Fashion reporting in cross-national perspective 1955-2005

This article aims to portray long-term developments and cross-national differences in the editorial prominence, artistic focus and international orientation of the coverage given to designer fashion by a central, intermediary agency within national, cultural fields: the journalism of art and culture in what are called quality or elite newspapers. Based on content analysis, the article explores how the volume and content of fashion coverage in these papers has evolved since 1955 and how this accords with their arts and culture coverage in general. Theoretically, the research draws on the sociological literature on processes and structures of cultural classification and cultural globalization and on communication research into the production of news. The research covers three countries - France, Germany and The Netherlands - and four reference years: 1955, 1975, 1995 and 2005. Fashion has often been included among the cultural forms that have gained in artistic legitimacy in the late twentieth century, but the present analysis indicates that the 'aesthetic mobility' of fashion in elite newspapers has been modest compared to that of other cultural forms. Journalistic attention to fashion is found to vary considerably among countries and across time, in accordance with the size, institutional development and international position of the designer fashion sector in each country and the globalization of the designer fashion industry. The longstanding (inter)national importance of the French high fashion world is clearly reflected in the relatively high amount of coverage given to (French) designer fashion in the French press. Until the 1990s, French newspapers primarily reported on French based fashion designers and events, but afterwards their fashion coverage became far more international in focus, in l

De institutionele logica van de journalistiek: onderzoek naar het journalistieke veld in het spoor van Bourdieu

This article considers several key concepts from Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field and their significance for the study of journalism, including the tension between ‘heteronomy’ and ‘autonomy’, and the struggle between ‘established’ and ‘newcomers’. It is argued that the field approach can bridge the gap between macro-level analyses that view journalism as the product of wider societal, economic and political structures and microanalyses that tend to focus on individual news organizations and journalists without paying much attention to the wider institutional setting in which journalistic actors operate. In addition, it is argued that the field approach provides a useful framework for international comparative research into the workings of journalis

Foreign Literatures in National Media

This article examines key developments and cross-national variations in the coverage of foreign literatures in U.S., Dutch, French, and German elite newspapers between 1955 and 2005. Such coverage is indicative of the interest in foreign literatures among literary mediators and readers and the degree and direction of “globalization from within.” Using content analysis, the degree, direction, and diversity of the international orientation of literary journalism are charted for each country. The results indicate that the degree of international orientation is inversely related to the centrality of a country's literary production. Results show a clear internationalization of literary coverage in the French newspapers, which coincides with the declining dominance of French literature in the late twentieth century literary world-system. German and Dutch papers' literary coverage already showed a high level of internationalization in 1955 and remained fairly constant, with foreign literature taking up around half of the total coverage devoted to literature. The NY Times, by contrast, devoted roughly one quarter of its coverage to foreign literature throughout the research period. Although the global diversity of coverage in all four countries has increased, international coverage is largely confined to a select group of “core” countries and to countries belonging to the same language area or region, and domestic literature remains important

Het soortelijk gewicht van kunst in een open samenleving

In de voorbije halve eeuw hebben zich ingrijpende wijzigingen voorgedaan in de classificatie van cultuur. Traditionele kunstopvattingen en culturele scheidslijnen zijn geërodeerd en vervangen door meer gedifferentieerde en minder hiërarchische patronen van cultuurproductie en consumptie. Voorheen als hoger beschouwde cultuuruitingen hebben aan prestige ingeboet en zijn steeds meer tot een mogelijke optie onder vele geworden. Susanne Janssen gaat in haar oratie na hoe deze veranderingen samenhangen met bredere maatschappelijke processen en daarmee verbonden ontwikkelingen binnen het culturele veld

Side-roads to success: The effect of sideline activities on the status of writers

