What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Bound by Creativity (University of Chicago Press) draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. I then transport readers into the art world, where we discover how artists’ understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors’ homes. Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige.
My current research bridges cultural and economic sociological approaches with other subfields and disciplines, drawing upon rich empirical data to theorizes core sociological concepts, including valuation, morality, and meaning. In addition to collaborative projects, I am collecting and analyzing data for two major sole-authored projects. Through an archival dataset of tenure files, I examine how faculty evaluate candidates’ academic worth and conceive of their own objectivity and ability to judge. I analyze how these processes vary by discipline and gender. My next book project is based on an ethnographic study of the Los Angeles pornography and adult content creation industry. I explore how industry members navigate unstable and charged symbolic meanings in their daily work as they strive to make pornography that is deemed interactionally acceptable, while also working to create organizationally passable products that meet the demands and regulations of consumers, corporations, and the state.