The ‘New Sociology of Art’: Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts ■ Eduardo de la Fuente Monash University, Australia ABSTRACT This article maps recent developments in social science writing about the arts and argues for seeing this work in terms of the label the ‘new sociology of art’. It con- siders four major lines of re-assessment being carried out by sociologists studying the arts: firstly, a reconsideration of the relationship between sociological and other disciplinary approaches to art; secondly, the possibility of an art-sociology as against a sociology of art; thirdly, the application of insights from the sociology of art to non-art ‘stuff ’; and, fourthly, the sociology of the artwork conceived as a con- tingent social fact. The argument is made that these developments represent an advance on the tendency to limit sociological investigations of the arts to contex- tual or external factors.The ‘new sociology of art’ is praised for framing questions about the aesthetic properties of art and artworks in a way that is compatible with social constructionsim. KEY WORDS ‘art’ and ‘society’ / aesthetics / artwork /social constructionism / sociology of art Introduction ‘Art is not needed for the creation or for the survival of a social order. And all the classic claims about the social determination of art or the artistic representation of “reality” suffer from almost insurmountable problems of philosophical consis- tency.’ (Graña, 1994: ix) T he sociology of art is at an interesting crossroads. Neglected for the greater part of the last century, it is now a well established ‘sub-discipline’ of soci- ology. In a short period of time, the field has produced its own ‘classics’, 409 Cultural Sociology Copyright © 2007 BSA Publications Ltd® Volume 1(3): 409–425 [DOI: 10.1177/1749975507084601] SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore at James Cook University on June 2, 2015 cus.sagepub.com Downloaded from