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MYTH, MEANING, AND PERFORMANCE
The Yale Cultural Sociology Series
Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman, Series Editors

Published

Triumph and Trauma

by Bernhard Giesen (2004)

Myth, Meaning, and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology

of the Arts
edited by Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick (2006)

Forthcoming
The Easternization of the West
by Colin Campbell

The Evolution of Educational Thought

by Émile Durkheim, new introduction by Mustafa Emirbayer

American Society: Toward a Theory of Societal Community

by Talcott Parsons, edited and introduced by
Giuseppe Sciortino

Contemporary Societies: Self, Meaning, and Social Structure

by Jeffrey Alexander and Kenneth Thompson

Setting the Stage for a “New” South Africa: A Cultural Approach to

the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
by Tanya Goodman
 MYTH, MEANING, AND
PERFORMANCE
Toward a New
Cultural Sociology of the Arts

Edited by
Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick
First published 2006 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2006 ,Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Myth, meaning, and performance : toward a new cultural sociology of the arts / edited
by Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978–1–59451–214–8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1–59451–214–0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Arts and society. I. Eyerman, Ron. II. McCormick, Lisa, 1975–
NX650.S6M98 2006
306.4'7—dc22
2006000236

ISBN 13 : 978-1-59451-214-8 (hbk)

ISBN 13 : 978-1-59451-215-5 (pbk)

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

 Contents

Introduction 1
Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick
1 Toward a Meaningful Sociology of the Arts 13
Ron Eyerman
2 Chewing on Clement Greenberg: Abstraction and the
Two Faces of Modernism 35
Robert W. Witkin
3 The Meaning of Style: Postmodernism, Demystification, and
Dissonance in Post-Tiananmen Chinese Avant-Garde Art 51
Julia Chi Zhang
4 Seeker of the Sacred: A Late Durkheimian Theory of the Artist 81
Steve Sherwood
5 Music as Agency in Beethoven’s Vienna 103
Tia DeNora
6 Music as Social Performance 121
Lisa McCormick

Bibliography 145
Index 155
About the Contributors 165

v
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick

Production, Politics, and Meaning:

Previous Perspectives in the Sociology of the Arts

For the past several decades, the sociology of the arts has been domi-
nated by the production of culture perspective, especially in the United
States. This perspective takes the social organization of the arts as its
prime concern and leaves any question of meaning to the humanities,
to philosophers and art historians (see Peterson and Anand [2004]
for the latest summation). From such a perspective meaning is either
bracketed out entirely, as lying outside the competence of the sociolo-
gist, or considered as a function or outcome of that social organization
which is the sociologist’s proper concern. While this perspective has
been particularly dominant in American scholarship, Bourdieu can
be said to offer a European variant, where the masters of the grand
sociological narrative, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, are brought to
bear on the production of value and the consumption of artifacts as
forms of social distinction. Combined with a feminist appropriation
of Foucault, which reads artifacts through discourses of power and
domination, these sociological approaches to art have spread into art
history and other disciplines traditionally grounded in humanism.
Here, areas of study such as art history that once sought to uncover the
universalistic values that defined great works of art are now engaged in

