culture is mindless because it reflects the mindless work of the masses. Theodor Adorno (2009 [1941]), a Marxist cultural critic, argues along these lines with respect to popular music.3 Storey (2015: 71) summarizes Adorno’s thinking:
work under capitalism is dull and therefore promotes the search for escape, but, because it is also dulling, it leaves little energy for real escape—the demands of “authentic” culture. Instead refuge is sought in forms such as popular music—the consumption of which is always passive, and endlessly repetitive, confirming the world as it is. Whereas “serious” music…plays to the pleasure of the imagination, offering an engagement with the world as it could be, popular music is “the nonproductive correlate”…to life in the office or on the factory floor. The “strain and boredom” of work leads men and women to the “avoidance of effort” in their leisure time… Denied “novelty” in their work time, and too exhausted for it in their leisure time, “they crave a stimulant” —popular music satisfies the craving.4
More Recent Reflection Analyses
More recent studies that draw on the metaphor of reflection sometimes consider economic relationships, as in Marxian analysis, but often go further. In addition, art is often used to understand the portrayals of gender, race, sexuality, social class, and other social categories of interest to sociologists, as well as to understand social change. Researchers embarking on a reflection study may start from different intellectual assumptions and use a variety of research techniques. The studies reviewed below illustrate this diversity.
National Identity and Unsettled Times
Helsinger (1994) looks at how engravings made by the great landscape painter J.M.W. Turner in the 1820s and 1830s reflected aspects of English national identity. Helsinger situates Turner’s engravings, published in Picturesque Views in England and Wales, in “the genre of coffee‐table books that address readers as travelers” (p. 108). These books show pretty scenes from England that an actual tourist might see while traveling, and through them, middle class “picturesque travelers” can gain a symbolic possession of the country.
Purchase these books and you too may gain at least visual access to the land. The prints also…provide an analogue for experiences of touristic travel (itself established since the eighteenth century as a means of vicariously possessing England) and for the geographic and social mobility increasingly characteristic of their middle‐class, often urban purchasers. (p. 105)
When Turner was creating his views, England was facing particularly unsettled times. Unemployed workers were circulating about the country, generating fears of mob violence (both justified and unjustified) among the middle and upper classes. Turner’s landscapes reflect these unstable class relationships in a number of ways, most notably, through his inclusion of figures in the foreground of his paintings. For example, the work
Blenheim, Oxfordshire…explicitly asks who shall be admitted to the privilege of touristic viewing… [A] group of middle‐ and lower‐middle‐class viewers stand waiting, on the extreme right edge of the picture, at the grand gate of the most visited great house in England, just visible at the upper left. A top‐hatted figure holding a brace of hounds and a rifle stands squarely in the left center foreground, confronting the viewer and barring the visitors’ way with unknown intent while a riding party from the estate can be seen on the far left. Centered in the distance and lit by the sun emerging from clouds, a bridge (ironically a purely ornamental bridge, built on appropriated land from the town) links the two otherwise tensely separate sides of the picture. Blenheim, financed out of public funds to reward a national hero, was indeed a “sort of national property” that might appropriately stand for the privileges of nationality demanded by the middle classes—and, unsuccessfully in 1832, by the lower classes, who are notably not represented in the party at the gate… These drawings depict English landscape as contested ground (p. 111–112).
In other engravings, unruly lower‐class men and women depicted in the foreground stand between the viewer and the landscape painted behind them. They are also, significantly, portrayed at leisure rather than at work. Interestingly, Turner’s critics did not like these figures and labeled them as vulgar and incompetent elements in otherwise beautiful works. Helsinger is unable to find enough evidence to tell us if the presence of these figures mean that Turner “claim[ed] for them rights of possession” of England and English nationality, or instead expressed a “sympathy with those who felt profoundly threatened by their presence” (pp. 118–119).
Helsinger’s work is an interpretive study. She has taken a number of artworks and examined them in detail in order to extract their meaning, and, thereby, she has shown that elements in the paintings reflect certain aspects of society. Her study shores up the interpretation of the visual objects with a historical analysis, in which she matches the stylistic elements in Turner’s work with aspects of the political and economic climate of Britain of the time.
Friendship as Utopian Solution
Sandell (1998) studied the popular television series Friends. This American sit‐com, which focuses on six friends who live in New York City, was originally broadcast from 1994–2004 in the US. It was also viewed internationally and is currently available on Netflix. Sandell, whose study was completed during the show’s fourth season, argues that the show reflects “fantasies and anxieties” which are “resolved in a kind of fantasy wish‐fulfillment” (p. 144). For instance, American society is geographically mobile. As people pursue employment and move to other parts of the country, they are separated from their original families. The show reflects this and provides a fantasy solution in which people no longer living near their biological families create “alternative families” through close relationships with friends: “Friends thus captures and romanticizes the formation of alternative kinship networks made up of friends and neighbors,” (p. 145). Similarly, finding fulfilling employment in capitalism can be challenging, but the show reflects the notion that friendships can “compensate for some of the frustrations” of urban employment (p. 145). In other words, the “utopian promise of the show is that alternative families can substitute for both the failures of biological families and the failures of professional life” in the contemporary world (p. 147).
The show also depicts other alternative family arrangements, including a lesbian couple raising a child, surrogate motherhood, and divorce. In this way, Sandell argues, Friends “is not a show which champions normative heterosexuality” and the nuclear family (p. 142). But at the same time, “the characters self‐consciously [invert] gender roles to highlight the constructedness of gender, but doing so in such a way that it finally reinforces existing stereotypes about men and women” (p. 149). In addition, the show reflects “whiteness” (p. 151). Not only are the main characters all white, so are most of the supporting characters and extras. This whiteness does not reflect the actual demographic composition of New York City, of course. Moreover, racial difference is erased in most episodes, and coded as disruptive in episodes where non‐white characters do appear, reflecting racism. Sandell writes, “Even though the show foregrounds and celebrates kinship networks which challenge the mythical nuclear heterosexual family…the visibility of these ‘alternative families’ is made possible only by simultaneously rendering invisible other kinds of ‘difference’” (p. 143).
Gender Roles
In their classic study of gender roles in American children’s books, Weitzman et al. (1972) use content analysis alongside a more interpretative approach to show how children’s
