Cultural Sociology

http://cus.sagepub.com

The `New Sociology of Art': Putting Art Back into Social Science
Approaches to the Arts
Eduardo de la Fuente
Cultural Sociology 2007; 1; 409
DOI: 10.1177/1749975507084601

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/3/409

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

British Sociological Association

Additional services and information for Cultural Sociology can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://cus.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
 Cultural Sociology
Copyright © 2007
BSA Publications Ltd®
Volume 1(3): 409–425
[DOI: 10.1177/1749975507084601]
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore

The ‘New Sociology of Art’: Putting Art Back into

Social Science Approaches to the Arts
■ Eduardo de la Fuente
Monash University, Australia

ABSTRACT
This article maps recent developments in social science writing about the arts and
argues for seeing this work in terms of the label the ‘new sociology of art’. It con-
siders four major lines of re-assessment being carried out by sociologists studying
the arts: firstly, a reconsideration of the relationship between sociological and other
disciplinary approaches to art; secondly, the possibility of an art-sociology as
against a sociology of art; thirdly, the application of insights from the sociology of
art to non-art ‘stuff ’; and, fourthly, the sociology of the artwork conceived as a con-
tingent social fact. The argument is made that these developments represent an
advance on the tendency to limit sociological investigations of the arts to contex-
tual or external factors.The ‘new sociology of art’ is praised for framing questions
about the aesthetic properties of art and artworks in a way that is compatible with
social constructionsim.

KEY WORDS
‘art’ and ‘society’ / aesthetics / artwork /social constructionism / sociology of art

Introduction

‘Art is not needed for the creation or for the survival of a social order. And all the
classic claims about the social determination of art or the artistic representation of
“reality” suffer from almost insurmountable problems of philosophical consis-
tency.’ (Graña, 1994: ix)

T
he sociology of art is at an interesting crossroads. Neglected for the greater
part of the last century, it is now a well established ‘sub-discipline’ of soci-
ology. In a short period of time, the field has produced its own ‘classics’,

409
Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007
© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
410 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 3 ■ November 2007

fostered professional associations and regular conferences, and sociologists

studying the arts have shed the image of being eccentrics or intellectuals rather
than ‘real’ social scientists.
But with the consolidation of the field has come some interesting self-ques-
tioning. Is the sociology of art fundamentally different from the approaches of art
history and philosophical aesthetics? Can the sociological investigation of the arts
afford to ignore the artwork and focus primarily upon contextual factors? What I
am calling, in this article, the ‘new sociology of art’ has addressed these and other
issues to do with the proper domain of the sociology of art. While the sociologists
whose work I will be reviewing are theoretically and methodologically too diverse
to be seen as a ‘school of thought’, they nonetheless exhibit similar characteristics.
One of these is the felt need to grapple with the aesthetic properties of art, includ-
ing re-examining the vexed question of the work itself. This doesn’t mean that the
‘new sociology of art’ aims to return the field to un-sociological assumptions. The
new work continues to reject the kind of ‘essentialism’ that sees artworks as spe-
cial kinds of objects or artists as ‘gifted’ individuals with unique visions. My argu-
ment will be that the ‘new sociology of art’ aims to say something meaningful
about art without succumbing to the problems Graña identified with older
approaches to art: namely, the tendency to inflate the status and importance of art;
and the propensity to make imprecise and vague statements about the ‘social
determination of art’ and ‘artistic representations of reality’.

The Road to Disciplinary Specialization

Until quite recently, as Vera Zolberg (1990: 29) has documented, sociologists
‘have not incorporated them [i.e., the arts] into the centre of their intellectual
concerns’ (Zolberg, 1990: 29). For a long time, sociologists avoided questions of
art and aesthetics, and tended to ‘relegate to the realm of philosophy, literary
criticism, or political ideology much of the work of Central Europeans such as
Simmel, Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, and others’ (Zolberg, 1990: 35–6, 37).
Zolberg (1990: 42, 51) claims that the attitude towards the arts hardened as
‘sociologists chose a scientific model to unite its members in a community of
scholarship’ and that, during the period of the discipline’s consolidation, ‘few
scholars’ in the field of the sociology of art ‘were likely to be published in promi-
nent, mainstream journals’. Her conclusion is that, prior to the 1970s, most soci-
ologists who dealt with the arts were ‘viewed as intellectuals in a broad sense or
as radicals, but not really proper sociologists’ (Zolberg, 1990: 51).
The disciplinary status of the arts shifted radically with the founding of
professional associations dedicated to the social science study of the arts1 and
the publication of two seminal texts: Howard Becker’s (1982) Art Worlds and
Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) Distinction.
Becker’s Art Worlds can be considered a ‘foundational text’ for both
American and European sociologists currently working on the arts. It advances
many of the major orthodoxies that have come to characterize the field. In the

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
 The New Sociology of Art de la Fuente 411

‘Preface’ to Art Worlds, Becker differentiates his own approach from that of an
earlier tradition that tried to decode the social content of ‘great’ works of art:

[My approach stands] in direct contradiction to the dominant tradition in the soci-
ology of art, which defines art as something more special, in which creativity comes
to the surface and the essential character of the society expresses itself, especially in
great works of genius. The dominant tradition takes the artist and art work, rather
than the network of cooperation, as central to the analysis of art as a social phe-
nomenon. (Becker, 1982: xi)

