Concluding this book does not mean resolving the debates and dissensus that pervade the arts, the sociology of the arts, and sociology in general. Lack of resolution, however, should not be a matter of regret, since intellectual uncertainty has the potential value of alerting scholars and intellectuals more generally to inadequate theorizing or gaps in their data. My goal was not to achieve closure, an impossible aim in the study of society, but to provide tentative solutions to internecine intellectual conflicts involving art versus sociology, internalist versus externalist analysis, and sociology versus sociology. This chapter serves to synthesize these themes, highlighting recent trends in sociology and in society more generally that offer promise for research and, perhaps, deeper and more complex understanding of the relationships of the arts and society.

At the present time researchers who study the place of the arts in society face two major tasks. The first concerns the meaning of context and contextualization. The second has to do with the problem of value and evaluation of the arts. Contextualizing the arts is a necessary strategy if we are to understand how certain activities and objects come to be defined as art, if, and on what basis they are hierarchically ordered, and how some art comes to be judged as better than others. On the other hand, uncritical contextualization runs the risk of losing sight of the art object itself, trivializing art in general, and prematurely closes off the possibility (and legitimacy) of evaluating art works or genres.