Myth, Meaning and Performance

Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts

Ronald Eyerman, Lisa McCormick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317255741
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

The cultural and performative turns in social theory have enlivened sociology. For the first time these new developments are fully integrated into new approaches to the sociology of the arts in this important new book. Building on the established research into art worlds, what is interesting for the new sociology of the arts, understood in the broad sense to include popular culture as well the classical focus on music, painting, and literature, is the relationship between art works and meaning, myth, and performance. Also reflected in these rich essays, which range from Beethoven to John Lennon to Chinese avant garde artists, is the lived experience of the artist and its impact on the process of creation and innovation.

CHAPTER 1

Toward a Meaningful Sociology of the Arts

Ron Eyerman

It means more, than it means to me.

—G. K. Chesterton, on the meaning of poetry

Art forces us to gaze into the horror of existence, yet without being turned to stone by the vision.

—Nietzsche, on the birth of tragedy

Hearing a classical piano concerto streaming from a window while sitting out in the courtyard of a large apartment complex, I was moved to speculate about the class, age, ethnicity, and gender of the person listening to it. It later struck me that I was suffering from an occupational hazard, that of the intellectualizing sociologist. I could just as well have enjoyed the music or tried to guess its composer or performer. I could have made judgments concerning the quality of the piece, of the performer. The point is that there are many ways of listening to music or viewing a work of art and also a professional division of labor dividing the various ways of approaching the arts along disciplinary lines, so that the sociology of the arts would concern itself with their social organization, while art history would address the art of various time periods and so on. Such differentiation and specialization has also been conceptualized in terms of “dimensions,” as in a “sociological dimension” and an “aesthetic dimension” of art and artworks. From this perspective, the sociology of the arts is afforded sociological dimensions, such as “who is listening,” and not aesthetic dimensions, such as “what does art mean, what is good or bad art,” which is exactly the path I chose in my eavesdropping. This essay is my own attempt to overcome this occupation hazard and to cross disciplinary boundaries by pointing in the direction of a meaningful sociology of the arts.

One may speak about meaning in connection with the sociology of the arts in several ways. When it is considered at all, recent studies have focused on the production of meaning, on giving or imposing meaning. The process of meaning production, the attempt to evoke a desired response, as well as to communicate a designated message, has been studied from the perspective of semiotics as encoding. Influenced by Roland Barthes (1993) and others, studies have sought to uncover coded messages lodged in images and sounds as they are diffused through contemporary society. The process of encoding is described either as an unintended or intended process: the intention to make an object mean something in particular through representation. An artist or writer may intend to tell a story with a moral, didactic intent and thus to embed or encode that meaning in the story or painting; narrative religious art is an obvious example. Whether or not that aim is successful can be said to depend on an audience’s ability to interpret or read the message in the intended way.

In discussions of a culture industry stemming from classical critical theory, the process of meaning making was studied through a synthesis of Marxian and Freudian ideas, which brought together notions of ideology and commodity fetishism, the cognitive and the emotional, the conscious and the unconscious. In the less normative, more explanatory vein of the contemporary production of culture, the process of giving meaning is studied from an organizational perspective as a commercially driven process. Meaning making is here entwined with marketing needs, with finding or creating an audience for a particular product, be that an automobile or a genre of popular music. This sort of meaning making has come to be called branding, highlighting the ideas and organizational decisions concerning design, manufacture, and promotion, which turns objects into desirable products through attributing meaning. “The Story of the Sony Walkman” (du Gay et al. 1997:13ff.) is an example of what is described as a “signifying practice” in the “production and circulation” of meaning.

Making meaning has also been a key phrase in the symbolic interactionist tradition in sociology. Erving Goffman (1972), for example, studied the making of meaning from a performative perspective, how actors attempt to transmit meaning through gestures as well as words, to define a situation by convincing others of its meaning. Goffman’s ideas have been applied under the general rubric of “framing” to the struggle over meaning in discursive contests, as various individual and collective actors attempt to impose their definition, or meaning, of a situation onto others. The hermeneutic and semiotic traditions of textual analysis conceptualize meaning as embedded in texts or objects, where meaning is a matter of interpretative decoding, as much as encoding. Such meaning may be more or less consciously encoded, by artists or by a culture industry.