Becker (1982: xi) adds that his approach to the arts ‘is social organizational,
not aesthetic’ and that he would not ‘quarrel’ with those who accuse him of not
being a sociologist of the arts but rather a sociologist of ‘occupations applied to
artistic work’.
However, the significance of Art Worlds for the emerging field cannot be
overestimated. It announced a conceptual shift away from, in Tia DeNora’s
(2000: 1) words, the ‘grand but imprecise manner of associating styles of art
with styles of social being and with patterns of perception and thought’.
Against this ‘grand tradition’, Becker ‘helped to specify many of the ways that
art works were shaped by social organizations, interests, conventions and
capacities available within their realms of production’ (DeNora, 2000: 4).
DeNora suggests that Becker’s art worlds approach is similar to those sociolo-
gies of science that have studied the laboratory as a social product, a concrete
instance in the production of scientific knowledge (Latour and Woolgar, 1986).
An important component of the growing disciplinary specialization of the
field is that sociologists of art came to see themselves as ‘unmasking’ the
assumptions, values and ideologies implicit in art world practices. Becker’s
(1982: ix, xi) Art Worlds claims to be based on the author’s ‘congenital
antielitism’ and sees itself as operating within a ‘hearty tradition of relativistic,
skeptical, “democratic” writing about the arts’. Interestingly, Becker (1982: x)
claims that the concept of an art world simply reinterprets what is common-
place knowledge about the arts: namely, that this is a social world involving
‘fashionable people associated with those newsworthy objects and events that
command astronomical prices’. He adds: ‘I think it generally true that sociol-
ogy does not discover what no one ever knew before… good social science pro-
duces a deeper understanding of things that many people are already pretty
much aware of’ (Becker, 1982: x).
The same could not be said of Bourdieu’s sociology of art. Its commitment
to unmasking illusions and false beliefs runs deeper. Thus Bourdieu (1984: 11)
claims that sociology is akin to ‘psychoanalysis’ in its approach to the field of
art and aesthetics, and that when it comes to artistic creation and consumption
‘the sociologist finds himself in the area par excellence of the denial of the
social’. The kinds of illusions found in the field of art include, on the side of
artistic production, the ‘ideology of charisma’ and, on the consumption side,
the notion of the ‘pure’ or ‘disinterested’ gaze. Bourdieu attacks both of these
tendencies for ignoring the social, economic and political factors that intrude

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
412 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 3 ■ November 2007

into a supposedly ‘pure’ or autonomous activity. According to this perspective,

the denial of extra-aesthetic factors is central to the art system’s mode of oper-
ation. Artists do not want to admit that fame or fortune influences their creative
decisions; and consumers don’t want to recognize that seeing artistic contem-
plation as a spiritual and disinterested activity is a class-based form of snob-
bery. As art is plagued with these kinds of ideological illusions, Bourdieu (1993:
139) claims: ‘Sociology and art do not make good bedfellows’.
In summary, the orthodoxies that have characterized the sociology of art
since the 1970s include the tendency to see it as: different from an older philo-
sophical decoding of art; a preference for studying the concrete networks of
artistic production and consumption; and a skepticism towards the worldview
of artists and the art worlds they inhabit. In what follows we will see that the
‘new sociology of art’ has come to reinterpret some of these key assumptions.

The Sociology of Art and Other Disciplines

One of the key features associated with the growth of the sociology of the arts
over the last three decades has been, as argued above, a degree of disciplinary
specialization. Disciplines such as philosophical aesthetics and art history have
been seen by sociologists as insufficiently critical of the ideologies one finds
amongst artists and the institutions of high culture.
Recent publications in the sociology of art have been more cautious in dis-
missing the approaches of other disciplines. A good example is Jeremy Tanner’s
(2003) collection The Sociology of Art. Tanner (2003: ix) tells his readers, that
‘[a]ny selection of readings in a particular discipline, whatever claims it may
make to being representative… is also programmatic’. Tanner’s collection
seems to be making two programmatic points: it challenges sub-disciplinary
specialization by including contributions from sociological theorists who have
written on art, such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Mannheim, Parsons,
Elias, and Habermas; and it challenges the boundaries between sociology and
art history. With respect to the latter, Tanner (2003: ix) defends the program-
matic vision on these grounds: ‘the best art history is, implicitly at least, socio-
logically informed, and the best sociology of art places questions of artistic
agency and aesthetic form at the core of its research’.
The attempt to re-establish a dialogue between the sociology of art and art
history is based on the observation that ‘Both art history and sociology were cul-
tural discourses or genres of writing constructed and “institutionalized”’ during
a similar period – ‘from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century’
(Tanner, 2003: 1). In a novel reading of the history of the two disciplines, Tanner
proposes that the discourses of art history and sociology both emerge out of the
‘differentiation of the spheres’ that modernity produces. Just as art history and
philosophical aesthetics emerge at a moment when art loses many of its overt
political or religious functions, social thought had to contend with the problem
of the ‘social’ as civil society became differentiated from the state. Indeed, the

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
 The New Sociology of Art de la Fuente 413

overlap between the two discourses was, at least for a century, quite significant
in that salons and intellectual clubs provided many early social theorists with the
‘model of a society of equals’ and much of the writing that anticipates the ‘key
concepts of what was to become sociology’ had the ‘largely literary and essayis-
tic character of salon culture’ (Tanner, 2003: 3). As Wolf Lepenies (1998) has
shown in Between Science and Literature, the battle to define sociology, includ-
ing whether it was part of ‘scientific’ or ‘aesthetic’ culture, was still being waged
during the period in which Weber and Simmel were writing.
It is only in the middle decades of the 20th century that sociology and art
history become completely differentiated ‘specializations’. Tanner sees
Mannheim’s engagement with the writings of art historians as something of a
last ditch effort to sustain the dialogue between sociology and art history:
Panofsky’s essay on the methodology of iconographic and iconological interpretation
and Karl Mannheim’s introduction to the interpretation of Weltanschauungen…
were originally written in response to each other, and are much better understood in
relationship to each other than in the disciplinary isolation in which they are nor-
mally read today. (Tanner, 2003: viii)

