Art as Gift: A Sociological Account of Art from the Perspective of Gift Culture

The sub-discipline of sociology of gift culture, which was established by the French cultural anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss, is dedicated to examining the phenomenon of gift exchange in primitive society. Mauss argued that the primitive society had a gift-exchange oriented lifestyle which gave rise to a specific gift society and its culture featured by an integrated relationship not just on a human/non-human level, i.e., between mankind, God and matter, but also on an inter-personal level, and this showcases the benevolent, reciprocal, and sacred nature of gift itself. Also, the physical gifts given to one another in a primitive festival ritual does not exhaust the meaning of gift, the ritual itself, out of which a primitive form of art took shape, comprises an essential format of gift as well. By virtue of transforming into a kind of state culture ceremony in early civil society, such as the ancient Greek and Roman epics and theatre, as well as Chinese ritual culture, etc., festival ritual maintained its features of gift culture in its variations. This gift culture had been broken up by commodity exchange and contractual relationship in civil society, especially in modern society that followed the antiquity, and the integrated relationship on both human/non-human and inter-personal levels thus dismantled as a consequence. However, the benevolent, reciprocal and sacred nature of gift is preserved in the aesthetic property of art in the civil society, specifically by means of modern art as a new form of gift, through which the gaps between mankind and the world, between individuals are bridged, whereas a gift culture is therefore restored.