• The primary function of the artworld is continually to define, validate, and maintain the cultural category of art, and to produce the consent of the entire society in the legitimacy of the artworld's authority to do so.
  • The artworld is thus part of our system of professions, and many parts of the artworld network are now highly professionalized and careerist.
  • As in all institutions as interdependent networks, you don't need to know you are participating in the artworld to be carrying out its primary cultural function.
• Compare Arthur Danto's and Pierre Bourdieu's views:
  • the artworld as the provider of an operational theory of art that participants use to distinguish art from non-art (Danto).
  • the artworld as conditioned or determined by social and economic lived positions, requiring knowledge and ownership of cultural capital as part of social class identity, the theory or concepts of art following learned professional and social class distinctions (Bourdieu).
• The artworld network is the ground of possibility for anything to appear as art for us today.
• Think of the artworld institution as the complex field of forces which constitute art works as such, providing the context and rules for the possibility of something appearing to us as art per se.
• The artworld also provides the structure of symbolic capital (Bourdieu): value, prestige, and other intangible factors that are fungible values--exchangeable for money.
• What makes something an artwork is invisible: there's no "there there" outside a position in the artworld network.
  • What makes something an artwork is not an observable property in an artwork itself.
  • The work is a node in a network of forces without which it would be unrecognizable-- literally invisible.

Value of an institutional approach to understanding the Artworld

• Provides a way of describing the social and economic conditions that make art possible today.
• Can be plugged into a complexity or systems model like mediology.
• Opens up analysis of the art work itself as being constituted by a complex field of forces that are not visible in art object itself, but are the grounds of possibility for art to appear for us at all.
• A constitutive, contingent, and interdependent view.
• Situates art, art making, art exhibition, and the art market in a large social and economic field of interdependent communities of social actors, whose exchanges and working agreements constitute the art world as such.
• Removes solitary individual agency (artist, art viewer) from the question of art (what is art? how does a work become art? does it have to be good to be art?).
• The art world is a social and economic network, and, like all networks, has externalities or network effects that create more incentives to be connected to the network than disincentives to remain disconnected.

Contributors to the Institutional Theory of Art

Arthur Danto first gave the notion of the "artworld" a philosophical definition: the artworld provides the theories of art which all members of the artworld tacitly assume in order for there to be objects considered as art (see "The Artworld," Journal of Philosophy (1964)).

• Approaching the question from the point of view of epistemology, definitions of concepts, and interpretation (hermeneutics).
• The artworld does circulate theories about art, and expects members to know them, but there's more to the artworld "club" in operational, social, and economic terms.

George Dickie’s institutional theory of art (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois-Chicago), stated and restated in two books: Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca: NY: Cornell UP, 1974. Art Circle: A Theory of Art. Chicago: Spectrum Press, 1997.

Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)

• Written after Dickie, attempts to define what makes up an artworld using sociological methodology.
• Important points: Artworlds involve collective activities and shared conventions.
• Defines art by collective activities that constitute the production of art, not by the end products (art works).
• Circumvents the pseudo-problem of defining art by some essential property in the works themselves.
• Defines artworld members and the cooperation of individuals in creating a whole artworld system.
• The system, not any individual, constitutes an art object. An art object as such only lives within a social system.

Pierre Bourdieu's view of the Art World

• Social class education, "ownership" of art environments, shared social-class expectations.
• Social class values determine what gets in and what stays out, who's inside and who's outside of the art world.
• See Pierre Bourdieu, "The Production of Belief," 1977 and 1983 (excerpts).

Summing Up:
The Artworld as Social-Economic Network

• The Artworld is made visible in the activities of art world institutions (social and economic networks, organizations, corporations).
• The art work is always presented in institutional context, an art world "container" (galleries, museums, alternative art spaces, biennials, large and small curated exhibitions, catalogues).
• The Artworld is really an aggregation of art worlds, a network emerging from many smaller micro-worlds, subcommunities, all with greater or lesser knowledge of the entire network.
• Artworld institutions create the visible structure and hierarchies in the presentation of art in a sliding scale from:
  • the blockbuster museum shows of canonized artists (e.g. "Matisse-Picasso" at MoMA)
  • the major artist's retrospective (e.g., Richter) as capstone to career and institutional valorization
  • first museum shows for rising stars
  • major gallery shows in the art power cities
  • gallery shows in lesser cities
  • first shows for artists beginning their careers in alternative or university art spaces

The art world is structured as an interdependent network of social-economic actors who cooperate--often contentiously or unknowing--to enact and perpetuate the art world, while at the same time negotiating kinds and levels of cooperation in a mutually understood careerist and competitive context.

• art schools, colleges, and professional art teachers
• artists
• art historians and academic art theorists
• art critics, art writers
• art periodical publishers, magazine editors and professional production staff
• book publishing industry for art books, monographs, museum exhibitions
• professional associations for artists, educators, and dealers
• art dealers and galleries
• curators, museum directors, other museum professionals
• public and private art collection managers
• international art fair organizers, corporations, supporters, funders
• managers and organizations for international art exhibitions (biennials, Documenta, etc.)
• art collectors
• art patrons, donors, public art funders
• private arts support foundations, both direct grants to artists and funding of art organizations (museums, non-profit spaces, university galleries, etc.) (connected to general economy through invested endowments and private contributions)
• all staff levels in art funding organizations: public (local, state, and federal government) and private (foundations, corporate art funding)
• auction houses and art business professionals in the auction companies
• art consultants
• art investment advisors
• art insurance companies
• art market data companies and publishers
• art advertising and art marketing specialists
• directors of non-profit and alternative art spaces
• art materials suppliers and materials fabricators
• conservators, art materials specialists
• museum and collections security systems, climate control, archiving

Doing research: Build out the big picture when studying an artist, an art work, a movement, an art genre

• Situate art work in the constitutive network of relations to disclose how the work came to be included in the artworld.
• Who were the necessary actors, what institutions and artworld containers defined the work, what were the social-economic conditions (follow the money), how was the work/artist received in the artworld, what were the contexts for interpretation

Continue: Artworld Case Studies: consider examples of art works in their conditions of production and reception in the artworld.