The details underpinning Tanner’s (2003: 10) reading of Mannheim’s work

through the prism of art historians such as Panofsky, as well as Alois Riegl, are
complex but the basic point is that the great sociologist of knowledge ‘saw art
history as a special case of a cultural science of interpretation’ and borrowed con-
cepts from the former in constructing the latter. Thus, in the selection included in
Tanner’s reader, we find Mannheim (2003: 218) invoking Riegl’s concept of
‘artistic volition’ to suggest how ‘individual fields’ such as language, literature,
religion, the economic and social, possess a ‘common life’ and ‘move in a com-
mon direction’. If ‘[a]rtistic volition refers to the tendency operating uncon-
sciously in the creative artist which impels him [sic] to move in the direction of
the dominant style even in his most spontaneous expressions’, then Mannheim
(2003: 218) suggests a cultural science of interpretation might employ the term
‘social volition’ to account for the ‘unity of style’ that a community shares.
While such overlaps between art history and sociology may be of interest
to those wishing to re-frame the genealogy of the two disciplines, it is another
thing to suggest that terms such as ‘artistic volition’ will be readily embraced by
contemporary sociologists of art. It is also noteworthy that the only art histo-
rian included in Tanner’s anthology is Arnold Hauser, who hardly represents
the latest word in the social history of art. A more obvious choice would have
been Michael Baxandall (1974), whose Painting and Experience in Fifteenth
Century Italy, has informed the work of social scientists such as Howard
Becker (1982: 15–16) and Clifford Geertz (1983: 102–9).2 Baxandall’s contri-
bution to art history has very solid sociological credentials, and begins with the
following declaration:
A fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship. On the one side
there was a painter who made the picture, or least supervised its making. On the
other side there was somebody else who asked him to make it, provided funds for

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
414 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 3 ■ November 2007

him to make it and, after he had made it, reckoned on using it in some way or other.
Both parties worked within institutions and conventions – commercial, religious,
perceptual, in the widest sense social – that were different from us and influenced
the forms of what they together made. (Baxandall, 1974: 1)

Baxandall (1974: ‘Preface’) also invokes Durkheim’s notion of ‘social facts’ in

proposing that in a given society we see the ‘development of distinctive visual
skills and habits: and these visual skills and habits become identifiable elements
in the painter’s style’.
A different, and largely more successful, attempt to address the question of
the sociology of art’s relationship to other disciplines is provided by David Inglis
and John Hughson’s (2005a) recent collection The Sociology of Art: Ways of
Seeing. The essays in this collection cover a range of case studies in the sociol-
ogy of art, including Victorian painting and its depiction of ageing, women’s art,
opera, ballet, World Music, ‘art house’ cinema, contemporary architecture, and
the ‘aesthetics’ of everyday living. While Bourdieu is of central theoretical impor-
tance to a number of the contributions, especially his concept of the ‘field’, the
book also covers the theoretical perspectives of a ‘sociological aesthetics’ or
semiotics of aesthetic perception, cultural studies, art history and architectural
theory. The variety of subject matter and theoretical perspectives is matched by
the methodological pluralism of the collection, which ranges from ‘ethnography’
and ‘analysis of historical documents’ to ‘sociologically informed “close read-
ings” of particular texts’ and the ‘empirical analysis of the responses to specific
texts by critics and lay audience members’ (Inglis and Hughson, 2005b: 1).
There is an interesting balancing in this collection between working within
the now established assumptions of the sociology of art and recognizing the need
to push the field further. In many respects, these texts provide good evidence of
the trend I am calling the ‘new sociology of art’. The editors have learnt the
lessons of the prevailing social constructionism of the last three decades and begin
their ‘Introduction’ by highlighting the contestable character of the label ‘art’:

What does the word ‘art’ mean to you? Does it conjure up images of paintings and
sculptures in galleries, or orchestras playing Beethoven and Mozart? Does it express
works by great geniuses or pretentious bores? Does it suggest to you pictures by
John Constable and Claude Monet, or ‘installations’ by Tracey Emin and Damien
Hirst? Does it make you think of enjoyable evenings out, or nights of interminable
boredom? Does art excite you or turn you off? Do you prefer Schwarzenegger films
to ballet performances, or Bridget Jones to Jane Austen? (Inglis and Hughson,
2005b: 1)

Echoing the anti-elitism that pervades the field since the publication of Becker’s
Art Worlds, they add: ‘the sociological study of art is emphatically not just a
specialized academic exercise, which studies esoteric things that are of interest
only to a special few’ (Inglis and Hughson, 2005b: 2).
So how do the essays in the collection seek to extend the orthodoxy of the
field? Arguably, the theoretically most challenging of the essays are those that
ask sociologists of the arts to question their own tacit assumptions. In ‘Cultural

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
 The New Sociology of Art de la Fuente 415

