Hannah Wohl | University of California, Santa Barbara (original) (raw)
Papers by Hannah Wohl
Sociology Compass, 2022
Creativity is the intentional combination of symbols, ideas, or objects in a way that is unexpect... more Creativity is the intentional combination of symbols, ideas, or objects in a way that is unexpected for a given audience. While creativity is a process, innovation is the outcome of this process. Moving from the macro-level to the micro-level, I survey the literature on innovation and creativity in creative industries, spanning cultural, economic, and organizational sociology as well as management studies. As a broader market force, uncertainty over innovativeness results in powerful status orders with each creative industry. Within these markets, creative producers work to situate their products as innovative within certain categories and breadths of categories. Creative producers' social network configurations and their face-to-face interactions within these networks shape both the process of creative collaboration and the resulting innovations. Producers' moment-to-moment valuations, modes of cognition, and interactions with material properties of creative products also influence the creative process. I argue that future research should give more attention to how decisions in the creative process evolve over time and are relationally shaped.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2021
In cultural fields, where audiences view meaning as indeterminant, how do experts communicate the... more In cultural fields, where audiences view meaning as indeterminant, how do experts communicate their interpretations of multivocal artworks? Drawing on an archival dataset of contemporary art reviews, I examine how critics discuss ambiguous and complex meanings. Critics do not convey multiple, discrete meanings but instead focus on the relationships among multiple meanings. In particular, they use spatial metaphors to map these relationships. They describe the imagined physical features of spatial metaphors, such as shape, density, and movement, to portray concepts as discrete or intermingling, synchronously or asynchronously activated, having equal or unequal importance, or having a fixed or fluid relationship to one another. Critics' portrayals of these different infrastructures through which meanings are linked shape their overarching interpretations of works. By articulating different kinds of multivocality via spatial metaphors, critics guide audiences to attend to certain meanings and their relationships, without foreclosing multivocality and ambiguity in meaning.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2020
We examine how the contemporary art market has changed as a result of the disruptions caused by t... more We examine how the contemporary art market has changed as a result of the disruptions caused by the novel coronavirus. Based on interviews with artists, collectors, a dealer, and an auction house executive, we argue that the decline of face-to-face interaction, previously essential to art market transactions, has placed strain on each corner of the community. In the absence of physical co-presence with the artworks and art world actors, participants struggle to evaluate and appreciate artworks, make new social ties, develop trust, and experience a shared sense of pleasure and collective effervescence. These challenges especially impact the primary gallery market , where participants emphasize a communal commitment to art above instrumental speculation, which is more accepted in the secondary auction market. We find a transition to distant online communication, but the likelihood of this continuing after the lockdowns end and the virus dissipates varies according to the subcultures of these market segments.
Socio-economic Review, 2019
In cultural markets, where value is highly uncertain, intermediaries and consumers select product... more In cultural markets, where value is highly uncertain, intermediaries and consumers select products by using status signals, including public metrics and informal recommendations. However, certain intermediaries and consumers risk their statuses and access to informal recommendations if they appear to rely on these status signals. Drawing upon the case of contemporary art collectors in New York City, I reveal that collectors work to maintain their statuses while utilizing status signals through performances of 'aesthetic confidence'. In these performances, they claim a willingness to choose artworks based on their independent and good taste. Collectors flexibly cite multiple and sometimes opposing qualities of their purchases and interactions as evidence of aesthetic confidence. Higher status collectors reinforce status hierarchies through their privileged access to resources for displaying aesthetic confidence and their policing of lower status collectors' claims. Performances of aesthetic confidence are both influenced by status and necessary for displaying status.
Poetics, 2019
How do creative producers present aesthetic consistencies and variations within their bodies of w... more How do creative producers present aesthetic consistencies and variations within their bodies of work over their careers? I address this question by drawing on over 100 interviews and over two years of fieldwork in the New York City contemporary art market. I examine how contemporary visual artists' recognition and access to visual and narrative resources for presenting their works shape how artists draw formal and conceptual connections among their works. I show that un-initiated artists work to present strong statements of their creative visions, emerging artists strive to produce connected candidates for iconicity that signal the breadth and core elements of their creative visions, and established artists try to create associations with the iconic that link new work to recognized elements of their creative visions. The article extends sociological understandings of artistic content and careers by revealing the relational process by which producers, intermediaries , and consumers construct aesthetic meaning.
