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Sarah Thornton |
Sarah Thornton is a writer and sociologist of culture.1 Thornton's early work was about clubs and raves, subcultures, and cultural hierarchies. Thornton has authored and edited several works about subcultures. More recently she has published a cultural critique of the art world.
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Sarah Thornton was born in Canada and currently resides in London. Her education comprises a BA in the History of Art from Concordia University, Montreal, and a PhD in the Sociology of Music from Strathclyde University,Glasgow.2Her academic posts have included a full-time lecturership at the University of Sussex, and a period as Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Club Cultures analyses the "hipness" of British rave culture and coins the term, "subcultural capital," an adaption of Pierre Bourdieu's influential concept as outlined in many works including Distinction. The study responds to earlier works such as Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style. In contrast to Hebidge's analysis of British punk subculture—typical of the now-defunct Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, which argued that youth subcultural aesthetics rise out of calculated stylistic subversion of dominant societal norms—Thornton instead posits that youth subcultures are "taste cultures" with shared media consumption that compete for distinctions of different kinds.3 She said:
Local micro-media like flyers and listings are means by which club organizers bring the crowd together. Niche media like the music press construct subcultures as much as they document them. National mass media, such as tabloids, develop youth movements as much as they distort them. Contrary to youth subcultural ideologies, "subcultures" do not germinate from a seed and grow by force of their own energy into mysterious ‘movements’ only to be belatedly digested by the media. Rather, media and other culture industries are there and effective right from the start. They are central to process of subcultural formation.4
She suggests that these alternative social realities, rather than entirely re-inventing a system free from class hierarchies united under a particular style (as Hebdige proposes), "duplicate structures of exclusion and stratification found elsewhere."5
Thornton co-edited the first edition of The Subcultures Reader with Ken Gelder.
Thornton has written about the art market and the art world for many publications including The Art Newspaper6, Artforum.com7, The New Yorker8, The Telegraph9, The Guardian10, and The New Statesman11.
Her book Seven Days in the Art World was published in 2008. It consists of seven day-in-the-life case studies: an auction (Christie's New York); an art-school seminar (California Institute of the Arts); an art fair (Basel); an art prize (the Turner); an art magazine (Artforum); a studio visit (that of Japanese star Takashi Murakami); and the Venice Biennalecitation needed.
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Her book Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital is described by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson in Resistance Through Rituals as "theoretically innovative" and "conceptually adventurous."12
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