Читать книгу Sociology of the Arts - Victoria D. Alexander - Страница 33

Art reflects society, but in complex ways. I have identified a number of problems with the reflection approach. Crucially, the creators of and the audiences for art shape the artistic product and its meaning in ways that make a simple reflection argument problematic. Indeed, if art reflects society, then the mirror is one of the distorting kind that is found at fun fairs.

In summing up the relationship between art and society, Ferguson, Desan, and Griswold (1988) use a similar metaphor.⁹ They tell a story from the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale The Snow Queen. A demon has created a mirror that systematically misreflects (for the worse) people’s actions and thoughts. The demon’s students are very impressed with the mirror, believing that it reveals the truth of human nature. They take it and run around the countryside, holding it up to society, until everyone sees it. One day it breaks and shards of the mirror lodge in the eyes of everyone who had seen it, giving them the same, cynical vision of the original mirror.

Ferguson, Desan, and Griswold point out that each element in the story is analogous to the way art reflects society. The mirror can only reflect one part of reality at any given time (though it can be pointed in the direction of many things); its shifting misreflections are emblematic of art’s misreflections. And, indeed, it is systematically distorting, which suggests that it is amenable to study. Its distortions and images have been shaped by the Master Demon, its creator, and by the demon students, distributors. It has a frame, which suggests that there is an intellectual and institutional context in which art is created. Finally, the mirror’s reflections are consumed, as represented by the fragments of glass in the eyes of the beholders, a factor which reminds us that we must remember that art is received by audiences, who are embedded in a social context, and who contribute to the creation of meaning by selectively mispercieving the images they see.

Like the demon’s fantastic mirror, [art] presents structured misreflections, which magnify or diminish certain aspects of reality, twist some or leave others out altogether. The sociology of [art] challenges these mirrors and their inventors, examines their misreflections, their causes and consequences. It shows how and why a particular [work, genre, period, or artist] reflects in one way and not in another; it specifies the properties of the mirror that determine its (mis)reflections.

(Ferguson, Desan, and Griswold, 1988: 429)

The reflection approach has been an important way of examining art. Despite some serious drawbacks, it remains compelling. It is a common mode of artistic analysis in the popular imagination and the popular press. Moreover, it remains a sub‐theme in much contemporary research on art, though many of these studies are sophisticated enough to avoid the problems of the “pure,” or naïve, versions of the approach.