Contenu du sommaire : Sociologie de l'art et de la littérature

Raymonde Moulin : Art market and museums : how are made contemporary artistic values. The international market of contemporary art where transactions are carried out, and the cultural field where aesthetic appraisals take place both contribute to the fixing of the "value" of works and of artists. Aesthetic Welfare policy and the increasing support of public agencies introduce a new complexity in the relationship between the market and museums. The major phenomenon of the last twenty-five years is no doubt that cultural institutions, caught by the fever of immediateness have influenced the market while being at the same time influenced by it. Short-term strategies and continuous renewal have replaced long-term strategies and delayed success.

Patrick Parmentier : Literary genres and their audiences. A definite corpus of book's titles, representing the tastes of a sample of readers interviewed in public libraries, was categorized according to a code which cross references both the usual typology of the genres and the hierarchy of the three levels of social legitimacy of the works commonly used by cultural sociology. To appreciate the level of legitimacy, without interference any judgment concerning the quality of the works themselves, we used all the observable social indicators other than the consumer's characteristics. In the relationship between the level of the works and that of their public seems substantiated, it must be noticed that the appeal of the literary genre keeps its meaning within these broad correspondences. Finally, the discrepancies between the social hierarchy of the works and that of their publics show certain particular groups of readers who maintain special relationships with the current legitimacy, e.g. backwardness, deliberate ignorance, opposition, innovation.

Eliot Freidson: The conceptual challenge of the artistic vocations. The author investigates the reorganization which the theory of professions (in the anglo-american sense) must undergo in the light of analysis of the professional status of the artists. In general, he differentiates vocations or vocational statuses from professions. Among these, and adopting the opposition suggested by Hannah Arendt between activity as work and labor, he proposes distinguishing desinterested activity, based on a personal committment, and activity which is practised for the market, the one "nourishing" the other as do host plants with parasites. Academic professions and even more so artistic professions show examples of this duality.

Pierre-Michel Menger : The speculative ear : consuming and perceiving contemporary music. Learned musical creation has been progressively strengthened in its movement towards autonomy by the development of an entirely subsidized market of innovation. Based on a survey of the public of the main French contemporary music institution, the analysis shows how the repercussions of this evolution affect the volume, structure and behavior of demand. If the narrowness of the demand is the result of particularly rigorous selection mechanisms, the study of the consumer careers isolates factors of overselection which explain movements of adherence or of disaffection. Examination of the logical dead-ends of esthetic communication and the gaps between supposed cultural competence and estimated esthetic competence finally forces us to distinguish between consuming music and perceiving it, and to research to what extent the former can co-exist with the perplexity to which the evolution of production condemns the latter.

Daniel Milo : The cultural Phoenix : on resurrection in the history of art. The example of French painters from 1650 to 1750. "No one is a prophet in his own land" nor in his time. The geniuses of art would thus owe their reputations to foreigners ? and to posterity. What are the factual ? i.e. statistics ? underpinnings of this widely spread romantic idea ? We have investigated the posthumous careers of a number of French painters (1650-1750) present today on the memory market and referred their actual reputation to reception by their contemporaries. The results of this enquiry, along with two complementary surveys on musicians and writers of the eighteenth century are clear. All the artists recognized in 1986 were already well-known during their lifetimes, even the Le Nain brothers and Georges de la Tour, rejected from cultural memory after their deaths and rediscovered in the nineteenth century. The origin of the myth of the unknown genius remains to be investigated, as well as the reasons for its wide-spread acceptance.

Jean-Claude Chamboredon : Symbolic production and social forms. From the sociology of art and literature to the sociology of culture. In this paper, certain problems and main research trends are presented, based on various works of sociology or social history of art and of literature. The sociology of symbolic productions, defined as a social iconology, according to one of E. Panofsky's distinctions, allows linking the study of the works to that of their functions in the socialization processes.