ABSTRACT
During the 1970s and 1980s both dominant theoretical orientations and positivistic methodological scruples discouraged sociologists from paying serious attention to the aesthetic form and cultural patterning of works of art. Within the production of culture perspective, scholars such as Becker argued that discussion of the aesthetic properties of works of art by critics and art historians was not really about the intrinsic cultural properties of the art objects themselves, but a rationalisation of ‘the allocation of valuable resources’ (1982, 135) in the distribution of rewards to living artists or the determination of prices for the works of the dead. The success of particular artists and art movements was attributed not to the aesthetic properties and resonances of the works of art but to the economic and political power of prominent gatekeepers in the art world, able to confer or withhold the honorific label of art and impose hierarchies of values which were shaped by economic rather than aesthetic interests (Mulkay and Chaplin 1982). Even in cases where art was interpreted as an embodiment of some kind of cultural meaning, this involved analysis only of the themes or contents of works of art, not their styles which were taken as simple markers of membership of a particular artistic movement (Crane 1987).
