ABSTRACT
The sociology of art as conventionally understood assumes art as a given and then largely concerns itself with exploring the social organization of the art world the community of artists, collectors, galleries, curators, museums. Sociology itself has been remarkably creative in exploring the nature of actual, empirical, social structures and forms of social organization, but has been equally remarkably uncreative in asking deeper questions about where those structures and institutions come from, from what imaginative resources they arise and from what forms of human creativity they have been engendered. Nathalie Heinich subsequent work has included two books on the sociology of literature, a popular text on the sociology of art, a collaborative book on the legal status of authors, artists and artworks, another on the relation between philosophy and anthropology, a book consisting of an extensive interview of herself by the editor Julien Tenedos and a book on Bourdieu.
