events.
2 See Valkenburg, Peter, and Walther (2016) and Piotrowski and Valkenburg (2015) on indirect and selective media effects. Ferguson and Savage (2012) argue that wave‐to‐wave longitudinal designs do not solve the causality problem, because personality traits associated with preference for violence are stable over time, so are already confounded before the first wave of the study.
NOTES
1 1 For a recent review of Media Effects literature, see Valkenburg, Peter, and Walther (2016).
2 2 In a very interesting and empirically impressive article, Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei (2019) argue that individuals who heavily watched entertainment television as children “were less cognitively sophisticated and civic‐minded as adults” (p. 2497). They argue that opportunity costs create this effect. That is, for every hour of television an individual watches, they necessarily forgo an hour that could have been spent on cognition‐enhancing activities (e.g. reading books, exercising or playing sports, and socializing).
3 3 For a critique of the ability of the advertising industry to influence people, see Schudson (1986).
4 4 See, e.g., Barthel (1988), Cronin (2000), Ewen and Ewen (1992), and Klein (2000).
5 5 Binder’s (1993) excellent article shows how frames and counter‐frames work. Moreover, she finds differences in frames used when discussing heavy metal and rap which reveal racialised discourses.
6 6 This assumes that sales actually fell, but there is no clear evidence on this. It may be that the story is simply a compelling urban legend.
7 7 Curran (1990) scathingly attacks the equation of the media effects tradition with a hypodermic model of influence. This, he says, “is a breath‐taking, though often repeated, caricature of the history of communications research that writes out a whole generation of researchers. It presents as innovation what is in reality a process of rediscovery… Effects research cannot be said in any meaningful sense to have been ‘dominated’ by the hypodermic model. On the contrary, its main thrust ever since the 1940s was to assert the independence and autonomy of media audiences and dispel the widespread notion that people are easily influenced by the media. It did this by developing many of the same insights that have been proclaimed afresh in the recent spate of ‘reception’ studies, albeit in a different technical language and sometimes with less subtlety” (pp. 146–147).
4 A Mediated View: The Cultural Diamond
As we have seen in previous chapters, it is tempting to view the relationship between art and society as a direct link. Art holds a mirror up to society, reflecting it. Art shapes society by giving its consumers good and bad ideas. We have also seen that these approaches are flawed. We do not need to delve too deeply to realize that an artwork can only reflect a few aspects of society and is never a perfect mirror of aspects it does reflect. Similarly, you know from personal experience that you are not a “cultural dope.” You might get ideas from television or novels, but you do not uncritically adopt all of them just because you saw or read them. And great painting and great music is more likely to bore than uplift you if it is forced upon you by your parents or your school.
This chapter offers a brief critique of reflection and shaping approaches from the point of view of the “Cultural Diamond.” This model forms the basis for the sociological work covered in Part II of this book (Chapters 5–12). These chapters show the strength of the approach. We will address its weaknesses in Part III.
Wendy Griswold (1986) developed the idea of the cultural diamond. Put simply, the diamond is a square turned on one end like a kite. It has four corners, representing (1) artistic products, (2) creators of art, (3) consumers of art, and (4) the wider society. These four points are linked (with six lines) as in Figure 4.1. Griswold (2013) argues that to understand art and society, researchers must take account of all four corners and all six links in the diamond. Art is created by an artist or group of artists. It does not spring miraculously into form without human intervention. And art does not reach “society” at large. Instead, it reaches a particular public made up of individuals embedded in a social system. How consumers use art, what meanings it elicits in their minds, and how it eventually penetrates the general society is mediated by these individuals and is affected by their attitudes and values, their social location, and their social networks. “Society” (including wider norms, values, laws, institutions, and social structures) makes up the final node on the diamond. It affects artists, the distribution system, the consumers of culture, and through these, the shape of art.
Figure 4.1 Griswold’s Cultural Diamond.
Source: Adapted from Griswold (2013: p. 15).
The cultural diamond is a heuristic or a metaphor that sets out, in general terms, the idea that relationships exist among these points. It strongly suggests that all four points are important in understanding art sociologically. As Griswold states (2013: 16),
the cultural diamond is an accounting device intended to encourage a fuller understanding of any cultural object’s relationship to the social world…a complete understanding of a given cultural object would require understanding all four points and six links.
The cultural diamond is not a theory, however. It does not specify what the relationships among the points on the diamond only that some relationship exists.
A Better Diamond
The picture of the cultural diamond devised by Griswold has the elegance of simplicity. I modify the cultural diamond in my presentation of research on art worlds, however, to demonstrate some important links that the simple diamond obscures (see Figure 4.2). Art is communication. Art has to get from the people who create it to the people who consume it. That is, art is distributed by some person, organization, or network. As we shall see, the shape of the distribution system affects what kinds of art get distributed widely, narrowly or not at all. The simple diamond lumps the distribution of art objects together with artistic creation. Separating these two allows us to see that the layers intervening between artists and consumption can be many, as in popular music where feedback from the audience to the artist comes via the recording industry mainly in the form of market indicators, or few, as is the case for the consumers of pub music who are more directly in contact with the musicians who perform there. Distinguishing artists (or the production system) from distribution systems also allows us to see that artists can stand apart from the distribution system (as do most novelists), or can be deeply embedded within it (as are many television script writers).
In
