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On the Margins of Art Worlds. by Larry GrossReview by: Howard S. BeckerContemporary Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Jan., 1996), pp. 114-115Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2077006 .

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114 Culture

and communion.

Likewise,

particularly

n the

early

nineteenth century,

rival sects of

compagnons

devised myths

of origin

to

emphasize

the value of

their labor and

the

importance

of worker unity.

The various

joiners,

locksmiths,

nd stonecutters

within

the Enfants u

Solomon

sect, forexample,

wove

an

elaborate

tale

dating

theirclandes-

tine organization

back to

the building

of

Solomon's temple.

In

interpreting

these

cultural

practices,

Truant emphasizes

not only the power

of

ritual

to

create community,dignity,

and

resistance,

but also

the

resilience

and

cultural

flexibility

f

the brotherhoods.Always

llegal,

and often under attackbymasterartisansor

suspicious

local authorities,

he

compagnon-

nages

nonetheless

flourished,

ven resurfac-

ing after

being repressed

during

the Revolu-

tion.

Their

position

n the nineteenth

entury

became

more

complex:

They regained

strength

n certain towns and trades, but

in

response

to the changing

labor

conditions,

the

compagnonnages

became

more

rigid,

gradually

losing

members

to

rival trade

organizations.

he decline of

the

compagnon-

nages was due in part to socioeconomic

changes

in the nineteenth

century,

notably

the abolition

of

the

corps

des

metiers

n the

Revolution,

the deskillingof artisanal

trades

and

the

widespread practice

of subcontract-

ing (p. 331).

Remaining

true to

her

stress

on

cultural

factors,

Truant

suggests that,

above all,

the brotherhoods uffered ecause

they

failed to

adapt

entirely

to

the new

postrevolutionary

olitical

culture.

They

had

evolved

in

a world based

on

corporate

distinction ndprivilege nd found t difficult

to surrender

their traditional

ttachmentto

hierarchy, xclusion,

and rivalry etween

the

trades.Although

ome compagnonssought

to

embrace new

egalitarian

deas

or

to reform

the

associations

from

within,

most others

chose

to

cling

even more

tightly

o

precisely

defined rituals

and

practices

of

exclusion.

The

Revolution

of

1848

put

these

character-

istics into stark

relief:

While

many

compag-

nons supported the revolution and hoped

compagnonnage

could

act

as

a

force

of

reform,

ultimately the brotherhoods

could

not transcend

their

age-old

emphasis

on

control

of

hiring

and did not

embrace a

wider

program

of worker

unity

nd

equality.

Paradoxically,

the 1848 revolution marked

the decisive downturn

for

compagnnonage.

Readers will find this book

strong on

cultural nalysis nd weak on integrating

hat

analysis

into a broader reinterpretation

f

labor history r

labor organization.Truant s

so

wary

of

sacrificing

her

compagnons

to

traditional istoriographicaluestionsregard-

ing worker politicization,

abor unrest, and

the economic structure of

work and

trade

that she often focuses too

narrowly on

cultural

questions,

making

the rituals and

myths of the

compagnons seem strangely

isolated from

work days, economic struggles,

and

even

political

upheaval. Historians

and

sociologists

of abor will nonetheless

want to

read this book, for Truant offers

a rich

portrait of the underexamined world of

worker

brotherhoods,

and restores

legiti-

macy and dignity o the compagnonnages

of

old and

new

regime

France.

On

the

Margins of

Art

Worlds,

edited

by

Larry Gross. Boulder, CO:

Westview Press,

1995. 285 pp. $54.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8133-

1679-0.

HOWARD

S.

BECKER

University of Washington

For some years,

the Annenberg School of

Communication

at theUniversity fPennsyl-

vania has

been

a

major

center forresearch on

the

sociology

of art

and

culture.

A

distin-

guished faculty, ncluding Erving

Goffman,

Sol Worth, Ray

Birdwhistell, Steve Feld,

Charles

Wright,

George Gerbner,

and

Larry

Gross, backstopped by luminaries

in

other

departmentsand neighboring schools (e.g.,

musicologistLeonard

Meyer, iterary heorist

Barbara Herrnstein

mith, ociologist Charles

Bosk, and anthropologistJay Ruby), have

overseen

the

work of several

generations

of

productive

students.

Larry Gross,

a social

psychologist expert

on

such

matters as

children and television and

the

workings

of

artistic

competence,

has

probably

been

the

longest lasting and

most pervasive

influence

on the work done at the AnnenbergSchool.

This book, collecting

some

recent

work by

people associated

with

the

school,

shows

what's characteristic

f the

approach.

The

13 papers

are devoted

entirely o

the

visual

arts

including

film, hotography,

nd

animation).

