Under what social conditions do particular sorts of arts and
aesthetics arise and flourish, and under what conditions do they
decline and disappear? What types of artistic and aesthetic
practices exist outside of museums, galleries, and other
high-cultural institutions? In what ways are social relations and
broader cultural forces embedded within particular artworks, or
specific artistic genres and forms? What roles can and do aesthetic
orientations and artistic processes and products play in social
life? In what ways are arts and aesthetics socially organized,
regulated, distributed, and utilized? How are art worlds connected
to other major social institutions, such as politics and the
economy, and has art become just an offshoot of consumer and
celebrity culture?
Serious work on dizzying questions such as these has a long
pedigree, stretching back at least to the writings of Giambattista
Vico and Madame de Stael in the eighteenth century. Very simply
put, both these authors were concerned with tracing the manifold
relations that can pertain between the arts and, more broadly,
aesthetics on the one hand, and society on the other. Since then,
social scientists in many disciplines have had compelling things to
say about art and aesthetics. In some disciplines such as
anthropology this is a fact of long standing, while in others like
human geography it is of more recent provenance. But the most
striking recent surge of interest in the area has taken place in
sociology, where never before have cultural forces and phenomena
been so centrally on the research agenda.
Addressing the need for an authoritative reference work to make
sense of this rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of
scholarly literature, Art and Aesthetics is a new title in the
Routledge series, Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences. Edited
by two leading scholars, this new Major Work from Routledge brings
together in four volumes foundational and the very best
cutting-edge scholarship to provide a synoptic view of all the key
issues and current debates.
In particular, this new collection brings together for the first
time the most important research on how social relations are
embodied in artistic and aesthetic products and processes, and how
these in turn can affect social life and societal organization.
Rooted in sociology, but also embracing a broad range of diverse
contributions from other disciplines such as anthropology,
philosophy, art history, cultural studies, media studies, film
studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies Art and
Aesthetics demonstrates the great vitality of this area of research
and teaching. It highlights both how social scientists are
increasingly developing sophisticated ways of understanding
artistic and aesthetic issues, and also how scholars in the
humanities are drawing upon social-scientific ideas and methods in
order more fully to engage with such matters than hitherto was
possible.
Art and Aesthetics is fully indexed and has a comprehensive
introduction, newly written by the editors, which places the
material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an
essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by
scholars and students interested in the relations between arts,
aesthetics, culture, and society as a vital one-stop research and
pedagogic resource.
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