ART AND SOCIETYBarnett reprinted his state-of-the-field synthesis as
it stood in 1959, and, in yet another, Griff pub-
lished a seminal article on the recruitment and
socialization of artists, drawing in some part on his
earlier empirical studies of art students in Chica-
go. Though here, too, the editors spoke of the
sociology of art as being still in its infancy, they
helped it to take its first steps by including in their
reader a large number of empirically grounded
articles—by scholars in the humanities as well as
the social sciences. Divided into six subjects—
forms and styles, artists, distribution and reward
systems, tastemakers and publics, methodology,
history and theory—it served for many years as an
exemplary resource both for those attempting to
set up courses on the arts and society and those
embarking on research.
Beginning in the 1970s the sociology of art
moved toward formalization and started to come
into its own. Speeding this development in the
new age of television dominance was a growing
sociological interest in the mass media, in visual
communications, and in the popular arts. The
debate about mass versus popular culture was
revitalized by new fears about the effects of com-
mercialization, but some scholars began to won-
der about the terms in which the debate was being
cast. The assumption that art forms could be
categorized as ‘‘high’’ or ‘‘low’’ or, put another
way, as ‘‘mass’’ or ‘‘elite’’—an assumption that had
fueled the critiques of Theodor Adorno and other
members of the Frankfurt School—came into ques-
tion as reputable researchers looked more closely
at the empirical evidence (Gans 1974). Howard S.
Becker’s conceptualization of art as collective ac-
tion (1982) did not so much mute the debate as
turn attention away from the circumstances sur-
rounding the production of any particular work—
that is, what kind of an artist produced work for
what kind of audience under what system of re-
wards—toward the collective (cooperative) nature
of the activity whereby works regarded as art are
produced as well as to that collective process itself.
As attention turned to the production of culture,
the arts came to be widely regarded by sociologists
as socially constructed entities whose symbolic
meanings reside not in the objects themselves but
change as circumstances change.
Recent American studies in the sociology of
art have taken varied approaches, both as to sub-
ject matter and methodology. Some have focused
on genres that are considered marginal to estab-
lished categories of fine art, including such ‘‘out-
sider art’’ as that produced by asylum inmates,
‘‘naive artists,’’ African primitives, and Australian
aborigines. Others have researched the process
whereby ‘‘outsider artists’’ may make the transi-
tion to being ‘‘insiders’’ while still others, extend-
ing their interests to the politics of art, have con-
sidered what happens to ‘‘insiders’’ (and the art
they have produced) when shifts in the political
culture recast them as ‘‘outsiders.’’ Sociologists
have also extended their inquiries to the econo-
mics of art as they have considered the influence of
funding and the structure of museums on the
creation, production, preservation, and dissemi-
nation of art works; case studies of ‘‘arts manage-
ment’’ abound.Some inquiries involving genres marginal to
established categories of fine art have adopted
methodologically unusual approaches. These in-
clude Wendy Griswold’s studies of the social fac-
tors influencing the revival of Renaissance plays
(1986); Robert Crane’s study of the transforma-
tion of art styles in post-World War II New York
(1987); Liah Greenfeld’s study of taste, choice, and
success in the Israeli art worlds (1989); Vera
Zolberg’s studies of art patronage and new art
forms (1990); and Gladys Lang and Kurt Lang’s
study of the building and survival of artistic reputa-
tions (1990).
These and other empirical studies that have
already appeared in print or are under way are
helping to clarify what is meant by a sociology of
art. While there still may be no consensus as to
what art is—nor need there be—some consensus
is shaping up as to the direction in which the field
should be moving. Leading theoreticians—Vera
Zolberg, Janet Wolff, Paul DiMaggio, Richard
Peterson, and Anne Bowler among them—agree
on the need to keep the art itself at the center of
theoretical concern but continue to disagree on
the proper methodological approach to that ‘‘cen-
tering.’’ Essentially, this pits the case for focusing
on the institutions in which aesthetic objects are
produced and received—an analytical approach—
against one that emphasizes criticism and textual
interpretation of the objects themselves. Zolberg
has voiced the need to avoid the narrowness of
both social science and aesthetic disciplines, ac-
cepting the premise that art should be contextual-
ized in terms of time and place in a general sense as