Sociohistorical Interpretations of Art

Most sociohistorical interpretations of art view a body of work as the production of a class, generally a dominant or governing class, imposing its ideals. For example, Richard Taruskin writes in his Oxford History of Western Music that one of the defining characteristics of “high art” is that “it is produced by ways that art, historically, was “produced by and for political and social elites.”

The first way was for a member of the elite to engage a well-known artist to produce something for display. For instance, if one commissions a famous architect to design one’s house, that may reflect great credit on one’s taste, even if one finds the house impossible to live in. The second life, like Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican apartments commissioned by Pope Julius II.

Sociohistorical critics like Taruskin prefer to deal with art produced the second way, because it enables them to construct a subtle analysis of the way such art embodied the ideology of the elite, whatever the identity of the artist. For this kind of analysis to work, however, it must be the case can eliminate the possibility that artists subverted the ideals of the patron for their own reasons.

Historically, the two social classes able to commission art were the aristocratic, or governing class, and the well-to-do middle class, what used to be called the bourgeoisie. The taste of the aristocracy and the upper middle class has not always been apt to produce an art that endures. In his characterization of place in the margins of the establishment—engaged by a rich patron with eccentric tastes, for example.

Moreover, a great deal of art that went against the grain of elite values was paid for by the establishment unwillingly and with misgivings. Because some of this art endured, the sociohistorical critic, like Taruskin, must engage in an analogue of Freudian analysis, and claim that in hidden ways such art embodied those ideals are revealed by work of which they overtly disapproved.