Sarah Thornton is a writer and sociologist of culture and has worked as a brand planner for a London advertising agency. Her early work was about
clubsA nightclub is a drinking, dancing and entertainment venue which does its primary business after dark. People who frequent nightclubs are known as clubbers...
,
raveRave or rave party is a term first used in the 1980s and 90s to describe dance parties with fast-paced electronic music and light shows. At these parties DJs and other performers play Electronic Dance Music...
s, music taste and
culturalCulture is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
hierarchiesA hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another and with only one "neighbor" above and below each level. These classifications are made with regard to rank, importance, seniority, power status or authority...
. Thornton has authored and edited several works about subcultures. She now writes principally about art and the art market. Thornton has published a book about art's subcultural spheres titled
Seven Days in the Art World.
Sarah Thornton was born in Canada and currently resides in
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
.
Sarah Thornton is a writer and sociologist of culture and has worked as a brand planner for a London advertising agency. Her early work was about
clubsA nightclub is a drinking, dancing and entertainment venue which does its primary business after dark. People who frequent nightclubs are known as clubbers...
,
raveRave or rave party is a term first used in the 1980s and 90s to describe dance parties with fast-paced electronic music and light shows. At these parties DJs and other performers play Electronic Dance Music...
s, music taste and
culturalCulture is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
hierarchiesA hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another and with only one "neighbor" above and below each level. These classifications are made with regard to rank, importance, seniority, power status or authority...
. Thornton has authored and edited several works about subcultures. She now writes principally about art and the art market. Thornton has published a book about art's subcultural spheres titled
Seven Days in the Art World.
Life and work
Sarah Thornton was born in Canada and currently resides in
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
. Her education comprises a BA in the History of Art from
Concordia UniversityConcordia University is a comprehensive public university located in Montreal, Canada, one of the city's two universities whose primary language of instruction is English...
, Montreal, and a PhD in the Sociology of Music from Strathclyde University, Glasgow. Her academic posts have included a full-time
lecturerLecturer is a term of academic rank. In the United Kingdom lecturer is the name given to those who teach in their first permanent university position. That is, lecturers are academics early in their careers, who lead research groups and supervise postgraduate students as well as lecture courses...
ship at the
University of SussexThe University of Sussex is a British campus university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. It was the first of the "plate glass" universities founded in the 1960s. It received its Royal Charter in August 1961...
, and a period as Visiting
Research FellowThe title of research fellow is used to denote a research position at a university or similar institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act as independent investigator, or under the supervision of a principal investigator...
at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Publications
Club Cultures analyses the "
hipnessHip is a slang term meaning fashionably current and in the know. Hip is the opposite of square or prude.Hip, like cool, does not refer to one specific quality. What is considered hip is continuously changing. The term hip is said to have originated in African American Vernacular English in the...
" of
BritishThe British are citizens of the United Kingdom, of the Isle of Man, one of the Channel Islands, or of one of the British overseas territories, and their descendants. In a historical context, the term refers to the ancient Britons, the indigenous inhabitants of Great Britain south of the...
raveRave or rave party is a term first used in the 1980s and 90s to describe dance parties with fast-paced electronic music and light shows. At these parties DJs and other performers play Electronic Dance Music...
culture and coins the term, "subcultural capital," an adaption of Pierre Bourdieu's influential concept as outlined in many works including
Distinction. The study responds to earlier works such as
Dick HebdigeDick Hebdige is an expatriate British media theorist and sociologist most commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and its resistance against the mainstream of society. He received his M.A. from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, United Kingdom...
's
Subculture: The Meaning of Style. In contrast to Hebidge's analysis of British
punk subcultureThe punk subculture is a subculture based around punk rock. It includes music, ideologies, fashion, visual art, dance, literature and film. The punk scene is composed of an assortment of smaller factions that distinguish themselves from one another through unique variations...
—typical of the now-defunct
Centre for Contemporary Cultural StudiesThe Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was a research centre at the University of Birmingham, England. It was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart, its first director...
at the
University of BirminghamThe University of Birmingham is a British 'Redbrick' university located in the city of Birmingham, England...
