Group sociology with respect to art, the arts, and the various performing arts, perhaps including dance is the study of the social interaction of groups and its impact on the arts, the artists, and the works of art. Dominant group may impact art in the usual two ways: the works of art specifically, or groups associated in some way with art, the arts, and the performing arts, including dance. As in each subject of interest, dominant group is an entity.
Its effects on artists begin long before the secondary educational level but the realization of these effects probably begins in earnest at the tertiary educational level. And, more subtly, at the level of research when the artist reaches for individual novelty of expression.
Arts
Def. “[t]he conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colours, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium” is called art.
Dominant group
Examples from primary sources are to be used to prove or disprove each hypothesis. These can be collected per subject or in general.
- Accident hypothesis: dominant group is an accident of whatever processes are operating.
- Artifact hypothesis: dominant group may be an artifact of human endeavor or may have preceded humanity.
- Association hypothesis: dominant group is associated in some way with the original research.
- Bad group hypothesis: dominant group is the group that engages in discrimination, abuse, punishment, and additional criminal activity against other groups. It often has an unfair advantage and uses it to express monopolistic practices.
- Control group hypothesis: there is a control group that can be used to study dominant group.
- Entity hypothesis: dominant group is an entity within each field where a primary author of original research uses the term.
- Evolution hypothesis: dominant group is a product of evolutionary processes, such groups are the evolutionary process, produce evolutionary processes, or are independent of evolutionary processes.
- Identifier hypothesis: dominant group is an identifier used by primary source authors of original research to identify an observation in the process of analysis.
- Importance hypothesis: dominant group signifies original research results that usually need to be explained by theory and interpretation of experiments.
- Indicator hypothesis: dominant group may be an indicator of something as yet not understood by the primary author of original research.
- Influence hypothesis: dominant group is included in a primary source article containing original research to indicate influence or an influential phenomenon.
- Interest hypothesis: dominant group is a theoretical entity used by scholarly authors of primary sources for phenomena of interest.
- Metadefinition hypothesis: all uses of dominant group by all primary source authors of original research are included in the metadefinition for dominant group.
- Null hypothesis: there is no significant or special meaning of dominant group in any sentence or figure caption in any refereed journal article.
- Object hypothesis: dominant group is an object within each field where a primary author of original research uses the term.
- Obvious hypothesis: the only meaning of dominant group is the one found in Mosby’s Medical Dictionary.
- Original research hypothesis: dominant group is included in a primary source article by the author to indicate that the article contains original research.
- Primordial hypothesis: dominant group is a primordial concept inherent to humans such that every language or other form of communication no matter how old or whether extinct, on the verge of extinction, or not, has at least a synonym for dominant group.
- Purpose hypothesis: dominant group is written into articles by authors for a purpose.
- Regional hypothesis: dominant group, when it occurs, is only a manifestation of the limitations within a region. Variation of those limitations may result in the loss of a dominant group with the eventual appearance of a new one or none at all.
- Source hypothesis: dominant group is a source within each field where a primary author of original research uses the term.
- Term hypothesis: dominant group is a significant term that may require a ‘rigorous definition’ or application and verification of an empirical definition.
Entities
“[A]esthetic preference plays a part in cultural supremacy and that sometimes the taste of the dominant group is an aggressive assertion of mastery.”
Sources
“But once this dominant group has been deposed, other [art] producers take their place and can assert their hegemony, drawing authority away from consumers by a process of de-commodification.”
Objects
“Especially Bacillus species are commonly isolated from mural paintings [2,4,6] and also in this study, they are the dominant group.”
Humanities
“The term ‘humanities’ includes, but is not limited to, the study and interpretation of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.” –National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, 1965, as amended. Bold added.
The product or arrangement resulting from human artistic effort as understood from an historical, critical, or theoretical perspective would be a humanities effort.
Aesthetics
There may be enhanced social identification that “can ultimately act as a buffer against the threat of [mainstream] social rejection that discrimination represents.”
“[M]embers of devalued groups are likely to engage in social creativity by rejecting dominant group standards and instead placing greater emphasis and value on how they differ from the dominant group”.
