Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art

Art historian Michael Baxandall’s writings have played a key role in defining the major paradigms in the sociology of art: the production of culture perspective, Bourdieu’s critical sociology of art, Hennion and DeNora’s ‘new sociology of art’. Although making fruitful use of Baxandall’s focus on markets, material visual practices and the concept of the period eye, these appropriations have overlooked the centrality to Baxandall’s work of the concept of art as an institution. This institutional focus permits Baxandall to integrate social, cultural and visual analysis in a way which shows not only how visual art is socially constructed, but also how it plays an active role in the construction of social orders on a variety of levels of emergence, from the interaction order to larger social structures.