Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 What is art? What is the sociology of art?
- 2 Why sociologists have neglected the arts and why this is changing
- 3 Studying the art object sociologically
- 4 The art object as social process
- 5 Are artists born or made?
- 6 Structural support, audiences, and social uses of art
- 7 How the arts change and why
- 8 Where does the sociology of art stand, and where is it going?
- References
- Index
7 - How the arts change and why
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 What is art? What is the sociology of art?
- 2 Why sociologists have neglected the arts and why this is changing
- 3 Studying the art object sociologically
- 4 The art object as social process
- 5 Are artists born or made?
- 6 Structural support, audiences, and social uses of art
- 7 How the arts change and why
- 8 Where does the sociology of art stand, and where is it going?
- References
- Index
Summary
The present period is one of unprecedented cultural pluralism in which a wide variety of general and specialized worldviews coexist. The art world reflects in its pluralism the cultural fragmentation of its time and is criticized in some quarters for not providing a means of synthesizing these conflicting viewpoints.
Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940–85 (1987): 142New styles and techniques, schools and movements, programs and philosophies, have succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity. And the old has not, as a rule, been displaced by the new. Earlier movements have persisted side by side with later ones, producing a profusion of alternative styles and schools – each with its attendant aesthetic outlook and theory. … A culture which includes James Bond and Robbe-Grillet, the Beatles and Milton Babbitt, Coca-Cola ads and action painting is indeed pluralistic and perplexing.
Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in 20th-century Culture (1967): 88–9The coexistence of a multiplicity of art forms, styles, and genres is the predominant characteristic of contemporary society. Some interpret this positively as “progress” (the democratization and popularization of culture and the recognition of previously marginalized culture, that of women and racial minorities); others as decay (the loss of standards of quality to unthinking cultural relativism and the commodification of the arts, including even the fine arts).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Constructing a Sociology of the Arts , pp. 162 - 191Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990