“[W]hen confronted with discrimination, disadvantaged group members disidentify with the normative standards of the dominant group and increase the relevance of dimensions on which the ingroup is distinct”.
“[D]isadvantaged group members who are confronted with discrimination actively distance from the norms of the dominant group”.[6]
Imagined community
“The creation of an imagined community through artistic representation necessarily entails exclusion of minority groups and interests as the dominant group attempts to create a homogenized identity and national unity”
“At times, this exclusion of certain groups may even lead the dominant group to reassert its own identity and power over other groups within that same community through prejudiced actions or policies.”
“[T]he dominant ethnic group, the Hindus, has often excluded minority ethnic groups, notably Muslims, from this community.”
Will
“It is but natural that when aristocratic ideals should impose themselves upon any polity the art of that polity should reflect the taste, the culture, the ways of life, and the very being of the dominant classes.”
“At any rate, here is confirmation of the thesis that art voices the will of the dominant group in society.”
Artists
“Boston painters of the dominant group have the right idea.” “The showing made by the Boston men this season is certainly more extensive and apparently higher in quality than at the first Corcoran exhibition.”
“Another achievement of recent feminist practice with far-reaching theoretical implications has been to revalue the exploration of subjectivity as a legitimate purpose of art against the grain of formalist theory, which demands that the artist individual transcend subjectivity to achieve universality. More often than not, “universality” turns out to be a code word for the preference of a dominant group.”
“A similar issue was raised by the artists from South Asia and, in ‘Across the Pacific’, from the South Korean-based artists: namely, that they couldn’t understand the diasporan artists’ preoccupation with racism, and issues of identity. As members of the dominant group in their countries, questions around racism and the defensive creation of a fixed, appositional identity had never been raised.”
Products or arrangements
“We must also remember that every art object may simultaneously serve several purposes or functions.” “He would say that aesthetic preference plays a part in cultural supremacy and that sometimes the taste of the dominant group is an aggressive assertion of mastery.”
“[A]n art object expresses the interests and ideas of a particular social group even where the work seems to claim an aesthetic transcendence” “In one of its definitions, ideology is a set of ideas and values that reflect the interest of the dominant group within a given social order.”
“Especially Bacillus species are commonly isolated from mural paintings [2,4,6] and also in this study, they are the dominant group.”
“Although a part of the pottery assemblage there was petrographically similar to the one from En-Gedi, the dominant group consisted of dark red clay vessels. Shales and siltstones were the main tempering materials.”
“This is the dominant group of stone tools (47.7 %), including the following categories : grinding slabs (3.2 %), basalt mortars (4.8 %), grinding stones (23.8 %), pestles (3.2 %) and limestone bowls (12.7 %).”
Dances
“While there is in all this a containment and subduing of the difference or particularity of the originating group, there is also a shift in the bodily lexicon of the dominant group. Rather than “black” movement styles or “white,” a grey scale may give a more accurate metaphor.”
“In it [an afternoon sabar dance], the women accomplish a subtle act of subversion. Such understated hit-and-run tactics remind us that the control a dominant group maintains over subordinates and the acceptance of its ideology are always partial.”
“In a sense a newly dominant group of dancers (united by an interest in dance rather than ethnic or cultural characteristics) have replaced the Latin dimension of Salsa as cultural capital with a de‐ethnicised form of cultural capital that benefits those dancers with the time, money, dedication and inclination to follow a programme of dance lessons.”
“Two forces fundamental in determining the highland mestizo charango style have been identified. First, a group that is dominant economically, socially and politically will also dominate the cultural values and artistic orientation at least at the macro-level of the society. … One reason for this is that groups striving for upward social mobility will adopt the values and outward cultural manifestations of the dominant group as a part of their effort to join the elite.”[18]
“The other side of the aforementioned paradox is that, while mestizos seek to differentiate themselves from the criollo by the ideological and symbolic identification with campesino culture, they nevertheless remain greatly influenced by the cultural and aesthetic values of the dominant group.”[18]
Hypotheses
- Dominant group in art is associated directly with dominance in art.
