Sarah Thornton

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.

Thornton's book 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014) looks at the lives and work of figures "from all over the art ecosystem, from the market-driven mogul (Jeff Koons) to the profoundly intellectual performance artist (UCLA professor Andrea Fraser) to the impish prankster (Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan.)" The central question guiding the book is: What defines an artist in the 21st century? Thornton received "a range of answers that will startle even art-world insiders." Jackie Wullshlager of the Financial Times opined that Thornton is "skillfully nuanced" and "elevates gossip to sociology, writing with verve, insight and authenticity."

On 26 July 2011, Thornton won a historic libel and malicious falsehood victory against Lynn Barber and The Daily Telegraph. All three of the Telegraph′s attempts to appeal were denied.

At The Economist, Thornton penned investigative and analytical articles about the inner workings of the contemporary art market. Her writing often explored issues such as the value of art, the role of museum validation and branding, and the impact of gender on auction prices. In 2010, she wrote an article about the Damien Hirst auction, "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever", which took place on the evening that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008. The article explained how the auction was so successful.

The New York Times' Karen Rosenberg said that Seven Days in the Art World (2008) "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?’"

In Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (1995), Thornton examines the shift from live to recorded music for public dancing (from record shops to raves) and the resistance to recording technology's enculturation of the "authentic," valued cultural form. The book also analyzes the dynamics of "hipness," critiquing Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital with her own formulation of "subcultural capital." The study responds to earlier works such as Dick Hebdige's 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style. It does not see media as a reflection of social groups, but as integral to their formation.

Sarah L. Thornton (born 1965) is a writer, ethnographer and sociologist of culture. Thornton has authored three books and many articles about artists, the art market, technology and design, the history of music technology, dance clubs, raves, cultural hierarchies, subcultures, and ethnographic research methods.