The Sociology of Art Work

The sociology of artworks initially aims to analyze the artwork for exploring the evident and concealed meanings, and then relates these meanings to the structure of the society within which the artwork has been created. In such an approach, the recognition of artwork meaning may contribute to the recognition of prevailing contents in the society (in various levels, macro, middle and micro). In this approach, artwork criticism and analysis play a pivotal role. Generally, there are two major ways for criticism and evaluation of artworks; internal and external criticism. Since the internal criticism draws on technical and aesthetic principles of artwork than the surrounding and environmental factors, this article mainly focuses on the method of external criticism. As a matter of fact, this type of criticism observes the relation between the society and the arts and in other words is a sociologiccal criticism. The contribution of external criticism to the sociology of arts is in showing that artwork can be taken as a set of information which can be accessed through decoding and understanding its language. Consequently, the characteristics of the contemporary society are available through such a process. Meanwhile, content is not the mere focus of attention, but the issue of style is also significant and can artticulate many sociological effects on art. Although finding the relation between the style of artworks and social circumstances is more difficult than finding their relation between the content of works and social circumstances, but the relation cannot be denied. Employing the results of some researches, the present artticle acknowledges the existence of reflective relation of society and art and attempts to describe the actual reasons for this relationship.