Please be informed that tomorrow’s seminar is cancelled, Lorenzo G. Zaffaroni is unable to join us due to illness.
Cultural sociology and the arts: explore the affinities between cultural fields and other social domains
Lorenzo G. Zaffaroni, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Can studies on the artistic legitimacy of cultural products provide insight into how worth is assessed, recognised and rewarded in different (e.g., non-aesthetic) fields? I posit that problems concerning the legitimacy of the arts are points of departure rather than of convergence. Studies into how objects, people and practices are evaluated in cultural fields can shed light onto broader issues of meritocracy, legitimacy, status and power. To this aim, I put my recent work in the field of art photography in dialogue with studies on the legitimation of new categories of art (e.g., algorithmic art), and discuss how cultural products emerge and are compared to others based on evaluative judgement on their intrinsic (formal) and extrinsic (contextual) properties. Furthermore, I provide examples of the complex and seemingly blurred opposition between the social and the aesthetic, showing how lasting oppositions (e.g., between “artists” and “professionals”) might in fact reinforce status hierarchies even beyond creative fields, while other recent phenomena, i.e. the mediatization of art or consecration based on market logics, can establish new heterarchies. Ultimately, isolating the aesthetic from other areas of social life hinders our sociological imagination, as the vocabulary and functioning of aesthetic discourses deeply resonate with similar mechanisms underlying the diffusion and cultural power of widespread ideas, norms and values – even more so in the backdrop of the increasing aesthetisation of our social experience.