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REVIEW ESSAY: SOCIAL HISTORY AND THE ARTS
| By Julia L. Foulkes |
The New School |
| Berlin: The Symphony Continues: Orchestrating Architectural, Social, and Artistic Change in Germany's New Capital. Edited by Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson, Kristie A. Foell (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. x plus 328 pp.).
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| For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars. By A. Joan Saab (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 227 pp.).
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| Ghana's Concert Party Theatre. By Catherine M. Cole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. xi plus 196 pp.).
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| Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil. By Bryan McCann (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. ix plus 296 pp.).
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| The arts are a realm of experience most often noted for their thoroughly qualitative and subjective nature and their tie to a wealthy and powerful elite. Given the emphases of social historians, then, perhaps it is not surprising that scholarship on popular culture outweighs that on the "high" arts. Popular culture offers a way in which to talk about large groups of people, many of whom have been overlooked, such as the poor and oppressed, and give their actions and pleasures some political impact. This interest, however, has resulted in less scholarship on the high arts from historians interested in the social forces embedded in and propelling the arts. That scholarship still largely resides in other places in the academy: literature, art history, music, theater, and dance departments. Scholars in these departments have also been greatly influenced by the now decades-long attention to the social context of the arts and regularly produce research that furthers that approach. But formal analysis and disciplinary dialogue still tend to shape research so that historians know little of this work, or, at least, it has made relatively little impact on most historians' pedagogical or research agendas. Most often, the difference between how a dance scholar and a historian examines the work of Martha Graham, for example, is primarily a question of emphasis, and one that may make sense to perpetuate even as these lines of inquiry are converging; historians tend to pay less homage to aesthetic accomplishments and more to the power of social and political currents. |
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This emphasis is now dominant, but it is not new. Social history of the arts is, perhaps, bound to Arnold Hauser s The Social History of Art, first published in 1951, and a massive four-volume, thousand-page effort that spans the Neolithic period to the mid-twentieth century. With a history of visual arts at its core, the volumes covered the social context of artistic creativity by concentrating on the philosophical and intellectual trends of an age that influenced painting, sculpture, literature, music, and even film. Over the last fifty years sociologists and historians have followed Hauser in examining the arts as social practice, embedded in productive social relations beyond intellectual trends to forces of economics, politics, racialization, nationalism, religion, and gender, and constituted in these relations rather than mirroring or transcending them. This approach of the arts as social practice is now a truism and serves as the starting point, whether from the perspective of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, art history, or history. So, then, is there anything to be learned from social history? Are the lessons of social history firmly incorporated in the approach of cultural history now? How does this line of inquiry extend beyond popular culture? Four recent books offer an opportunity to think through these questions. |
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