One of the skills of graduate education that is most central to the evaluation of students is the... more One of the skills of graduate education that is most central to the evaluation of students is their ability to read and report on complex disciplinary texts. The display of comprehension is central to the judgment of competence, creating a status hierarchy. Demonstrating reading prowess is taken as a transparent indication of intelligence. Based on thirty-six ethnographic interviews with graduate students in sociology, history, and economics, we examine how informants think about the establishment of their scholarly reputations through self-presentational skills in discussing reading in seminars, articles, and eventually in the dissertation itself. The ability to read disciplinary texts and to situate those texts within disciplinary contexts is crucial for a validated selfhood.
This article analyzes how individuals use affect as a resource to negotiate judgments of appropri... more This article analyzes how individuals use affect as a resource to negotiate judgments of appropriateness in situations where they or others feel sexualized. It draws from two years of participant observation at a sensual figure drawing session in an erotic arts club—where bodily exposure was heightened and social norms regarding sexualization were ambiguous—as well as in-depth interviews with the club's artists, models, and owners. It argues that somatic security and somatic insecurity, individuals' comfort or unease with how they perceive others to interact with their bodies through talk and bodily comportment, mediate sexualized interactions. Extending sociological studies of sexualization in interaction, it reveals that these affective states, which arise out of situational dynamics, form a foundation of comfort/unease toward others and assurance/shame with oneself. Individuals use these affective experiences to judge and justify future interactions as appropriate or inappropriate and develop relationships with others.
The ability to comprehend, discuss, and use disciplinary texts is central to graduate education. ... more The ability to comprehend, discuss, and use disciplinary texts is central to graduate education. Although techniques for teaching writing have been welldiscussed, and even incorporated into graduate curricula, the same is not true for techniques of scholarly reading, a crucial skill that is largely untaught and which students must learn independently or through shared culture. We argue that more explicit training in reading has potential benefits for graduate student education. Drawing on thirty-six in-depth interviews with students in the social sciences, we focus on the routines of managing academic reading, necessary for accessing information for research. Graduate students develop techniques and schedules that permit them to read rapidly or carefully, to read for different academic purposes, and to make information retrievable through notating. We suggest how graduate programs might incorporate reading education into the curriculum.
Sociologists have undertheorized the role of aesthetic judgment in group identification. The auth... more Sociologists have undertheorized the role of aesthetic judgment in group identification. The author argues that the communication of aesthetic judgments in face-to-face interaction powerfully works to confirm or deny feelings of group belonging. The author introduces the concept of “community sense,” the public face of shared aesthetic judgments that is communicated and upheld within a group. The author illustrates this concept through an ethnographic case study of an erotic arts club, a group predicated on achieving a shared sense of “good” and “bad” taste. The author shows how the community sense is formed, challenged, and sustained in interaction, examining three characteristics of aesthetic judgments—derivation in form, visceral force, and intersubjective validity—that together constitute a strong basis for feelings of belonging and distinction. This setting acts as a wedge to access larger theoretical concerns, as the author explore the relationship between aesthetic judgment and feelings of group belonging in diverse contexts.
The evangelists of culture are mid-level professionals who engage directly with the public. Socio... more The evangelists of culture are mid-level professionals who engage directly with the public. Sociological theories of cultural authority or popular demand fail to explain decisions made at this juncture. An analysis of 3110 selections made by 567 One Book programs, together with interviews with One Book program leaders from all 50 states, reveals that while those people working on the front line of culture both share the literary tastes of cultural authorities and recognize contemporary reader preferences, their choices do not reflect either. Instead, their selections are creative, the product of institutional needs, professional agendas, and a persistent tropism toward regional authors and themes. One Book programs perpetuate a culture of place – literary regionalism – that resists both elite tastes and market forces.
In recent decades, the number of print and electronic outlets for scholarly publication across th... more In recent decades, the number of print and electronic outlets for scholarly publication across the humanities and social sciences has grown exponentially. Business models have shifted from university presses who offer subject-based clusters of journals to include commercial publishers and open-access digital platforms. With greater pressure than ever to publish early and often for those on and just out of reach of the tenure track, concerns with the timeline to publish and the number of outlets for publication become tantamount to the texts themselves. But what happens to the literature? When does readability no longer remain a commitment an author makes to its audience or editors make to their authors? This article argues for a persistent renewal of the journal editor’s commitment to providing authors with substantive peer review and suggestions for workable revisions. Publishers of scholarly content should also renew their commitment to professional copyediting in order to create lasting contributions to sociological literature that can be digested, interpreted, and built upon by researchers and students alike.
Book Reviews by Hannah Wohl
Contemporary Sociology, 2022
American Journal of Sociology, 2021
Contemporary Sociology, 2019
Books by Hannah Wohl
University of Chicago Press, 2021
What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists... more What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Sociologist Hannah Wohl draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. Wohl then transports readers into the art world, where we discover how artists’ understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors’ homes.
Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige.
Sociology Compass, 2022
Creativity is the intentional combination of symbols, ideas, or objects in a way that is unexpect... more Creativity is the intentional combination of symbols, ideas, or objects in a way that is unexpected for a given audience. While creativity is a process, innovation is the outcome of this process. Moving from the macro-level to the micro-level, I survey the literature on innovation and creativity in creative industries, spanning cultural, economic, and organizational sociology as well as management studies. As a broader market force, uncertainty over innovativeness results in powerful status orders with each creative industry. Within these markets, creative producers work to situate their products as innovative within certain categories and breadths of categories. Creative producers' social network configurations and their face-to-face interactions within these networks shape both the process of creative collaboration and the resulting innovations. Producers' moment-to-moment valuations, modes of cognition, and interactions with material properties of creative products also influence the creative process. I argue that future research should give more attention to how decisions in the creative process evolve over time and are relationally shaped.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2021
In cultural fields, where audiences view meaning as indeterminant, how do experts communicate the... more In cultural fields, where audiences view meaning as indeterminant, how do experts communicate their interpretations of multivocal artworks? Drawing on an archival dataset of contemporary art reviews, I examine how critics discuss ambiguous and complex meanings. Critics do not convey multiple, discrete meanings but instead focus on the relationships among multiple meanings. In particular, they use spatial metaphors to map these relationships. They describe the imagined physical features of spatial metaphors, such as shape, density, and movement, to portray concepts as discrete or intermingling, synchronously or asynchronously activated, having equal or unequal importance, or having a fixed or fluid relationship to one another. Critics' portrayals of these different infrastructures through which meanings are linked shape their overarching interpretations of works. By articulating different kinds of multivocality via spatial metaphors, critics guide audiences to attend to certain meanings and their relationships, without foreclosing multivocality and ambiguity in meaning.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2020
We examine how the contemporary art market has changed as a result of the disruptions caused by t... more We examine how the contemporary art market has changed as a result of the disruptions caused by the novel coronavirus. Based on interviews with artists, collectors, a dealer, and an auction house executive, we argue that the decline of face-to-face interaction, previously essential to art market transactions, has placed strain on each corner of the community. In the absence of physical co-presence with the artworks and art world actors, participants struggle to evaluate and appreciate artworks, make new social ties, develop trust, and experience a shared sense of pleasure and collective effervescence. These challenges especially impact the primary gallery market , where participants emphasize a communal commitment to art above instrumental speculation, which is more accepted in the secondary auction market. We find a transition to distant online communication, but the likelihood of this continuing after the lockdowns end and the virus dissipates varies according to the subcultures of these market segments.
Socio-economic Review, 2019
In cultural markets, where value is highly uncertain, intermediaries and consumers select product... more In cultural markets, where value is highly uncertain, intermediaries and consumers select products by using status signals, including public metrics and informal recommendations. However, certain intermediaries and consumers risk their statuses and access to informal recommendations if they appear to rely on these status signals. Drawing upon the case of contemporary art collectors in New York City, I reveal that collectors work to maintain their statuses while utilizing status signals through performances of 'aesthetic confidence'. In these performances, they claim a willingness to choose artworks based on their independent and good taste. Collectors flexibly cite multiple and sometimes opposing qualities of their purchases and interactions as evidence of aesthetic confidence. Higher status collectors reinforce status hierarchies through their privileged access to resources for displaying aesthetic confidence and their policing of lower status collectors' claims. Performances of aesthetic confidence are both influenced by status and necessary for displaying status.
Poetics, 2019
How do creative producers present aesthetic consistencies and variations within their bodies of w... more How do creative producers present aesthetic consistencies and variations within their bodies of work over their careers? I address this question by drawing on over 100 interviews and over two years of fieldwork in the New York City contemporary art market. I examine how contemporary visual artists' recognition and access to visual and narrative resources for presenting their works shape how artists draw formal and conceptual connections among their works. I show that un-initiated artists work to present strong statements of their creative visions, emerging artists strive to produce connected candidates for iconicity that signal the breadth and core elements of their creative visions, and established artists try to create associations with the iconic that link new work to recognized elements of their creative visions. The article extends sociological understandings of artistic content and careers by revealing the relational process by which producers, intermediaries , and consumers construct aesthetic meaning.