, which argued that youth subcultural aesthetics rise out of calculated stylistic
subversionThis article is about the political concept. For other uses see Subversion .Subversion refers to an attempt to overthrow structures of authority, including the state. It is an overturning or uprooting...
of dominant societal norms—Thornton instead
positPOSIT is an acronym of Process Optimization, Standardization and Innovation Technique, a standard to measure global business processes that are maintained in multiple business applications and serviced by various outsourcing companies....
s that youth subcultures are "taste cultures" with shared media consumption that compete for distinctions of different kinds. She said:
Local micro-media like flyersA flyer is a single page leaflet advertising a nightclub, event, service, or other activity. Flyers are typically used by individuals or businesses to promote their products or services...
and listings are means by which club organizers bring the crowd together. Niche media like the music press construct subcultures as much as they document them. National mass media, such as tabloids, develop youth movements as much as they distort them. Contrary to youth subcultural ideologies, "subcultures" do not germinate from a seed and grow by force of their own energy into mysterious ‘movements’ only to be belatedly digested by the media. Rather, media and other culture industries are there and effective right from the start. They are central to the process of subcultural formation.
Thornton suggests that these alternative social realities, rather than entirely re-inventing a system free from class
hierarchiesA hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another and with only one "neighbor" above and below each level. These classifications are made with regard to rank, importance, seniority, power status or authority...
united under a particular style (as Hebdige proposes), "duplicate structures of exclusion and
stratificationStratification is the building up of layers. Stratified is an adjective referring to the arranging of layers, and is also the past form of the verb stratify, to separate or become separated into layers...
found elsewhere."
Thornton co-edited the first edition of
The Subcultures Reader with Ken Gelder.
Thornton has written about the contemporary art market and
art worldThe art world is the "world" composed of all the people involved in the production, commission, preservation, promotion, criticism, and sale of art. Howard S. Becker describes it as "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of...
for many publications including
The Economist,
The Sunday Times Magazine ,
The Art Newspaper', Artforum.com
, The New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry published by Condé Nast Publications...
,
The Telegraph,
The Guardian, and
The New Statesman.
Her book
Seven Days in the Art World was published in 2008. It consists of seven day-in-the-life case studies: an auction (Christie's New York); an art-school seminar (California Institute of the Arts); an art fair (Basel); an art prize (the Turner); an art magazine (
Artforum); a studio visit (that of Japanese art star Takashi Murakami); and a Biennale (Venice). This book is published in English and the following other languages: Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese.
Reception
Her book
Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital is described by
Stuart HallStuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was an early and influential contributor to the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham...
and Tony Jefferson in
Resistance Through Rituals as "theoretically innovative" and "conceptually adventurous."
In the
New York Times, Karen Rosenberg said that
Seven Days in the Art World "was reported and written in a heated market, but it is poised to endure as a work of sociology… Where others would be content to gawk and gossip, [Thornton] pushes her well-chosen subjects to explore the questions ‘What is an artist?’ and ‘What makes a work of art great?’”
In the UK, Ben Lewis wrote in the
The Sunday Times that
Seven Days was "a Robert Altmanesque panorama of… the most important cultural phenomenon of the last ten years….” While Peter Aspden argued in the
Financial Times that “[Thornton] does well to resist the temptation to draw any glib, overarching conclusions. There is more than enough in her rigorous, precise reportage… for the reader to make his or her own connections.”
Alastair Sooke in
The Telegraph said, "She describes the excesses of today's art world with energy, clarity and panache, but in the final reckoning, she doesn't actually dig up that much dirt. We get a clear sense of quackery and monstrous egos, but the art world's murkier goings-on are rarely illuminated." Critic Matthew Collings said that Thornton is "not a seer, she's without a vision of how things could be different." He concluded, "Thornton gets to the heart of the problem of art-culture, which is that art has become trivial, whereas in previous eras it had some dignity. But she's too wrapped up in playing a role to realise it."
András SzántóAndrás Szántó is an arts journalist and sociologist. Born in Budapest, he was awarded his PhD in sociology from Columbia University.He became the deputy director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow at...
reviewed
Seven Days in the Art World: “Underneath [the book's] glossy surface lurks a sociologist’s concern for institutional narratives as well as the ethnographer’s conviction that entire social structures can be apprehended in seemingly frivolous patterns of speech or dress.” In interview, R.J. Preece wrote, "I think
Seven Days in the Art World might be the most important book on contemporary art of this time as it makes the art world more transparent, and might lead to reform."
External links