1
2 Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick

disclosing how such value gets assigned to cultural artifacts—a notion

now expanded to include film, video, and television—as the outcome
of interactions on discursive fields constituted through power.
While both the art worlds and production of culture of the
sociologist and the new art history have in common the contextualiza-
tion of artifacts, there are significant differences. The prime focus of
art historical analysis remains the content of an artwork or a musical
composition and the meaning it may convey to an audience, be they
local and contemporary or distanced by time and space. Much of
contemporary sociology of the arts, on the other hand, brackets out
meaning to focus on the context of production, and any “meaning”
that may result is taken as an epiphenomenal outcome of the process
of production itself, not something internal to an artwork or to any
communication between the work and its audience. Thus, while art
history can be said to have experienced a sociological turn, incorpo-
rating the sociology of art worlds into its analysis of the content and
meaning of artworks, sociology has not reciprocated. The sociology
of the arts has, until very recently, left such analysis of the art object
aside. There are now signs of opening, however, of the emergence of
a new sociology of the arts, which would achieve two things: expand
the sociological approach to art to include the content, performance,
and meaning of artworks, while at the same time expanding its focus
to include artifacts from popular culture.
Building on the established research into art worlds, what is in-
teresting for the new sociology of the arts is the relationship between
the production of artworks, objects designated as art, and the produc-
tion of meaning. What meanings and motivations are involved in the
production of art objects and communicated in their reception, and
how are these related to wider social processes and structures? To take
some well-established positions on such questions, for the Frankfurt
School, the production of meaning is bound up with the production
of cultural artifacts, especially in modern society with its culture
industry. From this perspective, the concept of ideology is central
to any analysis of contemporary art. The situation is more complex
in older, traditional societies and in relation to artifacts identified as
being outside the culture industry (i.e., high art). Here the relation
between art and social structure, art and values, is considered complex
and ambiguous. For example, for critical theorists such as Theodor
Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, a piece of classical music can be said to
contain a transcendent or critical moment, even when it is performed
and heard in a modern context. While early critical theorists were keen
to restrict this transcendent or emancipatory potential to high or seri-
ous art, younger critical theorists are more open to the possibility that
 Introduction 3

some artifacts of popular culture might also contain something of the

same. For the classical Frankfurt School, however, meaning is given
in the medium and popular culture is manufactured meaning.
At the other extreme is located the widely divergent field of
study known as cultural studies (CS). Cultural studies has largely
ignored the Frankfurt School, taking inspiration instead from post
structuralism and semiotics. At the same time, CS has reversed the
Frankfurt School’s position regarding the critical potential of popular
culture (Gitlin 1997). For many CS enthusiasts, popular culture is
not a source of indoctrination or false consciousness, as it was for the
Frankfurt School, but rather a source of resistance to the dominant
culture. Some would even go so far as to say that popular culture is
popular because it is resistant to cultural hegemony (for the reflections
of a reconstructed CS, see Morley 1997). Support for such claims were
bolstered by ethnographic studies of youth cultures, largely carried out
in the UK (see Hall and Jefferson 1976 for the classic statement).
At the same time as it has reversed the valuations of the Frankfurt
School, CS has challenged the distinction between high and mass
culture that defined the early work of the Frankfurt School. Here, CS
clearly finds support in recent developments in the (fine) arts and in
mass communications, where the lines that helped define the distinc-
tion between high and popular culture are continuously challenged,
if not entirely eliminated. With influences stemming from the lin-
guistic turn in theorizing and methods of analysis borrowed from the
humanities, CS theorists have looked for multiple levels of meaning
and interpretation in cultural artifacts and their reception/interpre-
tation. They have concentrated attention on what are conceived as
the decentered effects of mass cultural products such as TV and film,
and the aesthetic elements in such blatantly commercial enterprises as
advertising. In challenging the distinction between popular and high
culture, however, cultural studies has tended to study the former and
to neglect the latter, in part because the distinction itself is declared
hopelessly out-of-date. Even if one recognizes the difficulty of specify-
ing the aesthetic qualities that separate classical and popular music,
however, or a piece of advertising from a Picasso, there is clearly a
difference in intention and interpretation between a urinal placed in
a museum exhibition hall and the one in its men’s room. CS has spent
most of its energy in the latter.
Art history has experienced a virtual revolution with the in-
troduction of feminist theory and poststructural discourse analysis
(poststructural in the sense that “structure” is modeled on the rela-
tive openness of language rather than the closeness of institutions),
especially as practiced by Lacan and Foucault (Harrington 2004). As
4 Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick

