The `New Sociology of Art': Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts

Abstract

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.