Tourist art may be a billion dollar business. Nevertheless, such art is
despised. What is worse, the "bad" culture is seen as driving out the
"good. " Commer- cialization is assumed to destroy traditional arts and
crafts, replacing them with junk. The process is seen as demeaning to
artists in the traditional societies, who are seduced into a type of
whoredom: unfeeling production of false beauty for money. The arts
remain problematic for the social sciences. Sociology textbooks treat
the arts as subordinate reflections of social forces, norms, or groups.
An- thropology textbooks conventionally isolate the arts in a separate
chapter, failing to integrate them with analyses of kinship, economics,
politics, language, or biology. Textbooks reflect the guiding theories,
which emphasize such factors as modes of production, patterns of
thought, or biological and normative con- straints, but their authors
have not adequately formulated the aesthetic dimen- sion. One may
compare the theoretical status of the arts to that of religion. After
the contributions by Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, the sociology of
religion is well established, but where is a Durkheim or Weber for the
sociology of art? What is true of the social sciences in general holds
for understanding of modernization in the Third World. These processes
and those places are analyzed economically, politically, and socially,
but the aesthetic dimension is treated in isolation, if at all, and is
poorly grasped in relation to the other forces.