One of the skills of graduate education that is most central to the evaluation of students is the... more One of the skills of graduate education that is most central to the evaluation of students is their ability to read and report on complex disciplinary texts. The display of comprehension is central to the judgment of competence, creating a status hierarchy. Demonstrating reading prowess is taken as a transparent indication of intelligence. Based on thirty-six ethnographic interviews with graduate students in sociology, history, and economics, we examine how informants think about the establishment of their scholarly reputations through self-presentational skills in discussing reading in seminars, articles, and eventually in the dissertation itself. The ability to read disciplinary texts and to situate those texts within disciplinary contexts is crucial for a validated selfhood.
This article analyzes how individuals use affect as a resource to negotiate judgments of appropri... more This article analyzes how individuals use affect as a resource to negotiate judgments of appropriateness in situations where they or others feel sexualized. It draws from two years of participant observation at a sensual figure drawing session in an erotic arts club—where bodily exposure was heightened and social norms regarding sexualization were ambiguous—as well as in-depth interviews with the club's artists, models, and owners. It argues that somatic security and somatic insecurity, individuals' comfort or unease with how they perceive others to interact with their bodies through talk and bodily comportment, mediate sexualized interactions. Extending sociological studies of sexualization in interaction, it reveals that these affective states, which arise out of situational dynamics, form a foundation of comfort/unease toward others and assurance/shame with oneself. Individuals use these affective experiences to judge and justify future interactions as appropriate or inappropriate and develop relationships with others.
The ability to comprehend, discuss, and use disciplinary texts is central to graduate education. ... more The ability to comprehend, discuss, and use disciplinary texts is central to graduate education. Although techniques for teaching writing have been welldiscussed, and even incorporated into graduate curricula, the same is not true for techniques of scholarly reading, a crucial skill that is largely untaught and which students must learn independently or through shared culture. We argue that more explicit training in reading has potential benefits for graduate student education. Drawing on thirty-six in-depth interviews with students in the social sciences, we focus on the routines of managing academic reading, necessary for accessing information for research. Graduate students develop techniques and schedules that permit them to read rapidly or carefully, to read for different academic purposes, and to make information retrievable through notating. We suggest how graduate programs might incorporate reading education into the curriculum.
Sociologists have undertheorized the role of aesthetic judgment in group identification. The auth... more Sociologists have undertheorized the role of aesthetic judgment in group identification. The author argues that the communication of aesthetic judgments in face-to-face interaction powerfully works to confirm or deny feelings of group belonging. The author introduces the concept of “community sense,” the public face of shared aesthetic judgments that is communicated and upheld within a group. The author illustrates this concept through an ethnographic case study of an erotic arts club, a group predicated on achieving a shared sense of “good” and “bad” taste. The author shows how the community sense is formed, challenged, and sustained in interaction, examining three characteristics of aesthetic judgments—derivation in form, visceral force, and intersubjective validity—that together constitute a strong basis for feelings of belonging and distinction. This setting acts as a wedge to access larger theoretical concerns, as the author explore the relationship between aesthetic judgment and feelings of group belonging in diverse contexts.
The evangelists of culture are mid-level professionals who engage directly with the public. Socio... more The evangelists of culture are mid-level professionals who engage directly with the public. Sociological theories of cultural authority or popular demand fail to explain decisions made at this juncture. An analysis of 3110 selections made by 567 One Book programs, together with interviews with One Book program leaders from all 50 states, reveals that while those people working on the front line of culture both share the literary tastes of cultural authorities and recognize contemporary reader preferences, their choices do not reflect either. Instead, their selections are creative, the product of institutional needs, professional agendas, and a persistent tropism toward regional authors and themes. One Book programs perpetuate a culture of place – literary regionalism – that resists both elite tastes and market forces.
In recent decades, the number of print and electronic outlets for scholarly publication across th... more In recent decades, the number of print and electronic outlets for scholarly publication across the humanities and social sciences has grown exponentially. Business models have shifted from university presses who offer subject-based clusters of journals to include commercial publishers and open-access digital platforms. With greater pressure than ever to publish early and often for those on and just out of reach of the tenure track, concerns with the timeline to publish and the number of outlets for publication become tantamount to the texts themselves. But what happens to the literature? When does readability no longer remain a commitment an author makes to its audience or editors make to their authors? This article argues for a persistent renewal of the journal editor’s commitment to providing authors with substantive peer review and suggestions for workable revisions. Publishers of scholarly content should also renew their commitment to professional copyediting in order to create lasting contributions to sociological literature that can be digested, interpreted, and built upon by researchers and students alike.
University of Chicago Press, 2021
What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists... more What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Sociologist Hannah Wohl draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. Wohl then transports readers into the art world, where we discover how artists’ understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors’ homes.
Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige.