Negotiated Creativity: Balancing Artistic Creativity with Institutional Constraints in Aesthetic Socialization

• In Event: 3184 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 12. Music, Art, and Performance

Abstract

This article analyzes how artists in the making balance artistic creativity with institutional constraints, in the course of action, in aesthetic socialization. While cultural sociologists have observed the duality of creativity and constraint in artistic practices and cultural production, I further conceptualize the dynamics between the two forces as a dual temporal process that unfolds over time. To this end, I develop a conceptual approach that I call “negotiated creativity,” addressing the ongoing micro-processes by which artists in the making balance creative inclinations with rigid standards in institutional settings. Drawing on ethnographic data based on fieldwork at two art test prep schools in China as well as 30 in-depth interviews with art students and teachers, this article argues that art students’ artistic creativity is negotiated in two temporal dimensions: a processual dimension (a two-step process of standardization and deviation from the standards) and a historical dimension (a reflexivity of why they learn art in the way that they are learning it at the moment). This dual temporal process occurs and is embodied in three forms of ongoing negotiation inherent in academic art: between current demands (college entrance) and long-term goals (professional development), between art and craft, and between learning and unlearning. As academic art and commercial art have become increasingly standardized and institutionalized, negotiated creativity can serve as an approach to analyze creativity in action in various forms of rule-governed aesthetic socialization.

Author

• Jun Fang, Northwestern University