ABSTRACT
I want to conclude with a general theoretical point. The analysis in this book focuses on the specific shape, form, and content of objects of popular culture and art. This has not been a study of how any random piece of popular culture can be defined this way or that, but instead the book has taken great pains to identify specific parts of each object that have contributed to the interpretation it yielded. Such an approach may seem obvious, but this isn’t the case, for the reigning theoretical paradigm in the sociology of culture is to focus on how art objects are defined or labeled from the outside rather than on their specific inside shape or form. As a result, the art object is no longer seen as the cause of the meaning it emits. This is now largely thought to be conferred by various extra-art institutions, grids of knowledge, museums, critics, art worlds, or virtually anything except the behavior of the art object itself. To better understand the intellectual origin of this theoretical tendency I begin with Karl Mannheim and Erwin Panofsky, who argue that knowledge of art’s stylistic form does not provide knowledge of its meaning.