methodology, discourse analysis aims at disclosure through descrip-

tion, not verification or explanation as traditional science. It seeks
to uncover the meanings encoded or embedded in cultural artifacts,
now conceptualized as texts or as visual culture, rather than high art
or literature. The concept of truth is thus bracketed out in favor of
multileveled and layered “thick” descriptions. Its concept of power
derives from Foucault rather than Marx, implying that power is en-
twined in assignation, with the right to name, define, see and be seen,
and, most of all, speak. In seeking to uncover the meaning encoded
in the cultural artifacts, conceptualized as “texts,” cultural studies
turns to Lacan for concepts such as desire, fantasy, the gaze and the
look, for analyzing everything from rock lyrics and soap operas to
impressionist painting. The sociology of art has lagged far beyond,
with both positive and negative consequences.
On the positive side, proponents of the production of culture
approach in the United States have maintained a healthy interest in
the social organization of art worlds. Authors as diverse as Howard
Becker (1982), Diana Crane (1987), and Tia De Nora (1995) have
studied how music and art (i.e., high culture) should be conceived
not simply as resulting from the imagination of individual genius
but as organized social activity, where individual artists are linked
into networks that both limit and sustain their creative acts (see
Becker and Pessin, forthcoming, on the differences between the
art world and the field of cultural production). In many ways cor-
recting the brilliant analysis of the social constraints on Mozart’s
genius by Norbert Elias (1993), De Nora demystifies the notion of
genius by reconceptualizing it as reputation, something that can be
studied as a social process of production. From this constructivist
perspective, the organizational structure of an art world is essential
to any understanding of a particular art object. Richard Peterson
(1997) has made similar observations on a more macro level regard-
ing one of the most popular aspects of American popular culture,
country music. Peterson reveals how “authenticity,” a core concept
in the understanding of country music, was fabricated, produced,
and manufactured, as commercial interests searched for stars and
themes to which their audience would respond.
What this focus on the social organization of cultural production
has been reluctant to consider, and what is the strength of the new
art history, is the content and meaning of an artifact, be it of high or
popular culture. With its focus on the production and interpretation
of text and image through the concept of visual culture, the new art
history has expanded its field of vision to include not only film and
photography but also a wider range of interpretation than that which
 Introduction 5

focused on the formal qualities of a cultural artifact. “It also means,”

as some supporters put it,

that it is possible to approach canonical works, those said to be

invested with inherent aesthetic value, with different eyes. Instead
of seeking to promote and sustain the value of “great” art by limit-
ing discussion to the circumstances of the work’s production and
to speculation about the extraordinary impulses that may have
characterized the intentions of the makers, [the new approach]
examine[s] the work performed by the image in the life of culture.
(Bryson et al. 1994:xvi)

While art history and other humanities such as comparative lit-

erature have opened to new twists and turns in feminist and poststruc-
turalist theorizing, as well as to a more “anthropological” approach
to cultural artifacts, the sociology of art has felt more comfortable to
analyze such artifacts from the “outside.” This of course is also true of
the most influential European in the field, Pierre Bourdieu, as well as
the Americans mentioned earlier. In Art and Social Structure (1995)
and “Constructing a Sociology for an Icon of Aesthetic Modernity:
Olympia Revisited” (1997), Robert Witkin attempted to move the
sociology of art in a new direction in complementing the externalist
“art world” approach with a sociology of the “artwork.” In so doing,
he entered territory previously occupied by art historians (though
there are sociological precedents; see, e.g., the newly translated Rem-
brandt by Georg Simmel [2005]), where the content and meaning of
the cultural artifact is a prime concern. A “sociology” of the artwork
would attempt to relate this content to wider sociological concerns
with social structure and social change. Thus, in the article just referred
to, Witkin offered an interpretation of Manet’s Olympia from 1865
that bases itself in the classical sociological concern of the shift from
value to instrumental rationality associated with the transition from
traditional to modern society. He analyzed that painting in light of
the general sociological narrative about the effects of the transition
from traditional to modern society and what this meant for social
relations.
The thrust of Witkin’s argument was to read transformations in
social structure and relations as they are reflected in artworks. This
was exemplified through a detailed analysis of Manet’s Olympia. Fol-
lowing art historians such as T. J. Clark and Linda Nochlin, Witkin
“read” Olympia in its historical and social context, as a critical insider’s
commentary on the bourgeois male world of late nineteenth-century
Paris. What he added to these by now standard Marxist and feminist
6 Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick

accounts is the viewpoint of classical social theory, outlined earlier.