Studies and the Sociology of Culture’, Janet Wolff (2005: 92–3) argues that
‘most sociologists of culture and the arts base their work on pre-critical, some-
times positivistic, premises’ which, despite references to the so-called ‘cultural
turn’, often have ‘nothing at all to do with language, semiotics, or poststruc-
turalism’. Her basic point is that much of the sociology of art has not engaged
in the kinds of questioning of power, representation and subjectivity, of the sort
we find in cultural studies. Robert Witkin’s (2005) ‘A “New” Paradigm for a
Sociology of Aesthetics’ proposes heading in the opposite direction (a position
closer to Tanner’s) by reconnecting the sociology of art to sociological theory
and art history in the ‘grand tradition’ of authors such as Hauser and Gombrich.
He proposes that ‘“[s]tyles” of art are held in place by the “demands” made by
societies to think their key values at a level of abstraction appropriate to their
principles of social formation’ (Witkin, 2005: 59). He discerns three major
paradigms for seeing painting as a form of perception: the ‘haptic’ (which bases
perception on ‘touching’ and ‘grasping’); the ‘optic’ (which sees objects at a ‘dis-
tance’ and favours linear-perspective); and the ‘somatic’ (which sees colour, tex-
ture and shape, as purely ‘visual qualities’ rather than an actual representations
of reality). This rapprochement of the sociology of art and art history via the his-
tory of ‘perceptual paradigms’ is not likely to please everybody; but, as in Art
and Social Structure, Witkin (1995, 2005: 72) makes a strong argument for see-
ing ‘aesthetic styles… as integral to social formation’.
There are three essays in this collection that are particularly challenging to
the conceptual premises of the sociology of art. The first is Paul Willis’ (2005:
74) ‘Invisible Aesthetics and the Social Work of Commodity Culture’ which
claims that the sociology of art ‘helps reproduce the fallacy that “aesthetics” is
synonymous with “art”… in denying a living content to aesthetics, sociology
fails to locate “aesthetics” (without the shell) as a characteristic of ordinary and
everyday social contexts’. In neglecting the aesthetics of everyday cultures, in its
current form, ‘the sociology of art differs little from other academic forms of
comprehension such as art history in its privileging of official “art” spaces and
practices’ (Willis, 2005: 85). The second challenging essay, is David Inglis’
(2005) ‘The Sociology of Art: Between Cynicism and Reflexivity’. It argues that
the ‘animating drive behind most forms of the sociology of art is one of expo-
sure’ (Inglis, 2005: 98). If Willis is criticizing the boundary that the sociology
of art sets up between art and non-art, then Inglis is more concerned with soci-
ological imperialism and the denigration of competing experts, such as aes-
theticians and art historians. He suggests that ‘[a] less dogmatic future is
possible in social scientific analyses of art, if sociologists now do to themselves
what they hitherto been doing to “art” and other academic disciplines, namely
relativising, historicizing, and laying bare tacit assumptions’ (Inglis, 2005: 109).
The third challenging essay offers a similar questioning of the discursive sepa-
ration of sociology from other art discourses. Janet Stewart’s (2005)
‘Sociological Approaches to the Rebuilding of Berlin’ raises a very interesting
dilemma: what do we mean by the sociology of architecture when, in an era of
‘post-’ and other hyphenated ‘modernisms’, architectural and social theory

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
416 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 3 ■ November 2007

borrow from each other? She highlights a growing recognition amongst social
scientists that the boundary between the academy and the artistic practices
being analyzed are porous. In the case of contemporary architecture, Stewart
(2005: 187) suggests, ‘the actual complexity of the relationship between archi-
tectural discourse and sociological discourse… is influenced by the interplay
between exhibition value, exchange value and use value that characterizes any
given architectural object’. Sociology is simply one of the many elements that
plays a part in the cultural production, criticism, and reception of the arts.

Sociology of Art or Art-Sociology?

Tia DeNora has been at the forefront of a very exciting revitalization of a sub-
field within the sociology of art: the sociological study of music. Her most
recent contribution to this area, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology,
poses a significant challenge to the notion of a sociology of art. It advocates
what might be called an ‘art-sociology’. DeNora (2003: 151) claims that ‘[t]o
speak of the sociology of music is to perpetuate a notion of music and society
as separate entities’. She outlines early on in the book that one result of sociol-
ogists advancing a sociology of music was that ‘the medium of music was
implicitly downgraded; its status shifted, from active ingredient or animating
force to inanimate product (an object to be explained)’ (DeNora, 2003: 3).
DeNora’s most recent book is designed to counteract this tendency to treat
music as ‘object’ rather than as an active force in social life. Interestingly, she
chooses a dialogue with the sociological writings of Theodor Adorno as a way
to achieve her goal.
DeNora tells us in the ‘Preface’ to After Adorno that her journey back to
Adorno has taken over twenty years:
[B]y the mid-1980s, in the second year of the Sociology Ph.D. programme at
University of California, San Diego (UCSD) I had – or so I then assumed – ‘finished’
with Adorno. Tuning in to a curriculum that emphasized socio-linguistics, eth-
nomethodology, and action theory, and reading Becker’s Art Worlds (then some-
thing of a watershed), I became less interested in what I began to see as ‘impossible’
questions [in Adorno’s work] about music’s link to consciousness and domination…
It has taken over twenty years working as a music sociologist to return to Adorno…
In what follows, my aim is to connect Adorno with action-oriented, grounded music
sociology. (DeNora, 2003: xi–xii)

Re-tracing DeNora’s steps back to Adorno is instructive. Her doctoral research

at UCSD culminated in what is now recognized as a ‘classic’ within the art
worlds or production of culture paradigm: the book Beethoven and the
Construction of Genius (DeNora, 1995). It was an ambitious attempt to
explain, sociologically, one of the central myths of Western so-called ‘classical’
music: namely, why Beethoven and his music came to be seen by both his con-
temporaries, and future generations of musicians, critics and audiences, as the
very embodiment of musical ‘genius’. In keeping with the paradigm within

