Barcelona

Menu:

First ISA Forum of Sociology
Sociological Research and Public Debate
Barcelona, Spain
September 5 - 8, 2008


Research Committee on
Sociology of Arts RC37

Main theme
The sociology of the arts and culture: Towards a public sociology


Programme Coordinator
Jeffrey A. Halley, University of Texas, USA, jeffrey.halley@utsa.edu

Venue of RC37 sessions:

Faculty of Philosophy, Geography and History
University of Barcelona
Montalegre, 6
08001 Barcelona, Spain, map

Session 1: Rationalization and resistance in the arts, culture, and communication

Part I
Saturday, September 6, 2008, 09:00-11:00

Part II
Saturday, September 6, 2008, 11:30-13:30

Part III
Saturday, September 6, 2008, 15:30-17:30

Part IV
Sunday, September 7, 2008, 09:00-11:00
Joint sessions of RC14 Sociology of Communication, Knowledge and Culture and RC37 Sociology of Arts
Organizer: Jeffrey A. Halley, University of Texas, USA, jeffrey.halley@utsa.edu
This session addresses the problem of rationalization, paramount for such theorists as Weber, Lukacs (in the notion of reification), Adorno and others of the Frankfurt School, and beyond. The process of rationalization has been very present in the last decades in various forms, such as the growth of mergers and acquisitions, patterns of globalization, the instrumentalization and commodification of art and culture, and the very acceleration of the pace of these trends. What has been the effect of this political economic and socio-cultural process on the arts, culture, communications, and knowledge? What forms of resistance have developed by culture workers, consumers, social collectivities, and others against these trends?

Session 2: Biographical research and sociology of art

Joint sessions of RC 37 Sociology of Arts and RC38 Biography and Society
Artists use language in a performative way to express their relation to the artworld. Artistic processes of creating an artwork can be analyzed through their language use and also through the “working alliance” of researchers with artists. Artists can be seen as opening up a world of action in which they build houses for the visitor, who is no longer someone experiencing a work of art but becomes part of an action.
We propose a substantial and methodological reflection on sociology of art, performative social science, visual sociology, and biographical research, to understand the role of research in the art world. Questions to be raised and discussed can include the following: is the artistic biography changing? What kind of “biographical work” do artists do? How do artists reflect the artistic process of creating an artwork? Does a transnational and cosmopolitan concept of life play a role in the art world and how is it expressed? Are there differences in concepts how artists create artworks and how the curator is involved in the artistic process?

Part I
Saturday, September 6, 2008, 09:00-11:00
Faculty of Philology, University of Barcelona
Chair: t.b.a.

Part II
Saturday, September 6, 2008, 11:30-13:30
Faculty of Philology, University of Barcelona
Chair: Felicia Herrschaft, University of Frankfurt, Germany, F.Herrschaft@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Session 3: The public becomes public: The sociology of art and culture and public sociology

Part I
Friday, September 5, 2008, 15:30-17:30

Part II
Friday, September 5, 2008, 18:00-20:00

Part III
Saturday, September 6, 2008, 09:00-11:00
Organizer: Jean-Louis Fabiani, EHESS, France, fabiani.jean-louis@wanadoo.fr
In the last ten years, the sociological analysis of audiences and publics in art and culture has undergone various changes: more attention has been devoted to ethnographic approaches and comparative studies. Research on festivals has become central, as well as continuous surveys on cultural institutions. We are now provided with a large data set that allows us to discuss the efficiency of public policies and the expectations of increasingly fragmented audiences. In the meantime, the question of the public (and sometimes of the counter-public) has become a foremost public issue. Sociologists are regularly involved in public debates questioning the public interest in funding art and culture organizations and the specific ways of attracting and attaching new audiences. Can we assess the consequences of the debate on writing sociology  of art and culture ? Is it possible to share a common engagement about the « democratization of culture » or is such a topic out of date? We expect a large debate, since the question is not perfectly clear: there has been a lot of misunderstanding between sociologists, audiences and bureaucracies so far.

Session 4: Sociology of culture and sociology of the arts: Inheritance and transformation

Saturday, September 6, 2008, 11:30-13:30
Organizer: Marta Herrero, University of Plymouth, UK, marta.herrero@plymouth.ac.uk
This session will explore the sorts of theoretical and analytical frameworks from sociologies of culture (from classical to modern) which have inspired sociological analyses of the arts, as well as the contributions the sociology of the arts can make to current debates in the sociology of culture, for example, the role of culture in arts consumption and production.

Sesssion 5: Culture as activity: Fans, enthusiasts, amateurs

Part I
Saturday, September 6, 2008, 15:30-17:30

Part II
Saturday, September 6, 2008, 18:00-20:00
Organizer: Antoine Hennion, ENSMP, France, antoine.hennion@ensmp.fr
The sociology of culture has trained us to only have a critical reading of people’s tastes and preferences, as pure signs of identity and difference. Observed as reflexive work performed on one’s own attachments, through a comprehensive enquiry on various great amateurs, fans, enthusiasts, active practitioners, and by defining new ways of accounting for those passionate practices, taste may be no longer considered an arbitrary election, unaware of its own meaning and explained by hidden social causes. Rather, it appears as a collective technique, whose analysis helps us to understand the way we make ourselves sensitized, to things, to ourselves, to situations and to moments, while simultaneously controlling how those feelings might be shared and discussed with others.

Session 6: Collective memory, public discourse and the arts

Part I
Sunday, September 7, 2008, 09:00-11:00

Part II
Sunday, September 7, 2008, 11:30-13:30

Part III
Sunday, September 7, 2008, 15:30-17:30
Organizer: Jan Marontate, Simon Fraser University, Canada, jmaronta@sfu.ca
These sessions aim to promote reflection on how the arts shape and are shaped by public discourse about collective memory. Another goal is to develop a critical awareness of the place of the arts in rethinking changing collective memories of the past and in imagining the future and examine ways the arts sustain and reconfigure memory through performance, the built environment, everyday practices, movements and specific sites of memory including memorials, museums, internet sites and public art. What is not memorialized may be as important as what is commemorated.

Session 7: The territorial dimension of art

Part I
Sunday, September 7, 2008, 18:00-20:00

Part II
Monday, September 8, 2008, 09:00-11:00

Part III
Monday, September 8, 2008, 11:30-13:30
Organizer: Alain Quemin, Institute Universitaire de France, quemin@univ-mlv.fr
For several years, sociology of art has explored the impact of the territorial dimension on artistic creation at different levels. The works on the local dimension have dealt with artistic metropolis, focusing in particular on the relations between different art forms or making connections between various art forms and territories, such as cities, regions or countries. Other important works in the sociology of art field have been developed simultaneously to the development on works in the field of the sociology of globalization. These works in the sociology of art, thanks to empirical data, have made it possible to renew some imprecise or even inaccurate analyses on cultural globalization.

Session 8: Epistemology and methodology in the sociology of arts: Challenges for the twenty-first century

Part I
Sunday, September 7, 2008, 09:00-11:00

Part II
Sunday, September 7, 2008, 11:30-13:30
Organizer: Paulo Menezes, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, paulomen@usp.br
The purpose is to update the theoretical questions that have developed in research in the Sociology of Arts in its various field, such as fine arts, literature, cinema, photography and so on, regarding the analysis of art works, and their social conditions of production.

Session 9: Open submission sessions

Part I
Sunday, September 7, 2008, 15:30-17:30

Part II
Sunday, September 7, 2008, 18:00-20:00

Part III
Monday, September 8, 2008, 09:00-11:00
Organizer: Jeffrey A. Halley, University of Texas, USA, jeffrey.halley@utsa.edu