than making Whitey a more positive Black character in the 1975 reissue, he becomes ‘Dooley,’ White, Irish and speaking with a brogue” (p. 461; see their Plate 3).
The Caldecott awards are decided by an award panel. Thus, the Caldecott books pass through two sets of gatekeepers, the publishers who choose to produce the books and the panel that decides to honor them with an award. The effects of the Caldecott gatekeepers differ from that of the publishers. Black characters were more visible in Caldecott books than they were in the library and mass market samples during all four time periods. Moreover, in the last time period (1975–1990) when the general visibility of blacks, measured as the percentage of books with at least one black character, stabilized in the library and mass market books, general visibility continued to increase in the Caldecott sample. An increase in the percentage of Caldecott books portraying exclusively black characters accounts for most of the increase in the general visibility of blacks in these books during this time. Starting in the late 1960s, many Caldecott winners were stories about only black characters, up to 35 percent of books in some years. In contrast, the highest proportion of books with only black characters for the library sample was nine percent, and just one title from Little Golden Books featured only black characters (notably, this was the controversial Little Black Sambo). The focus of Caldecott books on exclusively black characters, rather than incidental black characters, however, explains why the books from the other two samples (library and mass market books) showed a higher degree of interracial interaction. “Ironically, the selection of African folk tales, which are an important part of the African American cultural heritage, rewards books removed from contemporary US society and from Whites” (p. 460).
Is the portrayal of blacks in children’s books improving? Pescosolido et al. argue that it is hard to draw firm conclusions one way or the other. On the one hand, the blatantly stereotyped images of the 1930s have disappeared, but on the other, the lack of portrayals of black adults and of positive, mutual interracial interaction “may indicate the continuation of a symbolic status quo in which Black equality is seen as threatening” (p. 462). Along the same lines, the “notable increase in distant and ‘safe’ images of Blacks in the Caldecott Award books can be seen as a recognition and celebration of Blacks’ unique cultural heritage, or it may be seen as a subtle form of ‘symbolic annihilation’ in which the cultural representations of Blacks do not include contact with Whites or portray contemporary ‘real’ African American adults” (p. 462).
NOTES
1 1 This image can be found by searching on “vigee le brun self portrait with daughter.” Vigée Le Brun painted two of these, one dated 1786 (the one Jones, 2000, spoke about, exhibited in 1987) and another, similar one dated 1789.
2 2 The reflection approach is often termed reflection theory. This is a misnomer, however, as the approach is neither a formal theory nor a single, unified way of viewing the relationship between art and society.
3 3 We will discuss Adorno, as part of the Frankfurt School, in more detail in Chapter 3.
4 4 Note, I have removed some emphasis from the original quotation.
5 5 Entman and Rojecki also consider the portrayal of race on television news. This makes up an important component of their study, but as it is outside the scope of this book, I leave it aside.
6 6 The portrayal of blacks in television news is the most dismal still, with black people commonly shown as welfare recipients, single parents, or criminals.
7 7 The term “liminal” was originally coined to refer to the intermediate stage in a ritual whereby the initiates no longer exist in their previous status, but have not been fully integrated into the status the ritual confers. As Entman and Rojecki put it, “Liminal people are by their nature potentially polluting, disruptive, but not necessarily destructive of the natural order since they are ‘no longer classified and not yet classified’” (p. 51).
8 8 Goffman poses still another mechanism: the technical requirements of the form. Advertisements must, he argues, make their scenarios understandable on quick inspection and so they rely on hyper‐ritualized depictions of common behavioral displays. Goffman’s mechanism, based on advertising conventions, is applicable to the type of advertising he studied. Today’s advertisements, however, often use different tropes—they are often purposefully provocative or darkly ambiguous, not instantly clear. Cortese (1999) discusses these tropes in detail.
9 9 Ferguson, Desan, and Griswold focus on the sociology of literature, rather than on the sociology of art, but their conclusions (which are cleverly, as well as clearly, put) may easily be extended to our broader concerns.
3 Shaping Approaches
In the film It Happened One Night (1934), Clark Gable unbuttoned his shirt to reveal his bare chest directly underneath. It is said that sales of men’s undershirts tumbled as a result. When people suggest that an art object affects society in this way, they are making a “shaping” argument. Shaping approaches suggest that that art can somehow put ideas into people’s heads. The shaping approach encompasses a wide group of theories that share the core belief, or metaphor, that art has an impact on society. As with the reflection approach, the shaping approach presents the relationship between art and society as a simple, straight line. But it reverses the causal arrow (the direction of the effect between art objects and society), so that art is seen as affecting society rather than vice versa.
To a great extent, shaping theorists look at the negative effects of art on society. Throughout the twentieth century, social critics pointed to “evils” that are said to herald the fall of civilization as we know it. For instance, it was said that jazz music leads to a society filled with degenerates drinking in speakeasies (in the 1920s), that pulp fiction corrupts morals (in the 1930s), that the flying of Superman on TV encourages children to jump off rooftops (in the 1960s), that Rap music erodes respect for law and order (in the 1980s), and that contemporary visual art undermines family values (in the 1990s). More recently, concerns have moved to the ill effects of non‐art cultural objects, such as video games and social media.
Art has potential positive effects, as well as negative ones. For instance, “green” art might encourage awareness of climate change and movies about cancer patients might engender sympathy or encourage donations to medical research charities. Effects can also be morally neutral (or ambiguous). For instance, it is said that the Indiana Jones movies dramatically increased the number of university students studying anthropology.
Roots of Shaping Approaches
Two nineteenth‐century thinkers, Karl Marx and Matthew Arnold, set out early ideas about how culture affects society, and these ideas have been taken up and refined to explain effects of art on society. We will explore each of these in turn.
Marxism
Marx
