UMN Sociology Workshop Series

Bio:

Fabio Rojas is the Virginia L. Roberts Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research focuses on social change, institutional theory, and orgnaizational behavior.  His books include From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline, Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11, Theory for the Working Sociologist, and Two Visions of the Art World. He was the co-editor of Contexts: Sociology for the Public, the official magazine of the American Sociological Association. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and the Academy of Management Journal. He has written for The Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill, and other popular outlets.

Abstract:

Two Visions of the Art World (co-authored with David de la Torre) presents a new sociology of the visual arts. Older theories, such as those proposed by Bourdieu and Becker, focused on how artists and their allies navigate a highly competitive art field. Two Visions presents the dual layer theory of the arts, which argues that artists create a world that has two distinct but co-mingled layers: one that focuses on competition and another focusing on community. The argument is illustrated with 125 in-depth interviews with artists, dealers, collectors, curators, and professors. Aside from being a new approach to understanding the social organization of the arts, we view dual-layer theory as a challenge to Bourdieusian theories of social fields that strongly emphasize the hierarchical and competitive aspects of social life.