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
 The New Sociology of Art de la Fuente 417

which she was then working, DeNora (1995: xiii) set out to show that ‘[g]enius
and its recognition require social and cultural resources if they are to be culti-
vated’. Her sociology of Beethoven’s musical genius de-mystified the phenom-
ena by demonstrating the agency and institutional factors involved in the
composer obtaining that recognition, as well by showing that ‘it could have
been otherwise’ (DeNora, 1995: 190).
While this work was empirically rich, and is a great example of what can be
achieved within an ‘art worlds’ or production of culture framework, it failed to
deal with music as music. DeNora’s (2000) subsequent book, Music and
Everyday Life, shows her moving towards recognizing the structuring properties
of music in social life. The book is based on what the author calls ‘ethnographies
of music “in action”’ in places such as ‘aerobic exercise classes, karaoke evenings
and music therapy sessions… [and] music in the retail sector’ (DeNora, 2000:
xi). Music and Everyday Life was designed to tackle the paradox that, in con-
temporary societies, music is accorded the power to move us and make us feel
in particular ways, but since it is less explicitly connected to religion, work or
politics than in traditional societies, its links to social life remain invisible.
DeNora proposes, in Music and Everyday Life, that music’s role in mediating
social actions ought to be studied through ‘grounded ethnography’. Thus, the
chapter on ‘Music and the Body’ takes us empirically from the ‘neonatal clinic’,
and observations about how the music we first hear in the womb links the body
to rhythm, to the aerobics class where music is ‘used to facilitate and/or hinder
the body’s passage through the components of aerobic order and its grammar,
from warm-up, to core, to cool-down’ (DeNora, 2000: 93).
This is the background to DeNora’s return to Adorno, in a grounded way.
But why Adorno? He famously wrote in his Introduction to the Sociology of
Music:
[T]he sociology of music tends to atrophy one or the other of the elements that went
into its name. Sociological findings about music are the more assured the farther
they are from, and the more extraneous they are to, music itself. Yet as they immerse
themselves more deeply in specifically musical contexts they threaten to keep grow-
ing poorer and more abstract as sociological ones. (Adorno, 1976: 195)
DeNora seems to be partly agreeing with Adorno. It is important to treat music
as music. However, while Adorno advanced a sociology of music that sought to
show how even musical technique and the listening experience were socially
mediated, he arguably didn’t see music as a social construct, in the sense that
DeNora is advocating. The ‘After Adorno’ in her title, therefore, refers to a
sociology that leaves behind the ‘level of generality’ found in Adorno’s thought
and which specifies just how musical practices are social in character (DeNora,
2003: xii). Following Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘doing things with science’,
DeNora (2003: 39) advocates a music sociology in which there are no a priori
categories and both ‘music’ and the ‘social’ are shown to be ‘co-produced’. In
this respect, she fears that both the sociology of music and musicology share the
unfortunate tendency to reify their objects; and, furthermore, that what is
labeled the ‘new musicology’ tends to posit ‘social structure as a backdrop or

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
418 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 3 ■ November 2007

foil for detailed musical analysis… we never [actually] see music in the act of
articulating social structure or as it is mobilized for this articulation’ (DeNora,
2003: 37). While the new musicology may seem an advance on formalist musi-
cology in bringing gender, race, and ideology to the forefront of musical anal-
ysis, it mirrors the reductionism of the sociology of music. This is why the
notion of the ‘co-production’ of music and the social is a necessary corrective:
Latour’s notion of co-production offers lessons for both the new musicology and for
music sociology. For the former, the lesson is that, on its own, the analysis of the
discursive properties of texts is not enough. It leaves in shadow the actual workings
of ‘society’… For music sociology, the lesson is that… [m]usic is not simply ‘shaped’
by ‘social forces’ – such a view is not only sociologistic, it also misses music’s active
properties and thus diminishes the potential of music sociology by ignoring the
question of music’s discursive and material powers. (DeNora, 2003: 39)

Passages like these make it clear that After Adorno is much more than a re-read-
ing of Adorno; indeed, the work doesn’t fit easily into the genre of Adorno-
scholarship. Its central concept is also not, as in the case of Adorno, ‘mediation’
or ‘negative dialectics’, but rather the notion of the ‘Musical Event’: ‘an indica-
tive scheme for how we might begin to situate music as it is mobilized in action
and as it is associated with social effects’ (DeNora, 2003: 49). In advocating a
‘programme of grounded, actor-oriented research, focused on the key concept
of the Musical Event’, DeNora’s (2003: xii) brand of music sociology epito-
mizes what is best about the new sociology of art: namely, a desire to speak
about the aesthetic properties of art but to do so in a manner that is congruent
with social constructionism and which avoids unnecessary ‘essentializing’ of
what we mean by art.

The Sociology of ‘Stuff ’

It may appear odd, in an article reviewing recent developments in the sociology

of art, to include a book on the sociology of consumer goods. However, the
central premise of Harvey Molotch’s (2003: 10) Where Stuff Comes From is
that ‘[t]he specific “feeling” an object gives off helps to constitute what indeed
it is in social terms’ (Molotch, 2003: 10). Molotch’s ethnography of product
design and designers could be seen as contributing to what I am calling the ‘new
sociology of art’ in a very important respect: it tries to show that the sociology
of art is not so different from the sociology of consumer goods. He claims, ‘[i]t
is the mode of form-function combination that makes something more or less’
compelling and aesthetically satisfying, practical and economically successful
(Molotch, 2004: 372).
Molotch’s brand of sociology is a combination of Romanticism and social
constructionism.3 He wants to assess why there are so many barriers to seeing
the aesthetic character of goods and what this tells us about the social construc-
tion of art: ‘Just how, in the contemporary world, can we imagine aesthetics,
fun and spirituality as entering into goods given all the resistance to seeing it

