ABSTRACT
The 'affordances' or causal properties of art are fundamental to understanding the sociological properties of art and other aesthetic forms. This chapter outlines how a flexible outlook might enhance the sociology of art; or better still, an art-sociology. It highlights the need to move beyond conceptualizing the aesthetics-social divide in a rigid analytical manner. The art-nexus is a loose ensemble of aesthetic, economic, emotional and technological connections that demand different and innovative ways of perceiving the same conceptual problem from the vantage point of different conceptual frames. The situation by the 1980s was one involving disciplinary consolidation but one attained at a cost: namely, a more trenchant separation between aesthetic and sociological forms of thinking; and a tendency to exclude aesthetically minded sociologists from the pre-history of the field. The chapter argues that the question of bringing aesthetics and sociology into meaningful dialogue with each other has little to do with the capacity of sociologists to emulate art historians.
