First Report from the ESA Network on Sociology of the Arts
From: Tia DeNora (t.de-nora@exeter.ac.uk)
Date: September 24, 1999

Ciao a tutti! This is our first 'official' communication from the ESA NETWORK on the SOCIOLOGY OF THE ARTS!! We are pleased to tell you that the ESA Executive Committee approved our proposal during its meeting in Amsterdam. (We extend our thanks to Professor Marlis Buchman for her help and advice during the process.) We held our first business meeting in Amsterdam where we elected Convenors (myself and Anna Lisa, Chair and Vice Chair) and a distinguished, internationally representative Board: Antoine Hennion (France), Erik Hitters (Netherlands), Jan Marontate (Canada), Ingo von Sundahl (Spain). (All of these positions last only two years; new people can be cycled in frequently.) Our meeting was productive. I'm pleased to tell you that our interim conference is to be held in Exeter in 2000 (see below). Bob Witkin, Head of Department in Sociology at Exeter, offered to serve as co-organizer of the event, and was co-opted on to the Board for this purpose. We were also delighted to accept Arturo Rodriguez-Morato's offer on behalf of ISA RC 37 of an "ESA within ISA" session during the July Barcelona meeting. If you would like to take part in that session, please contact Arturo (rodrig@eco.ub.es) or myself with a title and paper abstract. Post-meeting, guided by Erik Hitters, who knows Amsterdam's restaurant scene very well, we enjoyed a most magnificent banquet, at an excellent price. Thank you Erik! The evening was highly convivial; it was obvious we all love to eat and drink and along with the wine and the beer, conversation flowed fast through several European channels. We also linked up with Peter Golding, convenor of the ESA Media Network. The logistics of tram travel managed to separate us before we ate together but not before we agreed to meet again and instigate future collaboration between our groups.
Kees van Rees made the good suggestion at the business meeting to produce a resource listing of our (growing) membership. So we invite you to send a 'bio-note' and synopsis of current/future research interests and a few key bibliographic entries as keys to your work.. We also talked, briefly, about the possibility of, in future, sponsoring a prize of some kind, for outstanding work (e.g., a book/article) in arts sociology and a similar one for student work. Please write with ideas about this. And we broached plans for a publishing project - e.g., an edited book or series of books - whereby royalties from sales would be used to the greater glory of the Network (e.g., to help with meetings, assistance to students or junior scholars for travel, etc). Again, if you have ideas on these things, please contact me or Anna Lisa.
Since Amsterdam, we've been active with publicity. If you've seen the ASA Culture newsletter, you'll know that Karen Cerulo very kindly included a preliminary announcement about our group (under the banner 'Building Bridges with the European Sociological Association'). Other plans for publicity are afloat. We also want to extend thanks to ISA RC 37 Newsletter Editors Arturo Rodriguez Morato and Alain Quemin for including an earlier draft of our Proposal to the ESA Executive Committee. We will also put information in the British and Italian Sociological Association newsletters. Please let us know of any others! And, of course, we will soon be on the web, once Bob Witkin recovers from his recent trip to Outer Mongolia.
Thanks to everyone for becoming paid up members of ESA, for responding to Many emails during the year and for remaining enthusiastic about the Network. We hope to publish this newsletter in January, April, July and October. If anyone would like to publish a short article on their work (2000 words maximum), place an announcement for a conference or a new book, review a conference or a book, or anything else that might be appropriate, please let us know. The plan is to send the newsletter electronically, as a message text, and only to use paper for those without email (since we currently have NO MONEY). So that means, alas, we can't deal with graphics….yet! Once we have a web page this should change. Please also pass word on to anyone you think might be interested in our Network.
Finally, speaking of money, we discussed briefly the idea of collecting a small membership fee to cover photocopying and postage, and minor expenses. At the business meeting we discussed something in the area of $10.00 a year, and free to students. What do you think? We can revisit this issue later on.