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
 The New Sociology of Art de la Fuente 419

there?’ (Molotch, 2003: 15). Molotch notes, for example, that product design-
ers themselves have difficulty reconciling art and commerce, form and function
– in general, what we might term the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ dimensions of human cre-
ative action – and employ these binaries in legitimating their own work, and in
denigrating that of competitors. In addition, there is the broader cultural ten-
dency to divide labour tasks such that ‘the making and appreciating of art goes
to those who take up the unessential tasks, women and effete or neurotic men’
(Molotch, 2004: 343). Ornamentation, and by association art and design, are
feminine preoccupations.
However, the tendency to construct art and aesthetics as ‘soft’ and to cast
them in opposition to the ‘hard’ factors of economy, technology and science, is
evident also in sociology and social theory. Molotch (2003: 14) contends that
one of the obstacles to a sociology of how design works is that the social sci-
ences have tended to treat ‘post-tribal and post-medieval societies as virtually
defined by the break with spiritual motivation, communal sentiment, and sen-
suality’. Anthropologists, on the whole, have not been saddled with the thesis
of ‘disenchantment’ or rationalization, and have been more alert to the ways in
which ‘[a]rt and spirituality are endemic to economic activity, rather than
superfluous or in opposition to it’ (Molotch, 2003: 13).
Molotch’s conception of art also challenges some of the reigning ortho-
doxies in the sociology of art. Against the tendency to regard statements about
art as inherently suspect, the author felt the ‘need to make the case for art so as
to get it out of the production doghouse’ (Molotch, 2004: 343). He agrees with
those who say that the artfulness of art does not lie in the ‘thing itself’. This
would make an explanation of why good design works too easy. Molotch
advances the argument that art entails objects (or situations) that have the
capacity to draw upon ‘social-psychological associations’ which are heavily
compressed and give that object (or situation) an air of ‘transcendence’. Art
transcends mundane and routine perception, by compressing experience in the
following manner: ‘the magic of art is in the way complex social and psycho-
logical stimuli are made to conjoin, a kind of lash-up of sensualities’ (Molotch,
2004: 344). This is not relegated to the so-called fine arts, as such a social-psy-
chological compression of sensualities, in time and space, can occur in the con-
sciousness of ‘stormy nights, sexual thrill, a flowerpot, eating rice crispies,
coming home from school… and all other art one has ever seen before’.
Lest he be accused of being all Romantic, and no social constructionist,
Molotch (2004: 345) concedes that ‘[m]ounted on top of all the human sens-
ing… [there] are institutional mechanisms’ (Becker’s point in Art Worlds) and
that various ‘plots, nefarious and otherwise’, exist in the realm of art, as ‘social
classes and cultural groups advocate their versions’ (Bourdieu’s point in
Distinction). However, he does not back away from the importance of seeing
art-like qualities in mundane objects and in their making. Any good can work,
or function, as art if it carries the kind of ‘charge’ described above.
However, it is in the application of concepts from the sociology of art to
non-art markets that Molotch’s sociology of design may be considered most

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
420 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 3 ■ November 2007

radical. In a crucial chapter of Where Stuff Comes From, entitled ‘Form and
Function’, he lists the following art-like properties of conceiving, manufactur-
ing, and adopting, any type of good: (1) ‘art as representation’ (for e.g., plans,
maps, diagrams, images of the good); (2) ‘art as pioneer’ (where the aesthetic
conception prefigures the mechanical or industrial process); (3) ‘building mar-
kets’ (where aesthetic creation or innovation create a market through making
‘people want things’); (4) ‘fulfilling basic needs’ (for e.g. the design and aes-
thetic intent that goes into food preparation or furniture); (5) ‘leaps and visions’
(the way in which industrial design and production resemble the avant-garde
invention of the ‘new’); (6) ‘fine art’ (the role of actual art in promoting every-
day things through association in advertising and the mass media, and by inclu-
sion of ordinary objects in museums and galleries); and (7) ‘the semiotic handle’
(the design grammar that makes a thing attractive and specifically useful).
Molotch’s account also shows the impact of design professionals and indus-
tries on the ‘feel’ of a place like Los Angeles. This goes significantly towards
bridging the gap between the sociology of art and recent discussions of the ‘cre-
ative economies’ in geography and urban planning (Scott, 2000; Florida, 2003).
However, I would claim that the most compelling message of Where Stuff Comes
From, for sociologists of the arts, is that objects are both aesthetic and social. As
with DeNora’s notion of the ‘co-production’ of the music-social, Molotch (2003:
88) argues that, when trying to understand why some objects are successful, we
need a ‘chicken and the egg’ approach: ‘We are, with form and function, with art
and economy… There are no independent variables in this henhouse’.

The Work Itself

The surest sign that something is changing in the sociology of art is that leading
sociologists associated with the ‘art world’ or production of culture perspective
have recently published a book collection, together with an economist, a cultural
theorist who works in a performance department, and several humanists and
creative artists, addressing the issue of the artwork itself. Art from Start to Finish
includes contributions from Howard Becker, Pierre-Michel Menger and Robert
Faulkner and was prompted by the fact that ‘There has always been a blind spot
in the sociology of art: any discussion of specific artworks’ (Becker, Faulkner
and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2006: 1). The editors suggest the collection poses a
challenge to the deterministic readings of the production and consumption of art
that sociologists have sometimes gravitated towards:
An analysis that simply invokes class, race, organization, or any other of the com-
monly summoned ‘social variables’ does not get to the heart of what social science
can contribute to understanding art. That way of working sets the artwork apart
from, places outside of, the social process… Art is social not because social variables
affect it but because it is the product of collective work… [which] produces the
result that is eventually taken to be the artwork itself. (Becker, Faulkner and
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2006: 3)

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
 The New Sociology of Art de la Fuente 421

