the seventeenth century. But we can examine seventeenth century paintings. Dutch artists of that time painted scenes of everyday life. If we assume that the paintings are an accurate reflection of Dutch society, we can get a sense of what life was like through such details as how houses were furnished or how social groups interacted (see Adams, 1994).
In addition to questions of what is reflected (norms, values, needs, fantasies, myths, demographic trends, stereotypes, statistical regularities, or unusual events) and who is reflected (elites, rising classes, the whole society, or subcultures), there is also the issue of how society comes to be reflected. Helsinger’s study relies, implicitly, on the assumption that great artists are in touch with the spirit of their times, and with their fingers thus on the pulse of society, they will faithfully perceive and portray the greatest truths of the society in their works. In contrast, Sandell implies that the mechanism of reflection resides in art’s popularity.8
Neither of these reflection mechanisms stands up to scrutiny. It is commonly asserted, especially with respect to the avant‐garde, that artists are particularly sensitive to the zeitgeist or even to future trends in society. But artists are also sensitive to the artistic conventions and understandings of the art worlds of which they are a part, to other artists, and to potential sales, and not always to the person in the street. They may make powerful statements about the condition of society, they may express intensely personal feelings, they may engage with current aesthetic problems, or they may do something else entirely. The idea that artists have exquisite powers of perception may be an ideology used by artists and their supporters to claim status honor. On the other hand, it is a truism that art forms would not be popular if people did not like them, and popular works must resonate somehow with many people. But popularity alone does not explain how art reflects society. Are people drawn to art that reflects their psychological needs, their shared societal values, or myths that symbolically resolve unresolvable conflicts in society? Or do they consume culture because it seems the least boring thing to do at the time or because their friends are doing so?
Both mechanisms are vague, and they leave aside the fact that art is made and distributed by people in production systems and is consumed by people in social systems. In other words, links between art and society are mediated by a variety of factors, as detailed in Part II of this book. Still, most researchers in the sociology of art believe that art objects can tell us something about the society that produces them, although the picture is much more complex than a single, straight line running directly between art and society. Current research in the sociology of the arts rarely uses a straightforward reflection approach.
Conclusion: The Fun House Mirror
Art reflects society, but in complex ways. I have identified a number of problems with the reflection approach. Crucially, the creators of and the audiences for art shape the artistic product and its meaning in ways that make a simple reflection argument problematic. Indeed, if art reflects society, then the mirror is one of the distorting kind that is found at fun fairs.
In summing up the relationship between art and society, Ferguson, Desan, and Griswold (1988) use a similar metaphor.9 They tell a story from the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale The Snow Queen. A demon has created a mirror that systematically misreflects (for the worse) people’s actions and thoughts. The demon’s students are very impressed with the mirror, believing that it reveals the truth of human nature. They take it and run around the countryside, holding it up to society, until everyone sees it. One day it breaks and shards of the mirror lodge in the eyes of everyone who had seen it, giving them the same, cynical vision of the original mirror.
Ferguson, Desan, and Griswold point out that each element in the story is analogous to the way art reflects society. The mirror can only reflect one part of reality at any given time (though it can be pointed in the direction of many things); its shifting misreflections are emblematic of art’s misreflections. And, indeed, it is systematically distorting, which suggests that it is amenable to study. Its distortions and images have been shaped by the Master Demon, its creator, and by the demon students, distributors. It has a frame, which suggests that there is an intellectual and institutional context in which art is created. Finally, the mirror’s reflections are consumed, as represented by the fragments of glass in the eyes of the beholders, a factor which reminds us that we must remember that art is received by audiences, who are embedded in a social context, and who contribute to the creation of meaning by selectively mispercieving the images they see.
Like the demon’s fantastic mirror, [art] presents structured misreflections, which magnify or diminish certain aspects of reality, twist some or leave others out altogether. The sociology of [art] challenges these mirrors and their inventors, examines their misreflections, their causes and consequences. It shows how and why a particular [work, genre, period, or artist] reflects in one way and not in another; it specifies the properties of the mirror that determine its (mis)reflections.
(Ferguson, Desan, and Griswold, 1988: 429)
The reflection approach has been an important way of examining art. Despite some serious drawbacks, it remains compelling. It is a common mode of artistic analysis in the popular imagination and the popular press. Moreover, it remains a sub‐theme in much contemporary research on art, though many of these studies are sophisticated enough to avoid the problems of the “pure,” or naïve, versions of the approach.
Case Study 2.1 The Reflection of Race in Children’s Books
Based on
Pescosolido, Grauerholz, and Milkie’s
“Culture and Conflict:
The Portrayal of Blacks in U.S. Children’s Picture Books
through the Mid‐ and Late‐Twentieth Century”
Points for Discussion
1 How does the portrayal of race in children’s books reflect society?
2 In what ways are the reflections indirect or distorted?
3 How can the absence of portrayals of social groups reflect society?
4 The authors’ concept of “gatekeepers” adds a production feature to their argument that a “pure” reflection study ignores. How does the inclusion of gatekeepers provide a critique of reflection theory?
Case
Art objects are sites of symbolic struggle among social groups. Because art is created and disseminated by the dominant social groups, its content tends to reflect dominant systems of order. Studies of the portrayal of race (e.g. Dines and Humez, 1995; Dubin, 1987; Entman and Rojecki, 2001; Lott, 2017) have generally shown that black and other minority ethnic individuals and groups are depicted less positively than white ones. In particular, “the social oppression of Blacks in the United States has been [coupled with], in Tuchman’s (1978) term, their ‘symbolic annihilation.’ Blacks have been ignored, stereotyped, or demeaned in cultural images” (Pescosolido et al., 1997: 443).
Pescosolido et al. (1997) examine American children’s books from 1937 to 1993. During this time, race relations in the United States went through a number of changes. Early in the century, the stereotyping of and discrimination against African Americans was rife. The black civil rights movement, sparked by social changes during World War II, grew in the 1950s and accelerated