In other words, several approaches to meaning are available to a sociology of the arts. In conjunction with these, one can also speak of the social and historical meaning of the arts themselves: what art means in particular cultural and historical contexts. This brings attention to the idea that what we call art is first of all culturally and historically conditioned. Such conditioning can be said to occur on at least two levels, first in relation to the very idea of art, implying, for example, the creating of relatively useless objects made for expressive purposes only, as distinct from craft, where similar skills are involved in the making of useful objects. This historical development has been claimed as a distinctive one in Western culture. Second, given this distinction, what is included and what is excluded as “art,” in the form of either an individual work or a more general technique, is also historically conditioned. Photography was first considered a craft largely because of the mechanics involved but also because of its military and commercial applications, but it has by now been assimilated into the world of art, just as filmmaking has.

One can also talk about the meaning of art from the perspective of why particular arts, conceived of meaningful expressions, arise and reappear at specific historical junctures (Danto 1997). The novel offers an example. Ian Watt (1957) connects the emergence of the novel to the rise of a new reading public, something that could be understood from the point of view of the production of culture; that is, a new audience, a new market, created the conditions for the emergence of a new artistic form. But Watt goes much deeper in arguing that this audience had interests of its own, an interest in self-knowledge. The new art form, in other words, spoke to, had meaning for, an audience it helped to constitute, aside from any commercial interests an author or publisher might have had. Social conditions important here were a rise in literacy, an increase in leisure time, and an interest in the subjective as well as objective world. As Watt discloses through a textual interpretation of three British novelists, the new literary genre told a story through the eyes of a unique yet generalizable individual, an everyman or everywoman, which was crucial to its appeal. As a distinctive genre, the novel captured emerging social relations and new possibilities of experience, even if such experience existed only as fantasy for the maid, the housewife, or the gentleman who read them. The world was changing, and the new art form, the novel, reflected those changes at the same time as it provided a means for experiencing and understanding them. The novel, in other words, meant something meaningful.

WHAT IS ART, AND DOES IT MEAN ANYTHING?

Definitions of art are notoriously difficult, and those interested in a thorough discussion of the alternatives may turn to Davies (1991) for a philosophical treatment and Shiner (2001) for a cultural history of the concept. Carroll (1998) thoroughly analyzes approaches to “mass art.” Whether one is an analytic philosopher out to find necessary and sufficient conditions for defining art or a museum visitor wondering what makes this particular object “art,” the idea of art is a contested concept. One thing is certain, however: how we think about and experience art is historically conditioned. The modern concept of art came into use in the 1400s; before then, there were similar practices that we today would identify as art, such as the making of images, but they were not understood as art, as aesthetic, but rather as relating to religion and to religious experience.

After centuries during which art was seen as craft, a skillful application of established conventions that ornamented useful objects or represented historical and religious narrative and important personalities, art achieved a degree of autonomy from its cultist and representative functions and from the guild and craft mentality that had previously defined its meaning and limited its development. A distinctive, separate space for the making and display of objects designated as art was put in place, which also provided the grounds for a new form of experience: the aesthetic. The idea of aesthetic experience—and, in its more utilitarian form, art appreciation—implied a form of contemplation and reflection separate from its earlier religious, cultist, ritualistic, and political forms of representation. It also implied a designation of social spaces and practices suited for that purpose, as art academies and museums were established. These provided material grounding for the ideal of art as a distinctive mode of experiencing and knowing the world. It was also the grounding of what came to be called an art world.

Accompanying this development was the notion that art and the aesthetic were something distinctive and separate from everyday life and its experience. In its original formulation in the eighteenth century, art was meant to stimulate reflective contemplation on the meaning of beauty. Once this separation was put in place and the distinctive meaning of art objectified in an aesthetic discourse and in the works themselves, once the autonomy of art was institutionalized in this way, these views could be contested and challenged, setting up a dynamic that has permeated and motivated developments in the arts ever since. Challenging this separation and the institution of art itself, according to Peter Burger (1984), was the defining characteristic of avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century.