There are echoes here of DeNora’s music-sociology which sees ‘art’ and the
‘social’ as co-produced. To conceptualize the social as a pre-given set of ‘vari-
ables’ is to render it ‘mysterious’ and unexplainable, when in fact all ‘social pro-
cess’ refers to, in the making, valuing and consuming of art, is ‘people doing
things together’ (Becker, Faulkner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2006: 3).
Art from Start to Finish involves a significant re-working of the ‘art world’
thesis. First, it recommends that we should take the ‘work’ part of ‘artwork’
seriously. The ‘grubby’, mundane details of artistic production are important.
Artistic work involves making all kinds of choices and these are shaped by all
types of ‘recalcitrant physical, social, and economic realities… the attention to
organizational constraints, collegial pressures, and career interests’ (Becker,
Faulkner and Kishenblatt-Gimblett, 2006: 3). Essentialist and idealistic under-
standings of the artwork like to bracket these out and therefore fail to con-
tribute to our knowledge of the artwork as work. Second, most of the
participants in Art from Start to Finish share the sense that the ‘artwork is one
of the actors involved in the drama of its own making’. The editors propose that
the artwork, in the ‘language of Bruno Latour, … is an actant’. Third, all the
papers arrived at a similar conclusion, the editors tell us, regarding the artwork
being the result of ‘process’. Social science is uniquely placed to help us under-
stand the artwork by studying the ‘observable fact that they [i.e., artworks]
have lives and careers, that they go from here to there to somewhere else and
that these movements in time and space affect what they are and what they can
be made into’ (Becker, Faulkner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2006: 6).
How an artwork comes to be considered ‘finished’ is the central object of
investigation of all the papers. The editors summarize the general conclusion
reached by the contributors: ‘“[f]inishedness” is an empirical problem whose
investigation shows us the process at work in the invention, making, communi-
cating, and preservation of art’ (Becker, Faulkner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
2006: 7). As such, the volume contains two interesting and complimentary
essays on jazz that trace how, within an artistic form based around improvisa-
tion, the musical work comes to be ‘finalized’. The chapter by Faulkner (2006)
focuses on the processes by which an instrumentalist ‘learn[s] repertoire, learn[s]
songs, play[s] musical lines over and over again, get[s] scales and arpeggios
under … [their] fingers’ – a cultural practice he terms ‘shedding’. Shedding pre-
cedes actual performance but Faulkner shows that without it there would be no
improvisation, ‘on the night’, as joint creative activity. If Faulkner studies what
he terms ‘downstream’ factors in the creation of jazz as a work of art, then Scott
Deveaux’s (2006) analysis of the Sony Rollins tune ‘This is What I do’ looks at
‘upstream’ factors that complete the work and give it some degree of stability
over time, such as the recording of a performance in San Francisco during the
1970s that comes to stand as a ‘document’ of the saxophonist’s work. Another
artistic genre that is covered in the volume is that of the ‘unfinished work’.
Menger (2006: 31) suggests that the sociology of the artwork can benefit from
studying the history of unfinished works: ‘Sculptures by Michelangelo or Rodin,
canvasses by Leonardo de Vinci, Turner, or Picasso, symphonies by Schubert,

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
422 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 3 ■ November 2007

Bruckner or Mahler, operas by Berg or Debussy, novels by Kafka, James, or

Musil’. The notion that ‘interrupted creation’ doesn’t stand in the way of some-
thing coming to be valued as art suggests a fascinating field of empirical inquiry.
Becker goes one step further suggesting that the scores of the maverick American
composer, Charles Ives, who had such low expectations of being performed that
he either did not keep his scores in good shape or continued scribbling on those
that were in fact ‘complete’ or already published, should perhaps be considered
the norm in the sociology of artworks:
I think it is better not to treat Ives as an oddity who we needn’t worry about, but
rather to make the unfinished character of what he did represent what would be the
general case if some set of social arrangements didn’t intervene to declare works
‘done’. (cited in Becker, Faulkner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2006: 17)

One could respond with less surprise than the authors of the volume might
have wished for in that the ‘indeterminacy of the work’ is a commonplace
argument in much aesthetic theory of the last forty years. However, lest the
empirical bent of Art from Start to Finish be lost on the reader, one of the
authors differentiates the sociology of the artwork being proposed from
poststructuralist or postmodern theory: ‘what a sociology of the work must
propose (other than an aesthetic ontology, however deconstructive) is
exactly the analysis of… the production, definition, evaluation, and com-
mercialization of works, in their various possible states of uniqueness and
multiplicity, of being finished and unfinished, of being “produced” versus
being “reproduced”’ (Menger, 2006: 58). In short, the indeterminacy of the
artwork is an empirical and historical fact rather than a primarily ontolog-
ical and philosophical one.
One of the truly novel aspects of Art from Start to Finish is its method-
ology. I am not referring here to the methods of data gathering that individ-
ual researchers relied on such as observation, analysis of historical archives,
interviews and autobiography – these qualitative techniques are common
enough in sociology. The truly innovative method lay in the approach taken
to framing and producing the text itself. In keeping with the emphasis on
‘process’, the authors of Art from Start to Finish take us step-by-step through
how they arrived at their individual and collective findings. The book
stemmed from a conference, which itself was guided by preliminary ‘provo-
cations’, and it was only after achieving some degree of consensus about the
important topics that the writing began. Each of the chapters refers to the
others, keeping the dialogue alive. In this, and many other respects, Art from
Start to Finish, could serve as the model for a 21st century sociology of art.
In its architecture and thematics, it highlights the contingent character of
intellectual work. But, as sociologists of the arts broadly share the assump-
tion that art is a contingent social fact, why shouldn’t this recognition of con-
tingency become the ground for consensus as the field opens up new
questions for investigation?

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
 The New Sociology of Art de la Fuente 423

Conclusion

This article has attempted to map certain recent tendencies in social science
writing about the arts that could be labeled the ‘new sociology of art’. It reflects
the consolidation of a distinctly sociological approach to the arts, but, at the
same time, involves the recognition that sociologists studying the arts have pro-
duced their own blindspots: for example, a blindness to the concrete work that
aesthetic factors perform in social life (DeNora, Molotch); and a blindness to
the artwork itself (Becker et al.). The ‘new sociology of art’ also seems confi-
dent enough to begin dialogue with other disciplines, such as art history and
cultural studies, if and when these discourses share the assumption that art is a
social construct, and that its production and consumption are thoroughly social
in character. Other forms of ‘reflexivity’ have recently included the claims that
sociologists of the arts need to check their own assumptions (Inglis, Willis) and
that sociological discourse doesn’t exist in a vacuum in a world of growing
intertextuality (Stewart). These developments suggest that the field is in very
good shape and that there is very much, for those interested in the sociology of
the arts, to look forward to.

