Sarah Thornton is a writer and sociologist of culture.[1] Her early work was about clubs, raves, music taste and cultural hierarchies. 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.
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Thornton was born in Canada and 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.[2] Her 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. Thornton worked for one year as a brand planner in a London advertising agency.[3] She is the chief writer about contemporary art for The Economist.[4] Thornton has written about the contemporary art market and art world for publications including The Economist,[5] The Sunday Times Magazine,[6] The Art Newspaper[7], Artforum.com,[8] The New Yorker,[9] The Telegraph,[10] The Guardian,[11] and The New Statesman.[12]
Club Cultures analyses the "hipness" 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's Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
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 the process of subcultural formation.[13]
The Subcultures Reader. Routledge, 1997
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".[14]
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?’”[15]
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”.[16] 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.”[17]
András Szántó 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.”[18] 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."[19]
On July 26, 2011, Thornton successfully sued Lynn Barber and The Daily Telegraph for libel and malicious falsehood.[20] 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."[21] 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.[22]