Researchable context of Iran's handicrafts from sociology of art perspective (Case study: carpet)

With the development of academic fields in Iran's handicrafts area and revealing of unbreakable links among social issues and arts, the importance of paying attention to effects of social contexts in the development, variation or stability of Iran's handicrafts factors have been revealed. In the meantime Carpets, as the most important cultural and handicraft product of Iran, have notable rank in Iran's traditional arts and handicrafts world. The main aim of this research is the sociological analyses of Iran's handicrafts world with the purpose of identifying the effective issue in the formation of cultural and artistic characters of this crafts. The main issue of research is, identification of the relationship between sociology of art and handicrafts worlds with the emphasis on effective social factors in Iran's hand-woven carpet world and position of carpet designers in this world. The research's main questions are 1. How is the relationship between sociology of art and handicrafts? 2. What is the pivotal sociological area in the carpet production world? 3. Where is the carpet designer's position in the carpet production world? In the research process, the main parts of the Iranian carpet world were identified and analyzed based on Victorian Alexander's "Cultural Diamond" approach. This approach is a model that takes part on based of Griswold's cultural diamond model. Alexander's model has five elements. Creators, cultural objects, audience, distributors, and the social world. Therefore, a complete understanding of this cultural diamond requires understanding all five elements and links between them. Once we understand the specific points and links in this diamond, we can equip to a sociological view to analysis art worlds. Meanwhile, we applied the cultural diamond schema to the analysis of the carpet production world and its elements to find suitable responses to designed questions. The results of sociological analysis of the carpet production world showed, 1) Iranian handicrafts are as the main part of cultural and artistic works due to the artistic acceptance having, among the general public. Therefore these objects have defensible value for sociological research and study. 2) Iran's carpet world, have adaptation capability with quintuplet parts of art world contains, arts or cultural objects, creators or producers, audience or consumers, distributors and social world that have been analyzed in the cultural diamond. 3) From the perspective of the sociology of art, carpet designers as the main agents of Iran's carpet world can be known as the axial artists of this world and their products also are known as the artistic objects. The research's methodically was a qualitative research and a descriptive analytic approach and field study-library based data collection were the research methods.