Notes

1 One might point here to the founding of the Social Theory, Politics and the Arts
conferences in 1974 and the establishment of the Culture section of The
American Sociological Association in 1987; in 1999 the European Sociological
Association Research Network on the Sociology of the Arts was created.
2 Tanner (2003: 18) discusses Baxandall’s work briefly in the ‘Introduction’ but
does not include a selection of the latter’s work in the reader.
3 On the lasting influence of Romanticism upon cultural sociology and the soci-
ology of the arts, see de la Fuente (2007).

References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1976) Introduction to the Sociology of Music (trans. E.B.

Ashton). New York: Seabury Press.
Baxandall, Michael (1972) Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A
Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Becker, Howard S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Becker, Howard S., Faulkner, Robert R. and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2006)
‘Editors’ Introduction’, in Howard S. Becker, Robert R. Faulkner and Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (eds) Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, and other
Improvisations, pp. 1–20. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
(trans. Richard Nice). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
424 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 3 ■ November 2007

Bourdieu, Pierre (1993) Sociology in Question. London: Sage.

de la Fuente, Eduardo (2007) ‘The Place of Culture in Sociology: Romanticism and
Debates about the “Cultural Turn”’, Journal of Sociology 43(2): 115–30.
DeNora, Tia (1995) Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in
Vienna, 1792–1803. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
DeNora, Tia (2000) Music and Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
DeNora, Tia (2003) After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Deveaux, Scott (2006) ‘This is What I do’, in Howard S. Becker, Robert R. Faulkner
and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (eds) Art from Start to Finish: Jazz,
Painting, and other Improvisations, pp. 118–25. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press.
Faulkner, Robert R. (2006) ‘Shedding Culture’, in Howard S. Becker, Robert R.
Faulkner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (eds) Art from Start to Finish:
Jazz, Painting, and other Improvisations, pp. 91–117. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press.
Florida, Richard (2003) The Rise of the Creative Class. Melbourne: Pluto Press.
Geertz, Clifford (1983) Local Knowledges: Further Essays in Interpretative
Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Graña, Cesar (1994) Fact and Symbol: Essays in the Sociology of Art and
Literature. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Inglis, David (2005) ‘The Sociology of Art: Between Cynicism and Reflexivity’, in
David Inglis and John Hughson (eds) The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing, pp.
98–109. London: Palgrave.
Inglis, David and John Hughson (eds) (2005a) The Sociology of Art: Ways of
Seeing. London: Palgrave.
Inglis, David and John Hughson (2005b) ‘Introduction: “Art” and Sociology’, in
David Inglis and John Hughson (eds) The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing, pp.
1–7. London: Palgrave.
Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of
Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lepenies, Wolf (1998) Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (trans.
R.J. Hollingdale). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mannheim, Karl (2003) ‘The Dynamics of Spiritual Realities’, in Jeremy Tanner
(ed.) The Sociology of Art: A Reader. London: Routledge.
Menger, Pierre-Michel (2006) ‘Profiles of the Unfinished: Rodin’s Work and
Varieties of Incompleteness’, in Howard S. Becker, Robert R. Faulkner and
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (eds) Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting,
and other Improvisations, pp. 31–68. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press.
Molotch, Harvey (2003) Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets,
Computers, and Many other Things Come to be as They Are. New York:
Routledge.
Molotch, Harvey (2004) ‘How Art Works: Form and Function in the Stuff of Life’,
in Roger Friedland and John Mohr (eds) Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology
in Practice, pp. 341–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scott, Alan (2000) The Culture of Cities. London: Sage.

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.
 The New Sociology of Art de la Fuente 425

Stewart, Janet (2005) ‘Reconstructing the Centre: Sociological Approaches to the

Rebuilding of Berlin’, in David Inglis and John Hughson (eds) The Sociology of
Art: Ways of Seeing, pp. 183–95. London: Palgrave.
Tanner, Jeremy (ed.) (2003) The Sociology of Art: A Reader. London: Routledge.
Willis, Paul (2005) ‘Invisible Aesthetics and the Social Work of Commodity
Culture’, in David Inglis and John Hughson (eds) The Sociology of Art: Ways
of Seeing, pp. 73–86. London: Palgrave.
Witkin, Robert (1995) Art and Social Structure. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Witkin, Robert (2005) ‘A “New” Paradigm for the Sociology of Aesthetics’, in
David Inglis and John Hughson (eds) The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing,
pp. 57–72. London: Palgrave.
Wolff, Janet (2005) ‘Cultural Studies and the Sociology of Culture’, in David Inglis
and John Hughson (eds) The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing, pp. 87–97.
London: Palgrave.
Zolberg, Vera (1990) Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Eduardo de la Fuente

Eduardo de la Fuente teaches in the Communications and Media Studies program in

the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University.
Since 2005, he has been a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale
University, and Co-Convenor of the TASA Cultural Sociology Thematic Group. He has
published articles on the sociology of art, aesthetics and social theory, Romanticism in
the social sciences, and has a forthcoming monograph (Routledge) on twentieth cen-
tury music and the question of cultural modernity.
Address: Communications and Media Studies, School of English, Communications and
Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, PO BOX 197, Caulfield East,
VIC 3145, Australia.
E-mail: [email protected]

Downloaded from http://cus.sagepub.com by Catarina Martins on December 3, 2007

© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution.