A sociological study of the structural elements of the art system

To study art, sociologists have so far related it either to the economic base of the artistic product or to the artist's ideology or world-view or the class structure of the audience and art consumers. The importance of none of these factors could be denied; however, what is more important is the relation between these factors, the complex network of political, economic and social relations that make up the world of art. The survival of art depends on the exchanges among these four elements (the world of art, the art product, the artist and the audience). In fact, art is a self-regulating system made up of the functional relations among these four structural elements. In this paper, the writer studies the art system based on Parson's social system (AGIL), and explores the functional relations among its structural elements.