8/14: To be honest arriving at ASA to see a big ol’ blown up version of the book cover at the Stanford booth was pretty exciting. As are the blurbs I got to read:

“The Work of Art offers an intimate investigation of the economics of earning a living making art: where the money comes from and where it goes, and how artists justify, to themselves and others, their strategies for supporting their work. Alison Gerber makes a solid contribution to sociology, to economics, and to our understanding of the practicalities of an artistic career.”

—Howard S. Becker, author of Art Worlds

“Alison Gerber’s The Work of Art is a welcome treatment of how artists develop their self-conceptions and their production practices. This account expands our insight into a cutting edge area of economic and cultural sociology, examining the art world where questions of valuation and good work are highly salient, and provides an exciting approach to how material objects are given value. Personal and powerful, Gerber’s work will alter how those who care about the lives of artists think about the role of money and identity in the creative process.”

—Gary Alan Fine, author of Everyday Genius

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10/30: I obviously think you should probably read Gary Alan Fine’s Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education. If you want to know why, and where I think we should go from here, check out my review of the book over at Contemporary Sociology.

10/16: As has become our custom, the brilliant Anna Lund & I are organizing the panels for the working group on cultural sociology for Sociologidagarna (the Swedish Sociological Association’s biennial conference). Hit me up w/ questions, send us an abstract, + see you in March… Visit the Sociologidagarna website for more information.

The working group for cultural sociology welcomes submissions that focus on the cultural dimensions of social life with diverse points of departure: both cultural perspectives on the social in general and sociological perspectives on cultural objects and institutions. Papers might focus on cultural sociology in practice – diverse empirical investigations – as well as theoretical and methodological issues. We look forward to diverse perspectives and generative conversations when we meet at this year’s Sociologidagarna.

Fokus för arbetsgruppen i kultursociologi är det sociala livets kulturella dimensioner, såväl avseende kulturella perspektiv på sociala fenomen som sociologiska perspektiv på kulturella objekt och institutioner. Inom ramen för denna breda kultursociologi välkomnas papers med olika ingångar. Det kan handla om kultursociologi i praktiken, dvs empiriska undersökningar inom olika fält, men även teoretiska och metodologiska papers. Vi ser fram emot flera givande och mångdimensionella diskussioner under de kommande Sociologidagarna (språk: engelska).

8/10: I’ve updated some old working papers and uploaded two new ones over at SocArXiv, everyone’s favorite preprint / working paper / postprint / open science platform. I’ve received great feedback on papers I’ve posted there, it’s super easy and fast, and making your work as open as possible is the right thing to do. Check out SocArXiv (or your own field’s nonprofit open access repository) and get postin’.

8/5: In the coming month or so I’ll be at ASA and 4S presenting on new work. Holler if you’d like to meet up, and I’ll see you soon-

4/11: We’ve had our first Kvällssamtal at Landskrona Foto and four more lie ahead – a series of conversations prompted by themes from the Bourdieu exhibition. I’ll moderate one; they’ll all be great. Obs, these are all in Swedish. We’ll produce a podcast with excerpts from these conversations in collaboration with Radio AF in Lund, but you don’t wanna wait till those come out – see you in Landskrona!

Krig och social omvandling 11/4
Socialt arv och ungdomars kulturengagemang 25/4
Eliterna 2/5
Kvinnor, fotografi och arkivet 9/5
En skola i kris? 15/5

[pictured above: Anna Hedlund (researcher in social anthropology at Lund University) in conversation with Claes JB Löfgren (journalist at Sveriges Television) with moderator Håkan Silverup (doctoral candidate in sociology at Lund University)]

4/9: Richard Barlow’s installation Erebus at Landskrona Foto is finished and guys, it is gorgeous. Here’s what we wrote about it:

Temporary and fragile, Richard Barlow’s chalk drawings illuminate existential and environmental concerns in beautiful site-specific installations. Barlow’s wide-ranging work uses drawing, painting, and installation to investigate issues specific to the history and form of photography and its signification of documentary truth. In a new work for Landskrona Foto, Barlow will create a wall drawing based on his time at the Arctic Circle residency: collaging multiple photographs of the receding pack ice, he first produces apparently seamless documentary images, and then uses them to produce an intricately detailed large-scale chalk drawing. The ephemeral nature of the chalk drawings maps onto the fragility of the natural world; the drawing, like the ice, is threatened by the presence of its viewers, and will eventually disappear.

It’s worth a visit, I promise. See you in Landskrona-

3/8: Happy to see another thoughtful review of my book, this in the AJS by Elise Herrala. She reads the book, as I’d intended, as an inquiry into value in working life more generally, writing that “The Work of Art offers insights beyond the art world into the valuation of labor for the nontraditionally employed” and calls the book “an important and much-needed contribution to the neglected question of how artist value their work and time.. a well-written account that paints a nuanced portrait of art as work and pushes forward sociological thinking about valuation, especially in nontraditional employment.” This academic book-writing process is a crazy one – reviews and citations start to come out over a year after the thing is printed – and I’m really grateful to Dr. Herrala for her thoughts and care, and for all who have taken the time to let me know what they think!

3/6: Lots going on here in southern Sweden, especially if you’re interested in photography and knowledge! Why not join us at our conference April 5-6 in Landskrona? Or join us for the opening of Pierre Bourdieu In Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting at Landskrona Foto the evening of April 6? Or come by some of the five evening seminars we’ve organized? Like I said: lots going on. Hope to see you there!

1/20: Happy to see a kind review of my book by Hannah Wohl appearing in Contemporary Sociology this month! It’s a great overview of the argument chapter by chapter for those of you who might not want to read the whole thing ;). She calls the book “methodologically rigorous, theoretically insightful, and engagingly written” and says that I make a “strong contribution to the sociology of valuation.” Aw, shucks! They couldn’t have picked a better reviewer – Hannah’s own work on creativity is awesome, and I’m grateful for her close reading of my work. Check it out.

12/8: A couple of days from now I’ll be in Helsinki for a symposium on Creativity in Art and Science featuring some pretty amazing folks at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. It’s been put together by Ugo Corte with Susanna Lindberg, Matthias De Groof, & Kirsi Tirri and should be great. Register if you’re planning to come so they know how many snacks to pick up, and see you soon-