The literary status of writers is strongly dependent on the critical attention given to their books in the daily and weekly press. Previous research has shown that this attention depends to a great extent on attributes that are external to the work in question, but are related to its institutional setting, notably the stature of the publisher and the critical reception of previous works by the same author. This article considers the options writers have at their disposal to stimulate or hold the interest of the critics. Following a theoretical outline of the types of activities authors can engage in, an analysis is performed on the relationship between 279 writers' involvement in a number of 'sideline' activities in the Dutch literary world and the degree of critical interest in the books of these writers. Both the versatility of the authors' performance in the literary world and the extent to which they were involved in prominent institutions proved to have a strong positive relationship to the amount of critical attention their books received. A subsequent analysis confirmed the hypothesis that 'Publisher status' and 'Previous critical attention' are not the only external attributes that affect the amount of attention reviewers give to new works of fiction. The versatility of the author's performance in the literary world as well as his or her involvement in prominent literary institutions are also relevant

Reviewing as social practice: Institutional constraints on critics' attention for contemporary fiction

This article examines the activities of literary reviewers and the conditions under which they perform their task of judging recently published works of fiction. Reviewers and other members of the institution of criticism usually present their assessments as a highly personal matter, in which the intrinsic properties of the texts under consideration are focused on. To understand why this view is incorrect one must consider the choices and statements of reviewers in relation with the social environment in which they come about. Following a theoretical discussion of the institutional nature of critical choices and judgements, an empirical analysis is undertaken of the selection Dutch reviewers made from the supply of new fiction titles in the 1970s and 1990s. The findings show that reviewers tend to be on the safe side when dealing with recently published texts. In addition to the text itself, they take due note of extra-textual indicators of quality, such as the publishing house that marketed the title and, especially, the assessments of other critics. In doing so, they reduce the uncertainty as to which works deserve their attention, Hence, they reduce the risk of making the choices that might jeopardize their status as literary expert

Art journalism and cultural change: The coverage of the arts in Dutch newspapers 1965-1990

Cultural goods and activities are classified with respect to one another. Even though systems of cultural classification present themselves as natural and enduring, they are products of human action, continually subject to selection and change. An important role in the making and mediation of cultural classifications is played by agents and institutions whose job it is to make (quality) assessments with respect to the supply of cultural artifacts. The present study considered the coverage of artistic products and practices by art newsmakers in the daily press. The first aim was to identify the changes that occurred between 1965-1990 regarding the amount of space given by Dutch daily newspapers to art and to specific art forms. To gain a differentiated view, both popular and elite papers were taken into account. The second objective was to determine how forces extrinsic to the newspaper organization have affected the provision of information on the arts. The analysis shows that there were major changes in newspaper coverage of the arts in this period, resulting in a new hierarchy of art forms in terms of the proportion of space they received. The art forms that benefited most from this reshuffle are pop music (both in popular and elite papers), literature and film (in elite papers), and cabaret, musicals, and shows (in popular papers). The big 'losers' in both categories of papers are theater, classical music, and applied art, while visual art more or less consolidated its position. Dance received considerably more attention, but could not escape its low-ranking position in the papers' hierarchy. These changes appear to be closely related to changes in the audience for the arts, developments in the arts supply, and pressures from advertisers and competitors

Het soortelijk gewicht van kunst in een open samenleving: de classificatie van cultuuruitingen in Nederland en andere Westerse landen na 1950

Actors in the field of culture (producers, mediators, consumers, etc,) continuously classify cultural products according to their alleged meaning, style, quality, effects or other properties. Such classifications do not emanate from the content of cultural objects, but are socially enabled and socially constructed events that vary across time and place. Likewise, cultural classification systems – the ways in which members of particular societies classify the supply of cultural artifacts and develop corresponding rules of behavior and practices – show significant variations that seem closely connected to wider social and cultural conditions. This inaugural lecture addresses the evolution of cultural classification systems in late twentieth century Western societies, in particular Dutch society, and seeks to elucidate the impact of wider societal features and transformations on the development of such systems. The author argues that changes in social structure, processes of emancipation and individualization, and the growing role of the market in the domain of culture, eroded institutionalized cultural authority and traditional cultural hierarchies and boundaries, and created more differentiated, less hierarchical, less universal, and more loosely-bounded cultural classification systems than those in place during the first part of the twentieth century. Accordingly, conventional ‘high’ art forms have suffered a loss in status and seem increasingly to have become one of many options to actors in the cultural field.Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van Bijzonder Hoogleraar in de Sociale Aspecten van Kunst, Cultuur en Media aan de Faculteit Historische en Kunstweten