I think Baumann’s book affords us a good example of analyzing a cultural phenomenon from the perspective of sociology and maybe history. He has come down to every social aspect you can think of to account for the rising status of American film. Targeted at American film, he compares filmgoing in contexts of different countries; he anatomizes the specific roles inside the film production as well as the social and historian causes of the formation of the audiences; in a Bourdieu’s sense he stresses the role of the intellectuals in constructing the notion of American film as art. Sociologists are known for studying the arts in a way that focusing on constructing images of art as a social type and therefore have been criticized by art professionals for a lack of attention to the creative process and individual artistic personalities. But Baumann here managed to acknowledge the importance of aesthetic imperatives and the individual creative process by covering the self-promotion of directors (though not in length). At last he draws a general schema “the legitimation framework” that can be applied to the study of other artistic media, which is worth considering.

The question I am thinking about is the contradiction between his whole project trying to give reasons for Hollywood’s changing into art, and the perspective he adopts—the social constructionism. When answering why European intellectuals were willing to perceive film as art much earlier than the American intellectuals, he charges the non-equivalence to the different climate and culture in the two places at that time, and says: “Neither reason is based on a perception that European films were more artistic than American films.” (29) By saying so, Baumann dismisses the notion of art, and that’s the typical social constructionist way of viewing art—the notion of art is just a matter of social convention. If so, why would he bother so much to defense Hollywood/American film, claiming that we Americans certainly can produce artistic films—it’s just we weren’t given the opportunity earlier before. In the same page with the quote above, he indicates that Europeans can make it so early to treat film as art because their culture “was characterized by a withdrawal from aesthetic traditions and a search for alternative models.” For me, this revolutionary search within the expressing form itself, is more than anything the characteristic of art.