Suchergebnisse

1. The arts and the sociological imagination -- 2. What are the arts? : a historical perspective -- 3. Lenses of analysis -- 4. Social class and the arts -- 5. Gender and the arts -- 6. Race and the arts -- 7. Art, politics, and the economy -- 8. Technology and globalization -- 9. Artists and their work -- 10. Meaning and interpretation : what does it mean?

This conversation outlines an undergraduate research project that I designed and implemented during the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021 in an online Sociology of the Arts class at Queensborough Community College in New York City. The project involves original student research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on three community-based arts organizations and the communities they serve. To showcase the problems and possibilities that emerged in assigning the project, I engage the contrasting and complementary lenses of Pierre Bourdieu's structurally based theories of culture, capital, and social reproduction on the one hand and the pedagogical strategies that emerge from humanistic sociology on the other. The conversation concludes with reflections on issues faced by educators committed to teaching an interdisciplinary and humanistic sociology at the community college level and the ways experiential learning strategies can help students develop community connections and agency through the arts.

This article presents fieldwork that I conducted on the response of several New York artists to the events of 9/11 and the representation of these events in the mainstream media. Through interviews, analysis of works of art, and the development of a theoretical framework derived from both Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, I argue that the work of these artists constituted a critical response to historical events. I explain how Adorno's argument concerning the critical dimension of aesthetic experience is useful for understanding this response. In addition, I invoke Adorno's dialectical understanding of art's 'dual-character' in order to explain how critical art is possible within an art world dominated by market concerns. I also explore Walter Benjamin's contentions concerning the democratizing capacities of new media and the withering of the aura as an important corrective to Adorno's narrow focus on modernist formal development.

Looks at how feminist performance art of the 1970s echoes Theodor Adorno's utopian claims about the potential of aesthetic production as opposed to feminist art of the 1980s which is closer to Judith Butler's thinking about inscribed terms of performativity. It is contended that first-generation feminist performance art draws upon dimensions of feminist thought that are prefigured in Adorno's critique of instrumental reason & his understanding of the relationship between subjectivity, aesthetic experience, & emancipation. Adorno's utopianism & the radical nature of his critique of late capitalist society are contrasted with Butler's theory of performativity which suggests a positivist politics of reform rather than a radical rethinking of power/subjection. It is argued that Butler rejects the humanist version of agency & politics that assumes actors confront an external political field to maintain that "actors have no access to political possibilities outside of the discursive terms that constitute both the subject & the political field." The devastating repercussions for women artists of the current movement within art toward conservatism & market viability are pointed out. J. Lindroth

Conservative sociologists' connection of the US underclass with criminogenic culture is studied, & utilization of current sociobiological research to present criminal behavior as a physiological & genetic deficiency is discussed. The contemporary reemergence of sociobiological explanations for criminal behavior, particularly Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray's (1994) study of low IQ scores among the underclass & John DiIulio, John Bennet, & J. Walter's (1996) cultural explanation of the moral poverty of the underclass is examined. Current neurobiological research is used to illustrate how low serotonin levels in some mammals encourage aggressive behaviors; however, the problem of determining whether low serotonin levels cause or are caused by social stress requires future attention. The problems caused by DiIulio, Bennet, & Walter's usage of animal metaphors to describe violent inner-city youths & stigmatization of the underclass are addressed. Previous sociobiological research on crime is reviewed to demonstrate how such inquiry negatively impacts poor people's lives. 83 References. J. W. Parker

Résumé Entre les ethnographes et les artistes, ou les autres travailleurs de la création, s'est noué un rapport passablement complexe. En effet, historiquement, les milieux artistiques partagent avec les sciences sociales des finalités de réflexivité sociale et critique. En même temps, les agents du monde de l'art ont leurs propres intérêts vis-à-vis des objectifs propres à la recherche. Le présent article, qui s'appuie sur une recherche ethnographique (observation participation et entretiens approfondis) menée avec des artistes professionnels et autodidactes, avec des commissaires et des marchands d'art, étudie les différents aspects, positifs et négatifs, d'une collaboration entre le chercheur et ses informateurs au sein du monde artistique.