Sociology of the Arts. Victoria D. Alexander
one way or the other. On the one hand, the blatantly stereotyped images of the 1930s have disappeared, but on the other, the lack of portrayals of black adults and of positive, mutual interracial interaction “may indicate the continuation of a symbolic status quo in which Black equality is seen as threatening” (p. 462). Along the same lines, the “notable increase in distant and ‘safe’ images of Blacks in the Caldecott Award books can be seen as a recognition and celebration of Blacks’ unique cultural heritage, or it may be seen as a subtle form of ‘symbolic annihilation’ in which the cultural representations of Blacks do not include contact with Whites or portray contemporary ‘real’ African American adults” (p. 462).
NOTES
1 1 This image can be found by searching on “vigee le brun self portrait with daughter.” Vigée Le Brun painted two of these, one dated 1786 (the one Jones, 2000, spoke about, exhibited in 1987) and another, similar one dated 1789.
2 2 The reflection approach is often termed reflection theory. This is a misnomer, however, as the approach is neither a formal theory nor a single, unified way of viewing the relationship between art and society.
3 3 We will discuss Adorno, as part of the Frankfurt School, in more detail in Chapter 3.
4 4 Note, I have removed some emphasis from the original quotation.
5 5 Entman and Rojecki also consider the portrayal of race on television news. This makes up an important component of their study, but as it is outside the scope of this book, I leave it aside.
6 6 The portrayal of blacks in television news is the most dismal still, with black people commonly shown as welfare recipients, single parents, or criminals.
7 7 The term “liminal” was originally coined to refer to the intermediate stage in a ritual whereby the initiates no longer exist in their previous status, but have not been fully integrated into the status the ritual confers. As Entman and Rojecki put it, “Liminal people are by their nature potentially polluting, disruptive, but not necessarily destructive of the natural order since they are ‘no longer classified and not yet classified’” (p. 51).
8 8 Goffman poses still another mechanism: the technical requirements of the form. Advertisements must, he argues, make their scenarios understandable on quick inspection and so they rely on hyper‐ritualized depictions of common behavioral displays. Goffman’s mechanism, based on advertising conventions, is applicable to the type of advertising he studied. Today’s advertisements, however, often use different tropes—they are often purposefully provocative or darkly ambiguous, not instantly clear. Cortese (1999) discusses these tropes in detail.
9 9 Ferguson, Desan, and Griswold focus on the sociology of literature, rather than on the sociology of art, but their conclusions (which are cleverly, as well as clearly, put) may easily be extended to our broader concerns.
3 Shaping Approaches
In the film It Happened One Night (1934), Clark Gable unbuttoned his shirt to reveal his bare chest directly underneath. It is said that sales of men’s undershirts tumbled as a result. When people suggest that an art object affects society in this way, they are making a “shaping” argument. Shaping approaches suggest that that art can somehow put ideas into people’s heads. The shaping approach encompasses a wide group of theories that share the core belief, or metaphor, that art has an impact on society. As with the reflection approach, the shaping approach presents the relationship between art and society as a simple, straight line. But it reverses the causal arrow (the direction of the effect between art objects and society), so that art is seen as affecting society rather than vice versa.
To a great extent, shaping theorists look at the negative effects of art on society. Throughout the twentieth century, social critics pointed to “evils” that are said to herald the fall of civilization as we know it. For instance, it was said that jazz music leads to a society filled with degenerates drinking in speakeasies (in the 1920s), that pulp fiction corrupts morals (in the 1930s), that the flying of Superman on TV encourages children to jump off rooftops (in the 1960s), that Rap music erodes respect for law and order (in the 1980s), and that contemporary visual art undermines family values (in the 1990s). More recently, concerns have moved to the ill effects of non‐art cultural objects, such as video games and social media.
Art has potential positive effects, as well as negative ones. For instance, “green” art might encourage awareness of climate change and movies about cancer patients might engender sympathy or encourage donations to medical research charities. Effects can also be morally neutral (or ambiguous). For instance, it is said that the Indiana Jones movies dramatically increased the number of university students studying anthropology.
Roots of Shaping Approaches
Two nineteenth‐century thinkers, Karl Marx and Matthew Arnold, set out early ideas about how culture affects society, and these ideas have been taken up and refined to explain effects of art on society. We will explore each of these in turn.
Marxism
Marx argued that capitalists have the desire and the power to create stories that legitimize their actions. Indeed, he argues, all elites, throughout history, have created the ideas that support their ascendancy. “The ideas of the ruling classes are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” he famously wrote (1978 [1846]: 172). These ideas have been developed by more recent thinkers who talk about how art forms can function as social control. Marxists believe that the cultural “superstructure” reflects the economic “base”, as we saw in the previous chapter. A related strand of Marxism sees the superstructure as an instrument of control. The superstructure, created by capitalism, shapes workers to fit better with capitalism.
Hegemony
An important contribution to this line of thinking was made in the 1930s by Antonio Gramsci (1971), who wrote about hegemony. Hegemony is a form of cultural control. In this view, elites rule through subtle persuasion, not (for the most part) through force, as the latter engenders greater resistance. As Marx (1978 [1846]) himself wrote, “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” (p. 172). But “each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled…to represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society, that is…it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones” (p. 174). Hegemony embodies the norms, values, and world views foisted on society by the dominant elites. Importantly, while these hegemonic ideals reflect the interests of the dominant elites who created them, they get their power from the fact that they are widely shared and largely unquestioned by most members of the society. Hegemony controls because people buy into it and come to take it for granted.
The idea of employment is one such hegemonic idea. Most people reading this book probably either have a job already or are planning to get one, perhaps once their education is finished. We could question the idea of getting a job and contemplate living off‐grid in simple harmony with the land, hunting or growing food, weaving cloth for