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The reflection approach refers to diverse scholarship within the sociology of art that shares the core assumption that art is a mirror held up to society. Albrecht (1954) identified six types of reflection in the analysis of literary fiction: (1) the notion that literature embodies norms and values of a society, (2) the psychoanalytic variant that it fulfills shared emotional needs and fantasies, (3) a Jungian view that literature arises from the collective unconscious and thus is similar to dreams, (4) the belief that literature reflects a Hegelian “essential spirit” of society, (5) the Marxian view that forms of literature are a result of the economic conditions of the elite or of the rising classes, and (6) literature reflects demographic trends. Peterson (1979) suggests a different way of dividing reflection: (1) those that focus on how art reflects the whole society and (2) more modest studies claiming that art reflects only the local milieu of the subculture that consumes it. If we combine Peterson’s and Albrecht’s schemes, we have at least twelve ways in which art might reflect society, and we could probably think of many more. But which is correct? A major problem with the reflection approach, then, is that its underlying metaphor is defined so broadly that we cannot specify which aspects of society are reflected or which groups.

Laslett (1976) cautions historical sociologists who would draw conclusions about real life on the basis of literary evidence. Literature, after all, is fiction. There is no way to know whether situations in literature were contrived because they were common in the society or precisely because they were uncommon. Laslett cites several examples where literature and society do not mesh. For instance, literature from the pre‐industrial age portrayed British households as large, when in fact they contained, on average, fewer than five people. In essence, Laslett argues that any reflection of society in literature is mediated by literary practices and conventions. The fiction of large households, with many people from servants to the patriarch living under one roof, creates more dramatic possibilities than the reality of small ones, which explains why so many novels depicted large households. Similar difficulties arise with most other art forms. To overcome them, Albrecht has suggested comparing art to other indices of the “essential spirit” of a society. Using a variety of sources is essentially what Helsinger does in her well‐researched and convincing study. Such comparisons help researchers avoid the literary fallacy, which is “deducing the ‘spirit of the age’ from its art and then rediscovering it is its art” (Albrecht, 1954: 431).

This point may be well taken, but if it is advisable to look at other data one might ask: Why study cultural artifacts at all? Why not study society itself? For instance, Goffman did not need to look at advertisements to learn that unequal relationships exist between men and women. The answer is that most researchers are looking for information more interesting than just the number of people in a household, and that supplemental evidence does not have to come from direct observation of the society. Goffman clearly demonstrated that sexism is reflected in advertisements. But he also uncovered a variety of pictorial styles that portray the unequal relationship between the sexes, which also, he argues, tell us about real‐life rituals.

Often the evidence we seek is not directly available, either because it has been lost through the passage of time or because there is no direct way to tap it. No time machine yet exists to go back to the seventeenth century. But we can examine seventeenth century paintings. Dutch artists of that time painted scenes of everyday life. If we assume that the paintings are an accurate reflection of Dutch society, we can get a sense of what life was like through such details as how houses were furnished or how social groups interacted (see Adams, 1994).

In addition to questions of what is reflected (norms, values, needs, fantasies, myths, demographic trends, stereotypes, statistical regularities, or unusual events) and who is reflected (elites, rising classes, the whole society, or subcultures), there is also the issue of how society comes to be reflected. Helsinger’s study relies, implicitly, on the assumption that great artists are in touch with the spirit of their times, and with their fingers thus on the pulse of society, they will faithfully perceive and portray the greatest truths of the society in their works. In contrast, Sandell implies that the mechanism of reflection resides in art’s popularity.⁸

Neither of these reflection mechanisms stands up to scrutiny. It is commonly asserted, especially with respect to the avant‐garde, that artists are particularly sensitive to the zeitgeist or even to future trends in society. But artists are also sensitive to the artistic conventions and understandings of the art worlds of which they are a part, to other artists, and to potential sales, and not always to the person in the street. They may make powerful statements about the condition of society, they may express intensely personal feelings, they may engage with current aesthetic problems, or they may do something else entirely. The idea that artists have exquisite powers of perception may be an ideology used by artists and their supporters to claim status honor. On the other hand, it is a truism that art forms would not be popular if people did not like them, and popular works must resonate somehow with many people. But popularity alone does not explain how art reflects society. Are people drawn to art that reflects their psychological needs, their shared societal values, or myths that symbolically resolve unresolvable conflicts in society? Or do they consume culture because it seems the least boring thing to do at the time or because their friends are doing so?

Both mechanisms are vague, and they leave aside the fact that art is made and distributed by people in production systems and is consumed by people in social systems. In other words, links between art and society are mediated by a variety of factors, as detailed in Part II of this book. Still, most researchers in the sociology of art believe that art objects can tell us something about the society that produces them, although the picture is much more complex than a single, straight line running directly between art and society. Current research in the sociology of the arts rarely uses a straightforward reflection approach.