Читать книгу Sociology of the Arts - Victoria D. Alexander - Страница 48

The media effects literature, along with the mass culture critique, focuses on what we now think of as the popular arts, art forms that arose during the twentieth century and that are produced by culture industries. There are a number of reasons for this. Most notably, the fact that such cultural forms were new, coupled with the fact that they were created by profit‐seeking businesspeople, made them highly suspect to many observers. But it is worth pointing out that cultural objects from the fine arts have also been criticized in the same manner. This was especially evident in 1990s during the “culture wars” in America when artists, many of them funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, came under fire for being indecent and contrary to family values (Dubin, 1992, 1999).

Despite such controversies, contemporary arts advocates claim that fine art is good for society. Such claims, especially of social benefits, have a long intellectual history. We have already seen that the art and civilization approach in the nineteenth century saw a positive impact of culture, but Belfiore and Bennett (2008) trace such ideas back to ancient Greece. In the twenty‐first century, arguments for positive outcomes are often intertwined with claims for public funding (McCarthy et al., 2004). Debates about why the fine arts are good for society have a different flavor than why popular arts are bad for it, but they are both shaping arguments.