Institutional Entrepreneurship, Artistic Valorization, and the Generation of Cultural Taste

• In Event: 377 - Regular Session. Sociology of Culture 3: Art, Taste, and Socio-Economics

Abstract

Foundational work in the sociology of culture was concerned with linking the institutional dynamics of cultural production with the creation of consuming publics for cultural goods. More recent research, however, has treated production and consumption dynamics in relative isolation from one another. In this paper, we take the case of the WPA and the consequent redefinition of American folk art as a site for investigating the link between institutional work and the creation of culture consuming publics. We use hierarchical age-period-cohort models (HAPC) on repeated cross-sections of the Survey for Public Participation in the arts covering 30 years (SPPA 1982-2012) to show the existence of a distinct “generation” of art consuming publics attuned to the category of “art festivals” and “craft fairs” peaking among those who came of age during the immediate post-progressive era period (1930 -1955). We shed light on the macro-level mechanisms that underlie this pattern via an historical analysis documenting how cultural capitalists in New Deal arts agencies engaged in institutional entrepreneurship around the artistic valorization of “folk art.” In revealing the process by which folk became art, we are able to illuminate some of the organizational and institutional transformations that contributed to the rise of (one generation of) the contemporary American art consumer.

Authors

• Jennifer C. Lena, Columbia University

• Omar A. Lizardo, University of Notre Dame