That's

important because,

as

Antoine Hennion argues

in

La Passion

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Culture 115

Musicale (Paris:

Metaili6, 1993), only the

visual arts

produce

a

lasting product

whose

meaning can be argued over; it's less

obvious

than

in

the

performing

rts that there is no

stable

art

object

whose

meaning

can

be

debated. So talk about objects and their

worth,

arried

on

as though the objects were

just there, is endemic

in

the visual

arts.

Dealing with visual

objects

and

their

makers,

the

papers, not

surprisingly, ocus on the

forms of discourse that serve

to legitimate

particularmedia,

genres,

and

works

as

art,

and the

consequences that flow from that

legitimation or the failure

to

achieve it.

Following a time-honored ociological

strat-

egy,

the

papers search out

marginal

cases-

areas

whose artness is

in

doubt,

like

animation, r stillbeing debated,

ike

photog-

raphy-and

situations-the problems of

stu-

dents

or other

newcomers,

such

as

immi-

grants-in which

problems routinelydealt

with

in

more established areas are

still

ively

topics

of discussion. The

papers

deal

largely

with the marketfor art

objects

and the

labor

market

for

art

workers,

and

relatively

ess

with the actual

patterns

of

cooperative

activity by means of which art work gets

done and the kinds of works that

are

done.

The

book contains

an

excellent

body of

work, making

a

real

contribution to

the

understanding

of art

and culture

as social

facts.

In

the most

impressive paper

in

an

impressive

collection,

Michael

Griffin hows

how historians nd aestheticians

of

photogra-

phy

have

systematically ignored amateur

pictorial

photography,

networkof

coopera-

tivepractice situated between the highart

found

in

contemporary

museums and

the

everyday

napshooting

of

the

general public.

This enormous

world,

nurtured

by manufac-

turersof

photographic equipment

and

mate-

rials and supported

by

a

vast

organizational

apparatus

of

clubs, exhibits,

and

magazines,

provides

the

marketwithout whose volume

that

equipment

and

material would

not

be

available

at

a

cost the

world of art

photogra-

phy

could afford. t

provides,

as

well,

the

aesthetic that supports practically all of

professional ommercial

photography

s

that

is

practiced

in

advertising,ournalism,

ravel,

and

the

many

other

areas

in

which

photo-

graphs

are a

major

communicative form nd

marketable

product.

This

world

has

been

almost

entirely ignored by

historians

and

scholars,

the work

of Pierre

Bourdieu and his

collaborators

(Photography:

A

Middle-Brow

Art (Stanford:

Stanford University

Press,

1990,

original

publication

in

French,

1965)

being

a

distinct

xception.

Several papers deal with the interesting

problem of

establishingmarkets

and prices

for

visual art

works.

Kristyna

Warchol shows

how

students,

newcomers to the art

market,

are

at a loss to

know whattheycan

charge

for

a

painting

and

what the

meaning of

a

painting'sprice is. William

Mikulakdescribes

the

confusion of the

marketbuilt on trade

in

the leftovers

from

the

making

of

animated

cartoons,

the

difficulty

ealers and

collectors

have

in

agreeingon the criteriaof value for

drawings,models,

and

most of

all

cels,

the

handpainted

frames from

which the films

were

made. Robert

S. Drew

recounts the rise

and fall

of

a

market

n

graffitirt, s

major

art

dealers

failed to solve the riddle

of how to

domesticate a

form whose chief

attraction

was

that t was

illegal

and

untamed.

Lisa Henderson's

study of a film

school

explores

how

student

directors learn the

individualistic lesson

that the

invariably

collective undertaking f makinga movie is

really

the

outgrowth of

their artistic

intentions.

A

second

paper

by Warchol

similarly

looks at the

way

Polish

emigre

artists learn

the

to

them

quite unfamiliar

motivations

f a Western

art

system.

The

collection

provides a wonderful

body

of

empirical

materials

that

sociologists of

culture can

look into for

evidence and

ideas,

models and

comparisons.

Gross

and

his

associates at the

Anneberg

School can

be

proud of theiraccomplishments.

My Music Is

My Flag: Puerto Rican

Musi-

cians

and Their New

York

Communities,

1917-1940, by Ruth

Glasser.

Berkeley:Uni-

versity of California

Press,

1995. 277 pp.

$30.00

cloth. ISBN:

0-520-08122-6.

Jost

ANTONIO

PADIN

Portland

State University

This

book penetrates

the realm

ofethnic

and

immigrant

ulture,

deliberately

sidestepping

the culture

deficit/culture

eaffirmationrob-

lematic that often

cramps the

conceptual

space of race and

ethnic studies.

Though at

one

level this is a

social

history

hat rescues

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