Abstract
The concept of high art usually connotes highbrow and snobbery, the pride of elitists; it seems to be an instrument of the ruling class for its dominant social status reproduction. Many advocates of popular culture scorn and ignore high art – they often use the approach of social constructivism and say that high culture is nothing but a social construction.
They emphasize that there is no quality, which could classify any work of art as high or low. On the contrary, the author of this book writes about an art with no animosity, without an effort to relativize of it, about art without ironic quotation marks.
The title of this book – quotation from Gustave Flaubert’s letter about reading Dante’s Inferno – enables to develop a story of the answer to the question of what kind of art is the art that no one calls boring and why no one dare do it. The book finds its inspiration in the perspective of social constructivism and in the sociology of science.
The author describes the actors (both humans and non-humans) that keep the network of high art together. He starts with the ways of creating canons (of authors or works of art), he also deals with actors as nation, tradition, taste, age, money, education, comic, kitsch, irony, “nothing” or Shakespeare.
This kind of “following the actor” (actor as a part of objective reality, not as a social fiction or construction) makes the sociology of art possible of existence without preventing the work of art from theory.