art/literature

Jessica F. pointed out an interesting graphic at Fleshmap. They looked at which body parts are emphasized or referenced in different genres of music.

From the website:

Fleshmap is an inquiry into human desire, its collective shape and individual expressions. In a series of studies, we explore the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation.

You can also click on the genre headings and go to a larger breakdown of what percent of songs reference each body part.

I find this fascinating, in that it gives us some indication of which body parts might be considered particularly important for defining attractiveness to artists and listeners of various genres…and also which body parts are most likely to be criticized or ridiculed. After all, a reference to a body part may be mocking as well as complimentary.

Of course, there are always issues with dividing artistic works into genres (Who defines the genres? How do you decide which genre songs go into if they have things in common with things in more than one genre?). And while the website provides a methodology, it could definitely be clearer:

Based on a compilation of more than 10,000 songs, the piece visualizes the use of words representing body parts in popular culture. Each musical genre exhibits its own characteristic set of words, with more frequently used terms showing up as bigger images. The entrance image shows how many times different body parts are mentioned; the charts for each genre go into more detail, showing the usage of different synonyms for each part.

They don’t specify how many songs were in each genre, how they were assigned to genres, or what the compilation of 10,000 songs is. I wish we had that info. Still, it does tell us, generally, about some interesting patterns that show how different groups construct–and appreciate–the body differently.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Why did Bloomsbury Press choose this cover for a YA novel about a short-haired black girl? Maybe because, according to publishers, “black covers don’t sell.”

Justine Larbalestier, author of Liar, says she wanted an American cover similar to the Australian cover, which depicted the word “liar” in red letters. But Bloomsbury “has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted.” So why a white girl? Larbalestier says not all the girls Bloomsbury proposed were white, but the one they went with may have to do with some upsetting prejudices in the publishing and bookselling industries. She writes:

Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA-they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section-and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all.

So basically bookstores are acting like restaurants in the Jim Crow South, segregating “black covers” in a special section, or refusing to allow them at all. This may be causing presses like Bloomsbury to whitewash their covers, resulting in confusion and anger, at least among Larbalestier’s readers. One blogger asks,

Did the publishers not want to put a black girl on the cover for fear of not selling enough books to their white customers? Or is the cover supposed to be what Micah [the main character] really looks like, and her description in the book is just another of her lies?

Larbalestier says she never intended for Micah’s race to be in doubt. Nor, obviously, did she want parents not to buy the book because “my teens would find the cover offensive.” But the whitewashing of covers has implications beyond Larbalestier’s readership. She asks, “How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white?” And she points out that the idea that “black covers don’t sell” is a self-fulfilling prophecy:

I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them. Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with “white covers.”

Larbalestier says that publishers have historically underestimated the size of the African-American leadership, and that the music industry has no problem selling album with black artists on the cover. The supposed inviability of the “black cover” may have more to do with racist assumptions — that white people won’t be interested in a book with a black protagonist, or that black people won’t buy books — than they do with actual commercial realities. According to Larbalestier, these commercial realities haven’t even really been tested yet. But they could be — if Bloomsbury does what Larbalestier now wants, and puts a short-haired black girl on the cover of Liar.

Ain’t That A Shame [Justine Larbalestier]
YA Critics Feel Cheated By Liar Cover Girl [GalleyCat]
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire [The LibrariYAn]

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Anna North recently received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and is working on a novel.  She writes about books for Jezebel, among other topics.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Many of us live in consumption economies unlike any in human history.   Consuming is a daily chore.  Acquiring is easier than ever.

What do you have?  How much of it do you need?  Do you have things that you don’t want?  How do you manage the stuff that enters your home?  Does it go?  Or does it stay?  Do you dispose of the disposable and semi-disposable goods?  Or do you try to recycle them, even if only within the boundaries of your home?  How do the shelves and drawers, the nooks and crannies of your living space, obscure our answers to these questions?  What would it look like if we had to look at it all, all at once?

Chinese artist Song Dong convinced his mother to allow him to display every item of her home as an art exhibit (article here).  She had lived in the same house for nearly 60 years.  He arranged her belongings, in a museum, around a dismantled piece of the house.  The result raises questions about consumption, economy, and the things in our lives.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Nanette D. informed us about the site Books that Make You Dumb, which uses a questionable methodology to correlate SAT scores at various colleges and universities with the books Facebook users from those schools list as their favorites, taking the 10 most popular from each school (there’s an explanation of the methodology at the website; the width of the bubble the names are in indicate the standard deviation in SAT scores). By seeing which books are listed by people at schools with higher overall SATs, we supposedly find out which books make people smarter or dumber:

So Their Eyes Were Watching God, by the fabulous Zora Neale Hurston, makes you dumber than Gone with the Wind or A Million Little Pieces? Really?

Nanette says,

I think it reinforces a lot of ugly stereotypes about what type of person reads what type of literature, and the inherent “quality” of particular genres.

It’s a good point. There’s something interesting about designating certain types of books as “genre fiction,” which seems to be kind of a negative label, in general. Isn’t all literature technically part of a genre?

It’s all very Bourdieuian, really. To a great extent, what we read is a reflection of our class and our class is the number one predictor of our SAT score. So what is being measured (if anything) the way that class determines both our “taste” in literature and (or by way of) our educational achievements.

Aside from those issues, you could definitely have some fun talking about meaningless statistics and methodological issues with this graph. Just because you can find some statistics to correlate doesn’t mean they’re actually useful.

[Note: For the record, yes, I get it that the author was being kind of silly, and that he didn’t make up the genre classifications. The reason I find it interesting is that I think it reflects to some degree what a lot of people think–that certain types of books are inherently indicators of bad taste. I have friends who read fantasy and science fiction and get annoyed that it’s considered “genre fiction,” which they feel carries a negative connotation. Black authors have similarly complained about their books automatically going into the “African American literature” section at some bookstores rather than the mainstream “regular” fiction section. So mostly the image was a jumping off point for me thinking about how we often judge people by the types of books they read. And believe me, I’m not immune to this. When a relative gave me a set of three romance novels for Christmas a couple of years ago because I “like books,” I was perplexed. Though part of my confusion came from the fact that they were romance novels set among the Amish, and the concept of Amish romance novels had never in my life occurred to me. And then it turned out the relative didn’t know what they were; she had looked at the cover, saw a woman in the bonnet, and thought they were Little House on the Prairie books, which then left me with the question of why you would buy the Little House books for a 33 year old. But, you know, the thought that counts, etc. etc.]

In the opening essay to the book Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century, Rennard Strickland and Margaret Archuleta write,

J.J. Brody in his classic study, Indian Painters & White Patrons, identified the colonial nature of a patronage system that narrowly defined and dictated what was “Indian art”…It seems almost as if definitionally…that paintings by Indians can be considered only in a primitive, aboriginal context. (p. 9)

They discuss Oscar Howe:

…[he was] thwarted in developing new directions in painting and striving to break away from the old stereotypes limiting Indian art…one of Howe’s Cubist style paintings was rejected from the 1959 Indian Artists Annual because it was “non-Indian” and embodied a “non-traditional Indian style.” (p. 9)

Strickland and Archuleta quote a letter from Howe to a friend:

“There is much more to Indian Art, than pretty, stylized pictures…Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting…?” (p. 10)

What Strickland, Archuleta, and Howe (as well as other contributors to Shared Visions) are discussing is the pressure American Indian artists have often faced to create a certain type of art. This pressure may come from other Indians or from non-Indians. Non-Indians have often had significant power over Indian artists because of their role as benefactors (providing money for artists to attend The Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School, for instance) and because non-Indians are the majority of buyers of art created by American Indian artists. And benefactors and art collectors often have a certain idea of what “Indian art” is, which includes assumptions about both themes and styles. Specifically, they want “traditional” images that depict Native Americans in a pre-modern world, often including images of animals.

I couldn’t help but think of that book when I recently picked up a tourist-oriented guide to Taos, New Mexico. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying there is anything necessarily wrong with any of the particular art pieces (or with “traditional” type Indian art more broadly). I’m also not claiming these particular artists feel their artistic expression is limited by preconceived notions of what counts as “Indian art.”

What struck me was just the homogeneity of the images found in the guide, which seemed to more or less fit the mold of the stereotypical idea of “Indian art.” It brings up the question: what is Indian art? Is it any art made by an American Indian? Or does it only count if it fits in with non-Indians’ preferences for what Indian art should look like? What if a White person, say, masters the “traditional” style–is it Indian art then? Over the years a number of American Indian artists have created art to intentionally challenge the idea of the romanticized 19th-century Indian as well as what Indian art can be. For instance, Fritz Scholder painted “Indian Wrapped in Flag” in 1976, in an attempt to deconstruct images of Native Americans (p. 16 of Shared Visions).

Both Indians and non-Indians picketed some of Scholder’s shows in protest.

Similarly, T.C. Cannon painted “Osage with Van Gogh” (I’ve also seen it titled “Collector #5“; from around 1980), which reverses our idea of who collects or appreciates which type of art by showing a Native American collecting a European artist’s work. Another great piece is “When Coyote Leaves the Reservation (a portrait of the artist as a young Coyote)” by Harry Fonseca (1980). See images here.

