Sociology of the Arts. Victoria D. Alexander
surveys indicates that long‐term, regular exposure to television tends to make an independent contribution to the feeling of living in a mean and gloomy world. The “lessons” range from aggression to desensitization and to a sense of vulnerability and dependence. (p. 73)
Gerbner (1998) highlights a series of studies suggesting skewed perceptions among heavy television viewers, about crime rates, how trustworthy people are, understandings of work roles, assumptions about gender roles and gender expression, and so on. Interestingly, Morgan (1989) suggests that television encourages people to hold multiple unexamined opinions, by showing that the more television individuals watch, the greater the degree of contradictory opinions they express in surveys.
Framing
Framing refers to the ways that news media package their coverage. A frame provides a relatively coherent way to make sense of an issue (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). How a news story is framed can significantly change people’s perception of it. Framing has also been used to understand the effects of the popular arts. Binder (1993), for instance, shows how opinion pieces in the mainstream press framed heavy metal and rap music, often suggesting that these genres were harmful to society.5 She writes, “Frames help receivers make sense of social occurrences because they organize events into recognizable patterns and help individuals understand what actions they can then take in light of these events” (pp. 754‐55).
Framing can be applied directly to cultural objects. Streib, Ayala, and Wixted (2017), for instance, look at the framing of social class in children’s movies. They studied top‐grossing movies that were rated G in the US (for General Audiences). They found that social class was presented inaccurately and in ways that legitimate inequality. Children’s movie characters were disproportionately from privileged classes, with only four percent of primary characters shown as poor (p. 6). The poor are also blamed if they stay poor. For instance, Remy, the leading rat in Ratatouille, was born poor (see Illustration 3.1). All rats are poor, according to the movie, but because he is different, Remy is able to pull himself out of the gutter. Remy believes that the poor have bad taste, for instance they eat garbage. In contrast, his own taste in edibles is superior. He is portrayed as hard working and ambitious, as well as highly moral (he does not like to steal food), and he succeeds in being recognized as a talented chef. In contrast, his father, brother, and the rest of the rats are portrayed as lazy and duplicitous, and therefore deserving of being poor.
Illustration 3.1 DVD Cover Sleeve for Ratatouille (2007). Remy, a poor rat whose good taste and hard work led to success.
(Author’s collection; photo by author.)
Streib et al. also found that “frames of class conditions” (p. 7) downplay challenges involved in being poor or working class. For instance, they point out that in Aladdin, the eponymous main character is homeless and needs to steal food, but the movie presents the challenges of being an orphan living on the streets as equivalent to the struggles of princess Jasmine, who suffers living in her castle because she is watched constantly. Aladdin is poor, but also virtuous, sharing food with people in even more need than himself. In none of the movies do working class characters worry about how they will pay for housing, food, or other necessities. Working class characters also perceive their jobs as fun. For instance, the servants in Beauty and the Beast work as they please, enjoying themselves, despite their grumpy employer. Working class characters (the servants in Beauty and the Beast, soldiers in Mulan, or the cars of Radiator Springs in Cars, for instance) are presented as loving and looking out for each other. They are willing to accept upper‐class characters into their fold, but only if the latter will relax a bit. In this way, Streib et al. argue that the “frame of a warm and communal working class suggests that class inequality is benign. Rather than a threat to the upper classes, the working class is portrayed as happy to care for the upper classes and treat the upper class’ interests as their own” (p. 10). Upper classes are presented in two ways, kind and caring (or relatedly, in need of proving compassion, which they then do), or as callous. Interestingly, while the framing of some characters as callous suggests that the class structure can sometimes cause harm, at the end of the movie, the callous characters have all been punished for their unjustified attitudes and they lose their positions. Again, the social division is presented as benign. Social mobility is shown as easy to achieve with the right attitude and a bit of hard work. In conclusion, Streib et al. write, the frames “may encourage viewers to think of the class system as open and fair while discouraging greater consciousness of the systematic ways that the class structure advantages some and limits mobility of others” (p. 17).
Montemurro and Chewning (2018) write, “Popular culture shapes our ideas about gender, sexualities, and aging by providing scripts or dominant narratives” (p. 463). They study how the American television comedy Hot in Cleveland frames sexual desirability of older women. Their research demonstrates how the show “highlights tensions about desirability, aging, and the cultural invisibility of mid‐life and older women” (p. 464).
The show focuses on three middle‐aged women in their 50s from Los Angeles who, in a send‐up of LA, are obsessed with maintaining a youthful physical appearance through diet, grooming, and cosmetic procedures, The premise is that the women discover by mistake that they are still sexually attractive in Cleveland, where, as the characters say, “all the men look like real men and the women look like real women…And everyone is eating and no one is ashamed” (p. 469). Of course, they move to Cleveland, and comedic potential emerges from their attempts to “age successfully” (if unnaturally) and find love in their adopted city. Monetmurro and Chewning demonstrate the complex tensions in the show. For instance, it breaks down one set of norms by presenting older women as beautiful and desirable. The characters are seen by Cleveland men as “hot” and the “men’s reactions to them reinforce their desirability, not just on the show, but also to viewers” (p. 470–71). But at the same time, it reinforces other norms. In portraying the characters efforts to land a man, the show reinforces the notion that women need to find male life‐partners to be fulfilled. Comedy has subversive potential that is tempered by humor, or as they write, “The comic frame walks the line of debunking social order while existing within the same social order” (p. 465).
The Effects of Fine Arts
The media effects literature, along with the mass culture critique, focuses on what we now think of as the popular arts, art forms that arose during the twentieth century and that are produced by culture industries. There are a number of reasons for this. Most notably, the fact that such cultural forms were new, coupled with the fact that they were created by profit‐seeking businesspeople, made them highly suspect to many observers. But it is worth pointing out that cultural objects from the fine arts have also been criticized in the same manner. This was especially evident in 1990s during the “culture wars” in America when artists, many of them funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, came under fire for being indecent and contrary to family values (Dubin, 1992, 1999).
Despite such controversies, contemporary arts advocates claim that fine art is good for society. Such claims, especially of social benefits, have a long intellectual history. We have already seen that the art and civilization approach in the nineteenth century saw a positive impact of culture, but Belfiore and Bennett (2008) trace such ideas back to ancient Greece. In the twenty‐first century, arguments for positive outcomes are often intertwined with claims for public funding (McCarthy et al., 2004). Debates about why the fine arts are good for society have a different flavor than why popular arts are bad for it, but they are both shaping arguments.
Critique