When I hear the word “reflection,” applied to the study of culture, I reach for my red pencil, if not my gun. My problem with the word is that it stops inquiry just when it should begin. While it may be generally true that the ruling ideas of the times are the ideas of the ruling class, I think our job as sociologists and students of culture is to actually explain how this happens, what are the specifics, and the exceptions, avoiding reductionism, understanding both the significance of cultural creativity and accomplishment, and the complexity of the social world.

I am thinking of this pet peeve of mine today for two reasons: because I think that the work of Vera Zolberg stands as a model of what can be learned when we move beyond sociological truism in thinking about the sociology of the arts and memory, and culture broadly understood, and also because I am, ironically, tempted in opening my presentation today with a “reflection note.” As in: the intellectual quality of Zolberg, as a sociologist of the arts, collective memory and culture, is a reflection of the quality of Vera, as a person. And, ironically, I am not sure I can, or should even try, to explain this connection between professional accomplishment and personal quality, but I know I should talk about both the quality of Zolberg’s work and about Vera as a person (our people would say a mensch) today.

Vera and I have been closely connected professionally for a long time, from the beginning of my career as a serious student of sociology. We both worked to specialize in the sociology of the arts at the University of Chicago. When I was preparing my special field exam in this area, I discovered that there were three students who focused in their studies on the arts before me, Mason Griff (who I had studied with as an undergraduate), Hugh Dalziel Duncan and Zolberg. This was when I first read Vera’s work, her dissertation on the Art Institute of Chicago (a work that I still refer to, as the students in this semester’s departmental dissertation seminar can confirm).

Vera and I studied with the same teachers, Morris Janowitz, Donald . . .

Read more: Art, Culture and Memory: Conversations with Vera Zolberg