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.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequences.