One of the recurring dilemmas in the sociology of art has been how to balance “internalist” and “externalist” accounts of aesthetic phenomena (i.e., aesthetic and social explanations); or, what this paper terms the necessity of moving from an either-or model of art and society to adopting a both-and logic. In the last few years, the conceptual dilemmas have been further heightened by developments such as capitalism becoming more explicitly cultural; and knowledges about art and aesthetics moving from the realm of the ‘grand’ and the high cultural to the more prosaic and the everyday. This paper proposes that a solution to the ongoing dilemmas of the sociology of art, and the current challenge of the proliferation of arts/aesthetics-knowledge bases, is to adopt a textural rather than textual mode of thinking. The textural paradigm was first developed in thinking about place and is well-suited to thinking through problems in the sociology of architecture and urbanism – including the problem of how the urban fabric, at times, starts to unravel; or why some unlikely architectural styles stage comebacks (e.g., post-war Brutalism).
Textures; Sociology of art; Ingold; Lefebvre; Architecture and Urbanism