This article maps recent developments in social science writing about the arts and argues for seeing this work in terms of the label the `new sociology of art'. It considers four major lines of re-assessment being carried out by sociologists studying the arts: firstly, a reconsideration of the relationship between sociological and other disciplinary approaches to art; secondly, the possibility of an art-sociology as against a sociology of art; thirdly, the application of insights from the sociology of art to non-art `stuff '; and, fourthly, the sociology of the artwork conceived as a contingent social fact. The argument is made that these developments represent an advance on the tendency to limit sociological investigations of the arts to contextual or external factors. The `new sociology of art' is praised for framing questions about the aesthetic properties of art and artworks in a way that is compatible with social constructionsim.
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