Acting on the social : art, culture, and government

The cultural turn in sociology tends to merge the realms of the social and the cultural into one another. In two case studies on cultural governance, it is suggested that these realms are more usefully regarded as distinct in order to understand how culture has been shaped into a historically distinctive means for acting on the social. The first case study examines how art was enlisted as a means of acting on what were deemed problematic class behaviours in the reforming programs of mid-19th century English liberalism. The article then considers the varied roles accorded art as a means of acting on communities in contemporary programs of advanced liberalism. Consideration is also given to the implications of this perspective on the relations of art, government, and the social for the status of the work of art.