So are those pieces Indian art? Does it count as “Indian art” only if it contains specific styles and themes?  In which case, does it remain a sub-genre of art–part of “ethnic” art, as opposed to the neutral, non-marked mainstream art world?  Are Indians who paint or sculpt or play music in ways that don’t fit the existing idea of Indian art not “authentic” Indian artists?  If we accept that premise, “Indian art” is, as Howe said, “held back forever,” with themes and styles frozen in time and artists discouraged from experimenting or innovating in their work, as Howe learned so clearly. This tendency is apparent in other elements of U.S. culture, of course: movies like “Dances with Wolves,” books about “noble savages,” and conflicts over what types of technologies American Indians can use when spear fishing (with non-Indians arguing Indians should only be able to use the methods that their tribes used in the 1800s) all indicate a wider perception that “authentic” Indians should inhabit a time-warp universe in which their cultures and lifestyles have remained basically unchanged since the late 1800s or early 1900s, a requirement we don’t ask of other groups.

For more evidence that Indians are represented, and expected to represent themselves, anachronistically, see this post.

UPDATE: Commenter Camilla points out a documentary that asks similar questions about “African” art:

Christopher B. Steiner produced a fantastic anthropological documentary about the market for “African” art that addressed many of these same issues. It’s called “In and Out of Africa”…It explores the issue of how ideas such as “authenticity” and “tradition” are socially constructed phenomena. It also questions why particular types of “ethnic” art are successful in Western markets, while others are not.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

In the Girl and Boy Scouts, merit badges represent the acquisition of skills and knowledge.  Artist Mary Yaeger tries to draw attention to the skills and knowledge that girls and women in America aquire, whether they be scouts or not, with her own set of embroidered merit badges. They feature things like tolerating menstrual cramps, shaving armpits, taking the birth control pill, suffering through gyn exams, using mascara and lipstick, learning how to walk in high heels, wearing sexy underwear, and more.

The project nicely reminds us that women have to work hard to appear properly feminine, as well as the unique things we experience as women.

Via Jezebel.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Ten Apples and a Flat Sponge reports that the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen is selling reproductions of Venus with Apple and the Birth of Venus, with some artistic interpretation:

Hat tip to Shapely Prose.

Shelby Lee Adams is a photographer most famous for his pictures of Appalachia. Here is the cover one of his books:

This post is based on a documentary about Adams work called The True Meaning of Pictures.

Adams has come under severe criticism.  Critics argue that his photography exploits the poverty and disempowerment in Appalachia and reproduces negative stereotypes. The idea the Appalachian people are imbred, dumb, and barbaric was made famous in the movie Deliverance. Here is the (at once charming and chilling) dueling banjo scene:

Critics argue, also, that Adams features the worst conditions of life in Appalachia.  Bill Gorman, the Mayor of Hazard, Kentucky, says:

“I don’t think this is average… I think it’s the kind of thing that sells.”

For example, one picture is argued to be staged. Adams admits to buying the pig and arranging the butchering (the family was too poor to have pigs).

In the documentary, we also see Adams instructing his subjects in how they should stand and what facial expression to make.

A.D. Coleman, an art critic, thinks that images are purposefully made to seem “ominous” and “spooky.”  And, while Adams gets permission from the people in his pictures to use their images, Coleman suggests that they are not necessarily capable of understanding exactly what they are consenting to.  He explains:

“They [the pictures] call for a very sophisticated kind of reading.  And I’m not sure that these people have the education, the visual educational background, to understand how these pictures read.”

Others suggest that that doesn’t give the Appalacians enough credit.

Adams argues that he’s taking pictures of his own culture. In fact, Shelby did grow up in Appalachia, though he was middle class compared to those he photographs.  He also abdicates responsibility for any objective representation.  He says:

“I’m trying to express myself with that culture. So it’s not an objective document. It’s not an object. It’s me. It’s life. And it’s my subjects lives. Who are my friends.”

You can see more of his photographs here and here.

The controversy over Adams’ work brings up some interesting questions regarding art and representation:

1.  What is art for?  Is it for representing things as they are?  Is it for the expression of the artist?  Is it for the furtherance of social justice?

2.  Who decides the meaning of a picture?  Does Adams’ intention count?  Or does the only thing that counts what the viewer sees?  Which viewer?  How many viewers must we predict will judge Appalachia badly upon viewing the pictures before we decide that they undermine social justice efforts (if, in fact, we decide social justice is relevant to art)?

3.  If, in fact, the pictures do represent the poorest Appalachians, does that mean they should not be photographed?  Is that criticism, in itself, a good one?  Who gets to decide who really represents Appalachia?

4.  So what if Adams is making money off of the pictures?  Does this make him a bad person?  Does it make the pictures exploitative?  When things are done for money, does that mean that they are automatically not about love and care?  Many of us, I imagine, sure hope that’s not true for preachers and teachers.  So how do we decide whether the fact that Adams benefits is a problem?

Thoughts?  Other questions we could ask?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.