ABSTRACT
In this chapter I want to set out some methodological principles for the sociology of art, a subdiscipline that I intend purposefully to broaden conceptually by shifting the terms from “art” to “cultural production.” Such a shift may appear consonant with several strands in twentieth-century sociocultural theory, from Walter Benjamin’s advocacy of “the author as producer,” to Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism, to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production, to the American production of culture school (Benjamin [1934] 1982; Williams 1976, 1981; Bourdieu 1993a; Peterson 1976; Crane 1992). But while I draw elements from these diverse predecessors, and while all of these writers found it productive to distance the study of the production of culture from the idealist assumptions attached to the notion of art, the perspective I advocate is not reducible to them. It is best approached through a critique of Bourdieu’s paradigm, arguably the most influential in contemporary art sociology, which I will come to later. I make this shift to highlight the methodological gains of addressing together the object and performance arts, mass media and popular culture, from the perspectives of production, creativity, and the making of symbolic and expressive forms. For despite their obvious differences, there are commonalities that bridge these cultural forms and that are instructive to examine comparatively—a comparison that points at the same time to the specificity of each form. The shift to cultural production suggests also the utility of overcoming the boundaries that demarcate the sociology of art from adjacent fields, augmenting the sociological repertoire with reference to fertile developments in the anthropology of art, art and cultural history and criticism, the music disciplines, and media and cultural studies. It thus has the potential to broaden not only the object but the analytics of the sociology of art, making it possible to consider a number of theoretical and methodological problems that have seen little progress in recent years. My contention is that the sociology of art requires such a transformation in order to flesh out a fully sociological hermeneutics, one that takes on board aspects of structuralist and poststructuralist cultural theory, as well as new ways of conceptualizing temporality.
