de la Fuente, Eduardo (2015) Thinking contradictory thoughts: on the convergence of aesthetic and social factors in recent sociologies of art. In: Martin, Randy, (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics. Routledge Companions . Routledge, Abingdon, UK, pp. 53-66.

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Abstract

[Extract] The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked that the test of a 'first-rate intelligence' is the 'ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind and still retain the ability to function' (cited in Sullivan, 2010: backcover). It is striking how often discussions of 'art' and 'society' have produced the opposite effect: namely, an inability to think about the aesthetic and the social simultaneously. But - as I argued in a recent article (de la Fuente, 2007) - the sociology of art has finally started to move from consolidation (which, in some respects heightened the tension between aesthetic and social approaches) to a period of self-questioning and, then, innovative attempts to map the aesthetics-sociality nexus. The label I gave to this new style of social science writing about the arts is the new sociology if art. Its emergence suggested that debates about aesthetic and social factors were starting to mature and were finally approaching the mode of thinking, which Eviatar Zerubavel (1991) terms the 'flexible mind'. Indeed, I will draw upon Zerubavel's (1991: 3) aCCOunt of different styles of cognition, or the 'process by which we cut up the world', to explain some of the reasons why the convergence of aesthetic and social factors has taken so long to achieve in sociological writing about art.

Item ID:	40371
Item Type:	Book Chapter (Research - B1)
ISBN:	978-0-415-64510-2
Date Deposited:	08 Oct 2015 05:25
FoR Codes:	16 STUDIES IN HUMAN SOCIETY > 1608 Sociology > 160806 Social Theory @ 100%
SEO Codes:	97 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 970116 Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society @ 100%
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