Evil, Surplus, Power: The Three Media of Art (original) (raw)
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Sociology of Art: New Stakes in a Post-Critical Time
The international handbook of …, 2000
During a long period, sociology of art has been divided mainly between two major directions. Both show art as a social reality but they do so from quite different points of view: one is frontally critical and aims at revealing the social determination of art behind any pretended autonomy (be it the autonomy of the works, following the objectivist aesthetics, or the autonomy of the taste for them, following an aesthetics of subjectivity); the other is more pragmatic and, without pretending to make statements about the works or aesthetic experience, procedes through a minutious reconstitution of the "collective action" necessary to produce and consume art. Against a purely internal and hagiographic aesthetical commentary of art works, sociology has thus filled back an "art world" which formerly included only very few chefs-d'oeuvre and geniuses. Mainstream productions and copies, conventions and material constraints, professions and academies, organizations and markets, codes and rites of social consumption have been pushed to the front of the scene.
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