BETWEEN SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: ART AND SOCIETY’S TRANSFORMATION - Introduction

Art has been the focus of the social sciences on multiple occasions. It has mostly been studied as a “social fact”, a functionally differentiated sphere of social action, a field of production and of organization of knowledge practices, of power, and of the market. In other words, sociology has looked at art as an object or a product of the social world. Less frequently sociologists have questioned what role art plays in the transformation of society, and what forms of understanding and conceptualisation of social reality are elaborated by artists. However various art forms influence our lives, not only shaping aesthetical models, but also generating relational structures, which fosterreflections beyond the artistic domain. The artist’s creative effort is actually aimed at fostering both emotive and rational reactions, which induce psychological, political, and social evaluations in the people who are exposed to her/his art. Moreover, all art forms are intrinsically linked to the concept of innovation, of exploration of the new and of continuous re-invention of the past. We could thus affirm that there is a circular inextricable link between various art forms and various societal transformations. Furthermore, the public dimension of art pushes the artist’s itself at the centre of hermeneutic circle among her/his creative intentions, the symbolic meanings of the opus and the added value of the interpretations by spectators.