The Sociology of Art: A Reader provides students with an introduction to the fundamental theories and debates in the sociology of art, using extracts from the corefoundational and most influential contemporary writers in the field.The book is divided into five parts exploring key themes in the sociology and socialhistory of art:•classical sociological theory and the sociology of art•the social production of art•the sociology of the artist•museums and the social construction of high culture•sociology, aesthetic form and the specificity of art.With the addition of an introductory essay that not only contextualises the readingswithin the traditions of sociology and art history, but which also draws fascinatingparallels between the origins and development of these two disciplines, this book opensup a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology and art history as well asproviding a comprehensive overview of the subject.This book is essential reading both for students of the sociology of art and forstudents of art history.Jeremy Tanner is Lecturer in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology and coordinator of the graduate programme in Comparative Art and Archaeology atUniversity College London.
Finally, the logic of rarity and the necessity of incomprehension entail that the moment of success or consecration must be displaced onto posterity. All genuinely innovative creators can only clash with the common outlook, with their contemporaries doxa, because they contravene the accepted norms. This will continue until such time as the common outlook has changed (in part because of their eorts) and they can draw recognition from it. But that often happens too late for them to prot from it during their lifetime. In todays art world, success becomes ever more undeniable the longer public demand is deferred. In the world of commerce, by contrast, success must be great and swift. The value of immediate notoriety, which could always be discredited as an indicator of conformity, gives way to the value t h e v a n g o g h e f f e c t 127
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EXPLOITATION OF THE MOTIF OF INCOMPREHENSION IN ADVERTISING Until the end of the nineteenth century, the impressionists were all despised . . . Nowadays, it is understood that they prevented the death of the art of painting, and ushered the latter into the Twentieth Century (for a book on the impressionists).
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You will have recognized those childlike signatures. They belong to the impressionists, who rank among the very greatest, but who were despised, even hated during their lifetimes . . . Although hungering for recognition, they were not recognized, and remained orphans of their time, few of them ever knowing fame or fortune. When Monet lived in Vetheuil, he would sometimes trade a painting for a basket of eggs . . . in order to eat, and to be able to keep on painting the Seine! Indeed, who would have staked so much as a penny on the future of such painters, whose works were shot down in ames by the critics? Today, their works are worth tens of millions of dollars. There is a mystery. You will nd the key to this mystery in the book, The Impressionists. Page after page will reveal the gigantic gulf separating those painters from their predecessors, so dierent were they. You will discover the rich creativity through which these artists revolutionized our way of seeing the world, and you wil
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Van Gogh, too, was criticized (for a line of bras). ascribed by posterity, in which the encounter with a mass audience is deferred till later. Hence, immediate success only has credibility if it involves a small circle of initiates (brief time, restricted space), while large-scale common recognition only has credibility through the mediation of time (long time, extended space).
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