The idea of an autonomous realm of art and its materialization in new institutions had an enormous impact on those who created and those who appreciated and viewed art. It has also underpinned the sociological study of the arts and the idea of a distinctive art world. Within the frame of an autonomous realm, the notion of the artist as a distinctive role and personality became possible. One of the classic works in the sociology of art, Norbert Elias’s (1993) posthumously published study of Mozart, is a study of the effects of these changes on the composer. Tia DeNora’s (1995) study of Beethoven, done from the production-of-culture perspective, attempts something similar. Once established, it became possible to study the distinctive behaviors, as well as the distinctive experiences, that developed and became associated with this social space, the field of art or the art world. The behaviorism and instrumentalism that has accompanied the sociological study of art worlds has provided us with insightful and often witty accounts of the posing and posturing that goes on within the walls of art galleries and museums.

Questions concerning what “art” means, in the double sense of what art is and what is art, are relative to time and place. This seems to be a truism today, but that view, too, is historically contingent. For in the unfolding of the history of art, one finds strong claims about universal meaning concerning what art is, and, in addition, what we call art today carries something of those earlier designations about its meaning. The same claims about the historical nature of the meaning of art can be applied to the meaning of the artist. Thinking of oneself as an artisan is different from thinking of oneself as an artist, and this difference affects the meaning attached to the practices involved in each.

In its historicity, art is an achievement concept (Kulka 1996:7), meaning that it carries inherent normative notions, which may vary and are open to challenge, but they still remain there. This point in fact is part of what is taught in art school, along with the various techniques of representation. In his study of how art is taught at American universities, Howard Singerman (1999:2) recalls his own formal training toward becoming an artist, noting that “it was clear to us that something historical was at stake in the name we took.” For Singerman and his classmates, calling oneself an artist implied a burden of responsibility that made it both heavy and meaningful at the same time (see Sherwood, this volume). Contemporary discussions concerning the meaning of art and the role of the artist call forth previous discussions, just as any image—if the history of art be conceived of as the history of images—cannot be conceived in the absence of those images that precede it. Asking the question: “What does art mean?” is always done from some rooted point of view, rooted in time and place and in the particular location of the person asking the question—which at the same time recalls a sedimented discourse of posing and answering this question.

To repeat, one can take up the discussion about meaning and art in a number of ways: one can view art as a concept, an object, a practice, and an experience. As opposed to the ancient view, the modern perspective on aesthetic experience has focused on the individual. Without attempting an anachronistic return to a golden age, I think it both possible and fruitful to talk about a collective mode of aesthetic experience. When viewed this way, art can be said to open an imaginative space (individual and collective) from which to view the world and from there to represent it, through various media—paint, music, sculpture, film. This space can be material, as in a theater, a club, or a social or cultural movement, and imaginative, as well as collectively and/or individually experienced. It can also be collective in the sense that the history of art is as much a world of experience as it is of images and texts. Like experience and like tradition, art is at once historical and transcendent, reaching backward and forward, to past and future art spaces. It is also present. Writing about an American painter, for example, the art historian Stephen Polcari (in Joachimides and Rosenthal 1993:69) writes:

Mitchell Siporin was a mainstream American artist in the 1930s. A true believer in the social purposes of art, he established himself as a painter of the “people.” With paintings of the American scene, of the Haymarket worker’s riots in Chicago, images of the homeless and subjects derived from social history, Siporin joined others in defining the imaginative space of the 1930s as pride in, and protest against, American life. By 1951 that imaginative space was gone. Instead it was an art of inwardness—virtually abstract canvases of dreamy, moody ambiguity and complexity.

Polcari here captures both the transcendent and particular nature of art as experience and imaginative space. The Great Depression restructured and refocused modernist styles in the arts, the optimistic and future-oriented focus on the pulse and magical power of machinery and urban life, with the socially oriented realism of the 1930s, with its focus on a lost but “usable past” and an uncertain future.

