Art Worlds by Howard S. Becker PDF

ART WORLDS HOWARD S. BECKER ART WORLDS 25th Anniversary Edition Updated and Expanded Q3 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2008, 1982 by The Regents of the University of California First paperback printing 1984 ISBN: 978-0-520-25636-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) The Library of Congress has catalogued an earlier version of this book as follows: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Becker, Howard Saul, 1928-. Art worlds. Bibliography : p. Includes index. 1. Arts and society. 2. Popular culture. 3. Arts-Psychology. I. Title. NX180.S6B42 700'.1'03 81-2694 Manufactured in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Pennanence of Paper): Contents List of Illustrations vi Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition IX Preface to the First Edition xxiii Acknowledgments xxvi Art Worlds and Collective Activity 2 Conventions 40 3 Mobilizing Resources 68 4 Distributing Art Works 93 5 Aesthetics, Aestheticians, and Critics 131 6 Art and the State 165 7 Editing 192 8 Integrated Professionals, Mavericks, Folk Artists, and Naive Artists 226 9 Arts and Crafts 272 10 Change in Art Worlds 300 11 Reputation 351 12 Epilogue to the 25th Anniversary Edition 372 Bibliography 387 Index 401 v Illustrations 1. Page from a set of Shokunin-e ("depictions of various occupations"), Edo Period, Japan; artist, poet, and calligrapher unknown 12 2. Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. 20 3. e e cummings, "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" 27 4. Three realistic drawings of a tree 31 5. Jim Sohm and Diana Weber in the San Francisco Ballet production of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet 43 6. Conventional symbols for men's and women's toilets 44 7. Oberlin Dance Collective performing Format III 49 8. Master of the Barberini Panels, Annunciation: Reflection 51 9. Score of Randolph Coleman's Format II 62 10. Robert Frank, Navy Recruiting Station, Post Office- Butte, Montana 65 11. Performance of Harry Partch's Oedipus 76 12. Scene from The Red Badge of Courage, directed by John Huston 85 13. Program of a concert given by Ludwig van Beethoven, April2, 1800 136 14. Poster advertising The Bus Show 140 15. The Bus Show, installed 144 16. Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm 147 17. Andy Warhol, Brillo 148 vi vii ILLUSTRATIONS 18. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain 154 19. Orson Welles' modem-dress production of Julius Caesar 176 20. HowardS. Becker, The Blessing of the Fishing Fleet in San Francisco, print and contact sheet 196 21. A performance of Cookie by members of the Tactile Art Group 206 22. Charles I ves 234 23. Conlon Nancarrow and the apparatus for creating player piano compositions 245 24. Quilt designs 252 25. Convicts singing 257 26. Simon Rodia, the Watts Towers 261 27. James Hampton, Throne of the Third Heaven of the National Millenium General Assembly 262 28. Robert Arneson, Sinking Brick Plates 280 29. Marilyn Levine, Brown Satchel 282 30. Robert Arneson, Typewriter 284 31. Robert Arneson, A Tremendous Teapot 285 32. (a) Gertrude Kasebier, untitled photograph; 294 (b) Robert Frank, Covered Car, Long Beach, California 295 33. James M. Davis, The Railroad, 'Tis Like Life 318 34. Stereoscope manufacturing at Underwood and Underwood 323 35. Stock room, Underwood and Underwood 324 36. Ad for stereographs in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue 327 37. The Buddy Petit Jazz Band of New Orleans 334 38. The Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra 335 39. Unknown photographer, A Dewy Morning- The Farmer's Surprise 337 40. Stereoscopes in the schoolroom 338 41. Alfred Stieglitz, The City of Ambition 342 42. Walker Evans, Houses and Billboards, Atlanta, Georgia, 1936 347 Preface to the 25th Anniversarv Edition MAKING IT UP AS YOU GO ALONG: HOW I WROTE ART WORLDS Art Worlds was published in 1982, after many years of gesta- tion, reading, and poking around. It wasn't a "project" in the usual sense. I didn't investigate this group of artists Uazz players in Chi- cago) or that artistic community (the theater world of San Fran- cisco) or some specific form of art practiced in such a context. It was, instead, an empirically based consideration of the kinds of questions you can ask and the kinds of operations you would en- gage in if you set out to study any such phenomenon. So, you could say, Art Worlds is a way of looking at the arts intended to create problems for investigation. My mentor, Everett