It appears that the Orlando Museum of Art was duped. In 2022, they hosted an exhibition of the work of the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat, who died in 1988, was a New York graffiti artist and Neo-expressionist painter. To say his work was world-renowned and carried a hefty price tag would be an understatement. In 2017, his piece Untitled sold at auction for $110.5 million, making it the most expensive piece ever sold by an American artist. The 2022 exhibit titled Heroes and Monsters was supposed to include unseen examples of Basquiat’s work. Unfortunately, the paintings were fake. The FBI Art Crime Team seized 25 art pieces, and the museum director was fired. The kerfuffle left the museum’s reputation in such a tattered state that a year later, they decided to sue the exhibit’s sponsors in hopes of recovering not only money spent on the event but also the shards of their legacy. The fallout from this story opens the door for us to consider art from a sociological perspective. What is art?
From a sociological perspective, art is closely tied to culture, a society’s socially learned and shared ideas, behaviors, and material components. What is art in one culture is not necessarily seen as art in another culture. The indigenous people of Papua New Guinea may not consider Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa art, even though millions of other people visit it each year.
For our purposes, there are two categories under the rubric of culture. First, there is material culture, the physical artifacts that represent components of society. Material culture consists of those things made by humans you can physically touch. This can include a painting, a quilt, a necklace, or a piece of pottery. If a person made it and you can physically touch it, it is material culture.
On the other hand, nonmaterial culture consists of ideas and symbols representing components of society. Language and customs fall into this category. The overarching feature of nonmaterial culture is that humans created it, but you cannot physically touch it. That poetry competition you attended last week and the Sufi Whirling Dervishes’ hypnotic spin are nonmaterial culture forms. Interestingly, nonmaterial culture often has its material counterpart. You can’t touch spoken poetry, but you can touch the paper it is written on. While you can’t touch the belief and mysticism of the Whirling Dervish, you can (but shouldn’t!) touch their tall felt hat known as a “sikke.”