This latter way of viewing art as experiential space can be contrasted with the notion of an “art world” or a “field” of art, which also make use of a spatial metaphor. From this perspective, an art world or field is something one enters into, which then plays a determinant role over one’s actions and beliefs. Though similar in ways, the perspective I am offering gives more place to imagination and creativity, as meaningful and constitutive of the space, rather than something external and determinant, a reified space one enters like a maze. Art, in other words, can provide a space within a space, a place from which to view the surrounding world yet not be untouched by it. It can be a collectively realized Archimedean point, not unlike that of theoretically driven science or an ideologically driven social movement. This perspective would not be unlike the idea of cognitive praxis (Eyerman and Jamison 1998), where art would be conceptualized as a form of social activity through which new kinds of social identities and practices emerge. In this sense, art is like any other social activity, a form of practical activity informed by some underlying project. What specifies and distinguishes art is the form and content of that project and the related practices. Art is a frame of reference in constant interaction with a social context. While all social activity is creative, art is defined by this self understanding. As a cognitive praxis, art is a space for individual and collective creation that can provide society with ideas, identities, and ideals. An imaginative space for the imagination, as well as an ascribed and conditioned social practice, as the production of culture perspective would have it. Like a social movement, art opens a space for experimentation, social and political as well as aesthetic.

Within this space, art becomes meaningful in different ways. Its meaning is contextual; and as context may shift, so, too, may meaning. The meaning of a work of art is determined neither by its creator nor by the conditions of its production. Meaning is created in social interaction, an interaction within a larger context. As Orlando Figes (2004) writes of the attempt by the composer Dimitry Shostakovich to explain the meaning of one of his symphonies,

the Fifth Symphony is a good example because it reminds us that all “meaning” in music is constructed socially, and hence is never stable, because it depends on the historical experience and associations of its listeners. What made the Fifth so highly charged with subversive meaning was not so much the coded messages (which no doubt went by largely unnoticed) as the public’s awareness that, in composing that symphony.… Shostakovich was fighting for his life.

This example implies that although artworks may be open to multiple interpretation, all interpretations are themselves embedded in meaning. There may be no one authentic reading or experiencing of a work of art, but one central characteristic or meaning of art is that it opens itself to and aims at creating a space for the experience of and reflection on meaning.

More than experience and wider than the practice of making or viewing artworks, art can be conceptualized as a means of approaching and knowing the world, as a cognitive as well as (per)formative practice. In this sense, it is similar to the cognitive practice mentioned earlier. Art can provide a means through which one can gain an understanding of the world and ones place in it. In Music and Social Movements (1998), Andrew Jamison and I tried to show how musical performance provided a sense of collective identity, a sense of belonging as well as an understating of the nature of reality and ones place in it to social movement activists. While our examples were drawn largely from popular culture, the idea of high art as a means of knowing was central to the sociology of arts as practiced by Theodor Adorno and the early Frankfurt School.

MEANING IN ART

Art tells the truth about society.

—Adorno

One of the central issues concerning a return to meaning in the sociology of the arts is the question of any knowledge claims made in forms of representation. How might knowledge be expressed and communicated in artworks, how might such claims be received in their public reception, and how might they be evaluated by more distanced observers and analysts?

The production of culture has primarily conceptualized this matter within claims to authenticity, taste, and distinction, all of which can be conceived with an instrumental view of culture, as fabrication or as resource, part of a tool kit. On the other side, a long-standing romantic and idealist tradition has preserved what today is rather disparagingly referred to as an essentialist notion of meaning. As Grana (1989:18) describes this tradition, it “at least since Hegel and in some respects earlier, [has] attributed to the creation of images the power to cause reality to stand and reveal itself before our eyes.” I intend to carve out a middle ground between these positions.

Ancient thought recognized three modes of knowing—memory, art, and reason—while the Renaissance celebrated the role of art and the artist in prolonging memory through the painted image (Baxandall 1972). Our contemporary world has nearly succeeded in identifying knowledge with reason and reducing art to issues of taste, distinction, and money making. Rather than tracing this development (one can turn to Bernstein 1992 for suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Toward a Meaningful Sociology of the Arts
• 2 Chewing on Clement Greenberg: Abstraction and the Two Faces of Modernism
• 3 The Meaning of Style: Postmodernism, Demystification, and Dissonance in Post-Tiananmen Chinese Avant-Garde Art
• 4 Seeker of the Sacred: A Late Durkheimian Theory of the Artist
• 5 Music as Agency in Beethoven’s Vienna
• 6 Music as Social Performance
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors