This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach to meaning (...) is compared with others — with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism. (shrink)

The sociology of art has experienced a significant revival during the last three decades. However, in the first instance, this renewed interest was dominated by the ‘production of culture’ perspective and was heavily focused on contextual factors such as the social organization of artistic markets and careers, and displays of ‘cultural capital’ through consumption of the arts. In this article, I outline a new mode of approaching art sociologically that begins with Alfred Gell’s (1998) Art and Agency, but comes to (...) full fruition in what I am calling the ‘new sociology of art’. A major theoretical statement that captures many of the aspirations of the new approach is Jeffrey Alexander’s essay: ‘Iconic Consciousness: The Material Feeling of Meaning’. It is suggested that the new sociology of art has much in common with material culture studies, and that a more robust concept of the artwork’s agency is needed now that art has well and truly taken on a social and cultural life well beyond those institutions traditionally understood as the ‘art world’. (shrink)

(2013). The Beauty of Sport. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy: Vol. 7, Sport and Art: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Sport, pp. 100-120. doi: 10.1080/17511321.2013.761886.

One of the many brilliant insights of C. Thi Nguyen’s brilliant book, Games: Agency as Art, is the connection he draws between the distinctive agency of game play and one important feature of a lif...

While all human agency unfolds with a certain degree of improvisation, there are specific cultural practices in which improvisation plays an even more relevant role. Argentine tango is one of them. If tango is the chosen field of reference, I do not attempt to sing the praises of the form, but rather to establish a set of categories which enable to analytically frame improvisation. My contribution, as Wittgentstein would say, has a “grammatical” design to it, proposing signposts and concepts to (...) clarify the significance of the term “improvisation”. (shrink)

The structure of the next three chapters owes much to Kant's four great definitions of ‘beauty’ found with his Critique of Judgement, in the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ (1952, §§1–22). The first pa...

In this article, I first address the ethical considerations about football and show that a meritocratic-fairness view of sports fails to capture the phenomenon of football. Fairness of result is not at centre stage in football. Football is about the drama, about the tension and the emotions it provokes. This moves us to the realm of aesthetics. I reject the idea of the aesthetics of football as the disinterested aesthetic appreciation, which traditionally has been deemed central to aesthetics. Instead, I (...) argue that we should try and develop an agon aesthetics where our aesthetic appreciation is understood as involving and being embedded in our engagement in the game. The drama of football is staged but not scripted. The aesthetics of competitions like football matches—the agon aesthetics—lies in engaging in the conflict that a competition is, while being aware that the conflict is not over ordinary world or everyday life issues, but unnecessary and invented for the very purpose of having a conflict to enjoy. (shrink)

(2013). A Hermeneutics of Sport. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy: Vol. 7, Sport and Art: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Sport, pp. 140-167. doi: 10.1080/17511321.2012.761893.

In Ancient Greece, the figure of the hero was identified as a demigod, possessed of altruistic and virtuous deeds. When Pierre de Coubertin reinstated the Olympic Games, the athlete was personified as a modern hero. Its antithesis, the anti-hero, has more virtue that defects, no evil but he does not care on the means to achieve his goals. In the eyes of everyone involved in sports competition, these characters captivate and at the same time, create conflicts of ethics and aesthetics. (...) The purpose of this paper is to perform an ethical reflection linked to principles that contribute for the human growth and accomplishment, as well as the aesthetic on the perception of the sensitive, reverberated by sensations and feelings emerging from athletes. Connecting the ethic with the aesthetic spheres, we could have in the sports a phenomenon walking toward a common point between moral and aesthetic, between the good and the beauty. (shrink)