General Seminar Guest: Emmanuel PEDLER (EPS)

Guest : Emmanuel PEDLER (Sociologist, Director of Studies at EHESS)

" The time given to paintings" 
Ens Editions, coll Bibliothèque idéale des sciences sociales.

Discussant: Matthieu DEMORY (Doctor of Sociology, AMU)

Presentation of the book

In 1987, a team of investigators led by Jean-Claude Passeron and Emmanuel Pedler followed visitors to the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence, stopwatch in hand. The aim was to shed light on the social forces behind the «time given over to paintings». This original study is the subject of this book, originally published in 1991, which has been quoted far more often than it has actually been read. Today's reprint by the Bibliothèque idéale des sciences sociales is expanded to include several important texts in which the two sociologists have continued their analyses of the reception of artistic works, in both the pictorial and musical fields. By endeavouring to describe and measure precisely the «pacts» of artistic reception that are formed between works and their audiences, the collection offers an approach centred on the fate reserved for singular works, which differs from the surveys of cultural consumption that still dominate the sociology of culture today.