The Sociology of Arts and Markets

Consumption Markets & Culture, 2007

The Sociological Review, 2004

If, as Bourdieu noted, 'sociology and art do not make good bedfellows ' (in Tanner, 2003: 96), the productive tension between them is at least revealing of the contours of each, and illuminating of the dilemmas facing sociology as it grapples to 'sociologise' its object. The appearance of three books in the field of the sociology of the arts is welcome testament to a renewed vigour with which sociology is accounting for relatively autonomous spheres of culture. And not before time, for art is also achieving unprecedented coverage throughout the culture industries, its figures and forms fanning out beyond the hallowed realms of the museum, the canon and the library, into mainstream consumer culture. In fact, one can't help observe the ironies of a small division of Charles Saatchi's über-collection going up in flames at a warehouse in East London as the demise of some of Britain's most inflated art is ceded by and abandoned to the fires of cultural entrepreneurialism -a fitting but inevitable circularity Baudrillard would undoubtedly liken to the ultimate art of disappearance in postmodern times. Whatever the reason for the current interest, students no longer have to rely exclusively on classics such as Becker's Art Worlds, Zolberg's Constructing a Sociology of the Arts, and Wolff's The Social Production of Art, to guide them through the field.

2018

The field of cultural policies is novel and burgeoning; it harbors diverse and even contradictory approaches, with no universally recognizable principles; it has no common language of its own nor any united theoretical perspective. The field is fragmented and heterogeneous in nature and bound to the interaction of multiple actors in different institutional settings. Although it began initially as a western academic and institutional endeavor, and developed mostly in the U.S. and Western Europe, cultural policies has turned out to be a common good for the entire world both as an academic discipline and as a bureaucratic and institutional enterprise. This article reviews three recent and important publications in the field of cultural policies.

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

2017

AAM 7,1 personality, such as openness and sensation seeking, and interest in the visual arts by Moroccan workers. Wilks (2016) tested and refined the signal transmission model in communication within the context of a new non-profit art foundation's attempts to communicate its values to stakeholders. As part of the special issue on brands in the arts and culture sector, Sjöholm and Pasquinelli (2014) analysed how contemporary artists construct and position their person brands from a spatial perspective of art studios as in-between spaces that can be important in building an artist's brand. Preece (2014) examined power discourses of the arts market, including Western ideas, in relation to the Cynical Realist and Political Pop contemporary movements for the Chinese arts market. Rodner and Kerrigan (2014) highlighted the importance of the field of visual arts marketing for the development of branding theory and practice. Certainly the visual arts and craft sectors are large and complex and we encourage additional work in these areas to be submitted to Arts and the Market in years to come.

Curator: The Museum Journal, 2011

Cultural Sociology, 2007

This article maps recent developments in social science writing about the arts and argues for seeing this work in terms of the label the ‘new sociology of art’. It considers four major lines of re-assessment being carried out by sociologists studying the arts: firstly, a reconsideration of the relationship between sociological and other disciplinary approaches to art; secondly, the possibility of an art-sociology as against a sociology of art; thirdly, the application of insights from the sociology of art to non-art ‘stuff ’; and, fourthly, the sociology of the artwork conceived as a contingent social fact. The argument is made that these developments represent an advance on the tendency to limit sociological investigations of the arts to contextual or external factors.The ‘new sociology of art’ is praised for framing questions about the aesthetic properties of art and artworks in a way that is compatible with social constructionsim.

2018

New Directions in Cultural Policy Research encourages theoretical and empirical contributions which enrich and develop the field of cultural policy studies. Since its emergence in the 1990s in Australia and the United Kingdom and its eventual diffusion in Europe, the academic field of cultural policy studies has expanded globally as the arts and popular culture have been re-positioned by city, regional, and national governments, and international bodies, from the margins to the centre of social and economic development in both rhetoric and practice. The series invites contributions in all of the following: arts policies, the politics of culture, cultural industries policies (the 'traditional' arts such as performing and visual arts, crafts), creative industries policies (digital, social media, broadcasting and film, and advertising), urban regeneration and urban cultural policies, regional cultural policies, the politics of cultural and creative labour, the production and consumption of popular culture, arts education policies, cultural heritage and tourism policies, and the history and politics of media and communications policies. The series will reflect current and emerging concerns of the field such as, for example, cultural value, community cultural development, cultural diversity, cultural sustainability, lifestyle culture and eco-culture, planning for the intercultural city, cultural planning, and cultural citizenship.

2018

Art and the Challenge of Markets Volumes 1 & 2 examine the politics of art and culture in light of the profound changes that have taken place in the world order since the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors explore how in these two decades, the neoliberal or market-based model of capitalism started to spread from the economic realm to other areas of society. As a result, many aspects of contemporary Western societies increasingly function in the same way as the private enterprise sector under traditional market capitalism. This second volume analyses the relationships of art with contemporary capitalist economies and instrumentalist cultural policies, and examines several varieties of capitalist-critical and alternative art forms that exist in today’s art worlds. It also addresses the vexed issues of art controversies and censorship. The chapters cover issues such as the culturalization of the economy, aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, the societal benefits of works of art, art's re...

Cultural Trends, 2016