Sociology of the Artless Mass (An analysis of the sociology of artistic reception)

It is a longstanding tradition in sociology to study the phenomenon of “consumers of culture.” Respondiing to the question of who are the “consumers of culture,” appears to be relatively uncomplicated: they are the customary arts audience in general and artists, students, faculties and critics of arts in particular. These audiences are involved in art as a result of their career, discipline and/or because of their family background and environmental circumstances. The subject of this paper, however, is not the sociology of artisans and the audiences for arts; rather it is the sociology of the artless mass and the non-audiences: those who are unfamiliar with the world of fine arts (painting, progressive theater and sculpture). Some sociologists call these non-audiences “culturaally ignored people”, marginalized from cultural structures, and in Pierre Bourdieu’s words “culturally eliminated.” Others, by criticizing the latter standpoint which considers the culture of elites as its point of departure, defend the specific culture of mass people and argue that non-audiences of arts are indeed the non-audiences of culture of elites and fine arts but audiences of pop arts. Moving beyond these two appproaches, which have been called populism and legitimism respectively, is one of the major challenges of the sociology of art. This paper, by referring to the theoretical foundations of the Sociology of the Artless Mass and applying it to the context of Iran, investigates the three following assumptions: 1. Arts in Iran belongs to the cultural heirs. 2. The weakest chain in the threefold sequence of producing, distributing and consuming arts is the distributing one. This weakness has caused a gap between producers (artists) and consumers (people) of arts. 3. In Iran, we deal not with the public of arts but rather with the non-public.