Sarah Thornton is a writer and sociologist of culture. Her early work was about clubs

Nightclub

A nightclub is an entertainment venue which usually operates late into the night...

, rave

Rave

Rave, rave dance, and rave party are parties that originated mostly from acid house parties, which featured fast-paced electronic music and light shows. At these parties people dance and socialize to dance music played by disc jockeys and occasionally live performers...

s, music taste and cultural

Culture

Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...

 hierarchies

Hierarchy

A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...

. Thornton has authored and edited works about subcultures. She now writes principally about art, artists and the art market. Thornton published a book about art's subcultures, Seven Days in the Art World.

Life and work

Thornton was born in Canada and resides in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. 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. Her academic posts have included a full-time lecturer

Lecturer

Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...

ship at the University of Sussex

University of Sussex

The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....

, and a period as Visiting Research Fellow

Research fellow

The title of research fellow is used to denote a research position at a university or similar institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act either as an independent investigator or under the supervision of a principal investigator...

 at Goldsmiths, University of London. Thornton worked for one year as a brand planner in a London advertising agency. She is the chief writer about contemporary art for The Economist. Thornton has written about the contemporary art market and art world

Art world

The art world is composed of all the people involved in the production, commission, preservation, promotion, criticism, and sale of art. Howard S. Becker describes it as "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things,...

 for publications including The Economist, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Art Newspaper', Artforum.com, The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and The New Statesman.

Works

• Club Culture: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Wesleyan University Press, 1996
• Seven Days in the Art World. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008

Club Cultures analyses the "hipness

Hip (slang)

Hip is a slang term meaning fashionably current and in the know. Hip is the opposite of square or prude.Hip, like cool, does not refer to one specific quality. What is considered hip is continuously changing. The term hip is said to have originated in African American Vernacular English in the...

" of British rave culture and coins the term, "subcultural capital", an adaption of Pierre Bourdieu's concept as outlined in many works including Distinction. The study responds to earlier works such as Dick Hebdige

Dick Hebdige

Richard "Dick" Hebdige is an expatriate British media theorist and sociologist most commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and its resistance against the mainstream of society.-Life and career:...

's Subculture: The Meaning of Style.

Local micro-media like flyers

Flyer (pamphlet)

__notoc__A flyer or flier, also called a circular, handbill or leaflet, is a form of paper advertisement intended for wide distribution and typically posted or distributed in public place....

 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 the process of subcultural formation.

Critical Reception

Her book Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital is described by Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)

Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of...

 and Tony Jefferson in Resistance Through Rituals as "theoretically innovative" and "conceptually adventurous".

The New York Times Karen Rosenberg said that Seven Days in the Art World "was reported and written in a heated market, but it is poised to endure as a work of sociology...[Thornton] pushes her well-chosen subjects to explore the questions ‘What is an artist?’ and ‘What makes a work of art great?’”

In the UK, Ben Lewis wrote in The Sunday Times that Seven Days was "a Robert Altmanesque panorama of...the most important cultural phenomenon of the last ten years”. While Peter Aspden argued in the Financial Times that “[Thornton] does well to resist the temptation to draw any glib, overarching conclusions. There is more than enough in her rigorous, precise reportage… for the reader to make his or her own connections.”

András Szántó

András Szántó

András Szántó is an arts journalist and sociologist. Born in Budapest, he was awarded his PhD in sociology from Columbia University.He became the deputy director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow at...

 reviewed Seven Days in the Art World: “Underneath [the book's] glossy surface lurks a sociologist’s concern for institutional narratives as well as the ethnographer’s conviction that entire social structures can be apprehended in seemingly frivolous patterns of speech or dress.” In interview, R.J. Preece wrote, "I think Seven Days in the Art World might be the most important book on contemporary art of this time as it makes the art world more transparent, and might lead to reform."

On July 26, 2011, Thornton successfully sued Lynn Barber

Lynn Barber

Lynn Barber is a British journalist, who writes for The Sunday Times.-Early life:Barber attended Lady Eleanor Holles School...

and The Daily Telegraph for libel and malicious falsehood. Mr Justice Tugendhat, the UK’s most senior media judge, referred to Ms Barber's review of Seven Days in the Art World as a wrongful "attack on Dr Thornton's honesty." Although the Telegraph attempted to claim that the verdict was a blow for free speech, a closer look at the Judgment reveals that this is untrue.

External links

• www.sarah-thornton.com Author's Official Website
• Sunday Times Book Review October 5, 2008
• The New Yorker Letter from London by Sarah Thornton March 19, 2007