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The sociology of art is now an established sub-discipline of sociology. But little work has been done to explore the implications not of society on art, but of art on the nature and principles of sociology itself.
Vision and Society explores the ways in which art (here mainly understood as visual art) structures in fundamental ways the constitution of society, the relations between societies and the ways in which society and culture should be theorized. Building initially on an unfulfilled project by the French sociologist of art Nathalie Heinich to derive a sociology from art, this book pushes this idea in unconventional directions. Rethinking the relationships between the study of art and the study of sociology and anthropology, this book explores how this rethinking might impact sociological theory in general, and certain aspects of it in particular - especially the study of social movements, social change, the urban, the constitution of space and the ways in which human social relationships are mediated and expressed.
List of contents
Part I: Revisioning Art and Society 1. For a Sociology and Anthropology from Art 2. Social Aesthetics/Sociological Aesthetics 3. Art and Social Transformation: Challenges to the Discourse and Practice of Human Development 4. The Aesthetics of Social Change 5. The Aesthetics of the Urban: Visual Anthropology, Space, Place and Public Culture 6. Aesthetics Beyond Art: Conviviality and Social Imagination 7. Art Movements as Social Movements 8. The Migration of the Image: Art and the Politics and Sociology of Space Part II: Cases in Point 9. Modernism, the Colonial and the Negotiation of Representation: the Bauhaus in Asia 10. Art in the Colonial Encounter: Cultural Imperialism, Symbolic Resistance, and the Creation of Modern Korean Art 11. Rethinking the Sociology of Japanese Visual Culture: Historical Amnesia, Popular Culture and Contemporary Art in Japan
About the author
John Clammer is Professor of Sociology at the United Nations University. His research interests encompass the sociology of art, urban sociology, the sociology of religion and sociological theory East and West. His most recent book is Culture, Development and Social Theory (Zed Books 2012).
Summary
Vision and Society is an attempt to show that it is possible to go beyond a sociology of art to the more ambitious possibility of a sociology from art. This book develops a theory of the relationship of the visual and the social and illustrates these with comparative examples from around the world.
