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A cultural sociology of the arts

After a long period of relative exclusion from serious consideration by social sciences, the study of culture and the arts has become a lively sociological arena in the United States, as it had already been in much of Europe. No longer a stepchild of the serious business of sociologists, the arts are, if not central, then at least a legitimate, as opposed to a frivolous subject. This flowering has come about despite a traditional anti-aesthetic orientation in American social science, and, until recently, relative retarded development of much contemporary European social science. Still, the position of the arts in the social science disciplines is likely to remain tenuous, and requires renewed justification as an intellectual enterprise. The reasons for this have to do both with the intellectual outlooks that have become embedded in understandings of the arts, and the social structures of their creation – or ‘production.’ The most promising developments in sociology are fostered by recognition of many more genres of creativity and their incorporation in the aesthetic domain. This growth is related to socioeconomic and political trends, consumerism, industrial transformation of global scope, though is not reducible to them. Arguably, they support new constructions and creativity at least as much as mass culture if not more.