From the historical narrative provided by classical theory, Witkin
located Manet’s work in the transition between traditional and mod-
ern society and claims that one can uncover not only a more or less
conscious attempt by the artist to shock his contemporaries with his
choice of subject matter and manner of representation, but also the
emergence of a more “abstract,” subject-oriented style that would
characterize modernism and modern social relations. Such a reading
is possible only on the basis of a grand historical narrative, one that, in
the spirit of classical social theory, places contemporary events within
a broader context of social development.
Witkin has been unapologetic in his return to grand theory in
this postmodern era when it has gone out of fashion. His is a post-
postmodernism, however, in the sense that Witkin takes seriously
some of postmodernism’s (including the art historians mentioned
previously) objections to grand theorizing of the type he seeks to re-
instate. One of these is the call to contextualize, to interpret artworks,
among many other things, of course, within their concrete historical
settings. Another is the focus on symbols and the value of semiotic
analysis. The first calls attention to local knowledge and experience, to
the concrete, as opposed to the abstracted discourse of grand theory,
as well as to the organizations, decision-making, and power structures
that concretely affect the “production of culture.” The second refers
to the various levels of meaning and interpretation that an art object
can contain or involve. The inclusion of various perspectives and levels
opens the possibility of several “meanings” and interpretations in a
single artwork. Thus, Olympia can be interpreted in its contempo-
rary context and in a wider theory of social development. One does
not exclude the other, although the latter is more general and more
abstract and can thus include the former, while the reverse is not
the case. Whether or not this means Witkin’s is a “truer” or “better”
interpretation, rather than merely a broader and more inclusive one,
can of course be discussed. As sociologists, however, our own feeling
is that while it may not be truer, it is certainly better.
At the same time as relating art works to social structure, and
to classical social theory, Witkin sought to demonstrate that artists
such as Manet, working within inherited traditions yet innovating
through them, can convey to audiences viewing their works a reflec-
tive understanding of themselves and the social relations of their age,
where art styles are seen as agents of social change and not merely as
reflections of it. Here reference was made to what could be called the
“truth-bearing” capacity of art. As part of the meaning they may con-
vey, artworks can evoke a reflexive or cognitive response from viewing
 Introduction 7

publics, in which powerful emotion and re-cognition can combine to

produce extraordinary affect. While Witkin (and Bourdieu similarly)
focused attention on the responses of individuals, even where these
individuals are thought to be class related, it is possible to expand the
analysis to include collective action and actors, something pointed
to in others’ work on music and social movements (Eyerman and
Jamison 1998). The door is now opened to new directions in the
sociology of the arts.

Beyond Production: Unbracketing Meaning,

Rediscovering Myth, and Exploring Performance

The essays in this volume address many sociological and aesthetic is-
sues. For the purposes of this introduction, we highlight three themes
that signal, for us, a new direction in the sociology of the arts: meaning,
myth, and performance. While every essay in this volume is centered
on the question of meaning, Eyerman’s contribution tackles this issue
directly by articulating the conceptual steps that would lead toward
a new “meaningful” paradigm in the sociology of the arts. First, he
demonstrates the need for a new spatial metaphor for art. The problem
with more established spatial metaphors of the “art world” and the
“field of cultural production” is that they reify the institutional space
surrounding art and overestimate external determinants of action and
belief. Instead, he suggests that we broaden the sociological view by un-
derstanding art as a conceptual or experiential space for imagination,
creativity, and critical reflection. In other words, we should understand
art as “space within a space, a place to view the surrounding world
from, yet not untouched by it.” In addition to a different conception
of art, a meaningful new paradigm in the sociology of the arts would
also adopt a different conception of culture. The purely instrumental
view of culture reduces the role of art to distinction and profit and
remains blind to the experiential or sociological truths embedded in
aesthetic forms. For this reason, he advocates the notion of culture
as shared meaning structure that frames interpretation and action
without determining them. Culture, like art, should be understood
as relatively autonomous, always intertwined but never completely
determined by social structure. Eyerman argues that these conceptual
shifts would enable a sociological analysis of art that remains sensitive
to the meaning of an artwork and the intentions of the artist while
still providing rigorous analysis of historical and social context.
The second chapter explores the meaning of an artistic “move-
ment,” specifically, the transition from abstract expressionism to pop
8 Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick

art. According to Witkin, Western modernist art has been defined

by a tension between two equally strong yet antithetical objectives.
First, there is the struggle to defend the artist’s individual autonomy
and maintain the distance from society that allows a critical perspec-
tive. But at the same time, there is the refusal to accept art’s isolation
from everyday life and a desire to overcome the institutional and
status boundaries that maintain this separation. In the manner of
his analysis of Manet’s Olympia, Witkin offers an interpretation of
a particular artwork that, for him, crystallizes a significant moment
in aesthetic and social change. In this case, it is Latham’s masticated
Greenberg. Like all avant-garde gestures, this was a radical rejection
of what came before. But it also represented a radical departure,
rather than another oscillation between the two faces of modernism.
The transition to pop art was also a transition to a higher level of
abstraction—the “somatic”—in which the subject’s own sensing is
the object of perceptual attention. For Witkin, pop art invited a new
mode of perception for the social formation of late capitalism that
transformed both the objects of mass culture it was quoting and the
subject viewing these quotations.
Stylistic transitions are also the focus of Julia Zhang’s chapter,
but in her case, it is in Chinese avant-garde art. Through a survey of
representative artworks and interviews with members of the Chinese
art world, Zhang identifies three stages in Chinese modernism. These
stages coincide with critical junctures in Chinese political history: the
first in the 1920s with the fear of colonization following the Opium
war, the second in the 1970s at the height of Mao’s era, and the third
in the 1990s following the incident in Tiananmen Square. As Zhang
shows, artists at each of these historical junctures used aesthetic means
(artistic style) to interpret their historical moment and convey a desired
vision of Chinese modernity. During the first two stages, Chinese mo-
dernity was defined in relation to a “West” that occupied the sacred
side of the binary cultural code, representing the promise of scientific
progress, freedom from political oppression through democracy, and
the preservation of human rights. In the 1920s, the vision of modernity
was expressed in the incorporation of Western “realist” style with ancient
literati painting. In the 1970s, a different vision was expressed through
the rejection of the state-sponsored artistic style, the overt political
content of artworks, and the obvious allusion to Western avant-garde
styles (such as futurism, dada, and surrealism.) But after 1989, the
meaning of the “West” changed. As market liberalization took off and
Chinese artists became increasingly dependent on Western buyers, the
West became demystified. It came to be seen as the source of all that was
profane about modernity—the decadence, moral degradation, greed,
 Introduction 9

social alienation, and materialism. This view was expressed artistically

through postmodern styles that celebrate irony, cynicism, and detach-
ment or styles aiming purely to shock Western audiences through
artistic explorations of violence. In Eyerman’s terms, Zhang’s analysis
demonstrates how art can provide a cognitive space for the criticism
of contemporary society, the articulation of a political project, and the
imagination of a different future.
From the mythical constructions expressed in art, we go next
to a consideration of the myth of the artist and the artist’s subjective
experience. Sherwood begins by reminding us that Durkheim’s greatest
insight in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is that society and its
institutions are permeated by a religious force. The social institution
of art is no exception. If we accept Durkheim’s spiritual model of
society, then we must also accept the artist as a spiritual actor in two
senses: first, as a “religious” actor (orienting to the sacred in terms of
her motivation to create), and, second, as a collective representation
of the sacred (as expressed through the ritual form of the artist biog-
raphy.) Sherwood explores the “religious” dimension of art through
heuristic models based on Durkheim’s definition of the soul. The
first is the immanent model where the soul is understood as a kind
of energy or force. Using a phenomenological approach, Sherwood
demonstrates how this model provides insight into the artist’s creative
process. Through excerpts from artists’ writings, he shows that the
artist’s own experience of the creative power of the sacred can be both
positive (as in the case of inspiration) and negative (as in the case of
resistance.) The second is the transcendent model, where the soul is
conceived as an ideal or higher external power. Using a hermeneutic
approach, Sherwood shows how this model applies to the artist as a
collective representation. With the examples of John Lennon and Andy
Warhol, he demonstrates how the artist, as a historical and cultural
figure, is the focus of ongoing imaginative construction. Controver-
sies tend to erupt over “definitive” biographies of these artists not
because of disputes over factual details but because they have become
emblematic of society’s moral authority. It is through ritual processes
such as narrative that the collective conscience attempts to purify the
image of the artist, restoring or imposing a “soul” in the immanent
sense. Ultimately, Sherwood argues that the sociology of art has suf-
fered from a lack of theoretical innovation and it is only through the
reinterpretation of the classics that the field can be reinvigorated and
new directions found for the empirical study of art and artists. By
returning to classical theory, he is able to offer a more creative and
more cultural approach for the investigation of subjective experience
and the deeper elements of the collective imagination.
10 Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick

In the next essay, DeNora explores how the music of an art hero,
Ludwig van Beethoven, was constructed as a “workspace” for the
modeling of new conceptions of agency in early nineteenth-century
Vienna. This discussion resonates with Eyerman’s notion of art as a
conceptual space. In contrast to her earlier work on Beethoven that
emphasized the determinism of social structure, here DeNora traces
the influence of scientific and philosophical ideas on musical critical
discourse and musical performance. She shows that as music came
to be understood as the medium par excellence of the sublime and
the “inner life,” the composer became reconfigured as a new kind of
agent, a “master” of music who had power over musical materials and
the ability to “mesmerize” the audience. It was during this cultural
transition in Vienna that Beethoven emerged as a heroic figure. In
the second section of the chapter, DeNora takes this analysis a step
further, showing how discourses associated with Beethoven were em-
bodied and elaborated through the performance of his piano music.
In an important sense, Beethoven’s body was inscribed in his music;
it demanded a more visceral approach to the instrument through new
techniques, postures, and physical choreography. These became the
insignia of Beethoven’s own genius and that of subsequent performers
of his music. But not everyone could be cast as a Beethovenian per-
former. The physical and performative features required by Beethoven’s
works clashed with conventional standards of aristocratic composure
and compromised feminine propriety. Beethoven’s music provided an
“object lesson” in how to be an agent in Viennese social life, but the
modes of agency it modeled were not available for everyone. DeNora
shows how the emerging gender segregation at the keyboard and the
physical markers of musical genius were underpinned by notions from
the “science” of physiognomy that was popular at the time. While
some of these discourses have lost their cultural currency, the legacy
of pianism as the vehicle for masculine display continues to pose a
problem of performance for new generations of female pianists.
Providing further evidence of a performative turn, the last chap-
ter in this volume outlines a new “performance perspective” for the
sociology of music. Whereas previous sociological perspectives have
approached music as an object either produced by an industry or used
as a resource in social action, McCormick proposes an alternative
orientation that approaches music as a mode of social performance.
McCormick begins by articulating how the six elements of social
performance theory (Alexander 2004) apply to the field of music. To
demonstrate the analytical insight of this multidimensional approach
for empirical research, she uses illustrative examples from the field
of classical music to show the broad range of topics, musicological
 Introduction 11

and sociological, that can be brought into the same framework and
seen in a new light. McCormick then identifies the limitations of the
production/consumption paradigm that can be transcended through
the performance perspective. The first is the reduction of analysis to
the element of social power typical of the production perspective. As
a multidimensional approach, the performance perspective brings the
dynamics of social power in proper relation to the other elements of
performance. The second is the project of demystification and the
systematic denial of meaning typical of the art worlds approach. By
recognizing aesthetic action as meaningful and reconsidering sociol-
ogy’s divorce from the humanities, the performance perspective can
investigate how aesthetic and social meaning is negotiated through
the interaction of aesthetic form, enactment, and interpretation.
Finally, the performance perspective can resolve the methodological
individualism typical of phenomenological reception studies by ad-
dressing the broader cultural structures that shape aesthetic action
and experience.
Our central aim in this book is the presentation of a sociology
of the arts that takes meaning seriously. While any sociology of the
arts must discuss art in society, meaning has become a secondary
concern to social organization in this area of the discipline. Whether
they speak about the production of culture or the construction of art
worlds and fields, sociologists have been reluctant to address questions
of value, interpretation, and experience, except with an eye toward
debunking the claims of others. This has left us with an empirically
vigorous, yet aesthetically lifeless, sociology of the arts. The essays in
this volume have sought to point beyond production to new mean-
ing-centered directions.
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