Hughes, had always warned me to stay away from heavy theorizing, which he said was something to do at the end of your active career, and I believed him. But I had a lot of ideas that were more suitable to a comparative approach than to the close observation of one case, and bnce I started thinking about them seriously I had no choice but to see where that took me. From another point of view, of course, Art Worlds is empirical research, although a lot of the empirical materials were gathered or created by other people for their own purposes, and I just used them. I also used a great deal of my own life as raw material. Both are good sources of data and ideas for any piece of research. lX x PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Anyway, here's how it happened. At the end of the sixties, I had done several large projects on problems of education, focusing on what my colleagues and I called "student culture"-the shared understandings that helped students overcome the difficulties created for them by teachers, school administrators, and others. We had studied student culture in a medical school (Becker et al., 1961), in an undergraduate university (Becker et al., 1968), and in several kinds of vocational education (trade schools and apprenticeships) (Beckel~ 1972). I had gotten very good at such studies. I had the feeling-surely not accurate, but it's how I felt-that I could go into a new educa- tional setting and, in a few days, know what the results of three years of fieldwork would be. And so I was bored. I had a chance to escape this dead end in 1970, when I spent a year's leave from Northwestern University at the Center for Ad- vanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California. That's when I consciously began work on Art Worlds. I wanted to do something different, get into a new area of work. I thought that the sociology of art was an underdeveloped field. There wasn't much done in it and what there was was, in my arrogant young view, not very good, much of it, like the books of European think- ers who then wrote most of what was available on the subject (e.g., Goldmann, 1965), heavily philosophical, engaged with classic problems of aesthetics, concerned with judgments of artistic value, and so on. On the other hand, the small amount of work done in the United States was mostly very quantitative and did not really touch on the organization of artistic activity (e.g., Mueller, 1951). It's an interesting question as to when a piece of research actu- ally begins. In the case of Art Worlds, I could say that it began be- fore I became a sociologist, when I became (or started to become, at the age of eleven or twelve) a piano player. Playing the piano is an experience that colored and continues to color my life and my work as a sociologist. It gave me a lot of what we can reasonably call "data," observations of events, memories of conversations, I knew I could use in my thinking. I followed the practice of Hughes with respect to doing research and thinking about its results, which was very intuitive. He knew how to do it and, when he pushed himself, could explain how he did it, sort of (see his essays collected in Hughes, 1984). I grew up in an era of methodological self-consciousness and thus was pushed to be reflective, more than he had ever been, about how I was doing what I was doing. xi PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION I always begin a project, as I did in the case of Art Worlds, with a strong awareness of what I don't know. My sense of the topic is fuzzy, I'm sure I'm not asking the right questions, and equally sure that, whatever the question or problem finally turns out to be, that I don't know the right methods for studying it. And I am always-! don't brag about this but simply recognize that it is what I do-arrogant enough to ignore most of what people have already written about whatever I am about to study. This is not to say that I have no idea at all. I dislike the way people imagine themselves going into the field as a tabula rasa, waiting for things to "emerge." That's grammatically wrong. Top- ics and problems and themes do not "emerge." It's better, though it's an awkward expression, to say that we "emerge" them, invent them as a result of what we learn once we begin our work. This means using what we learn each day, applying all the theories we have to each day's findings and then, on that basis, generating new problems and questions. We do that with the help of working ideas, what Herbert Blumer (1969, pp. 147-52) called "sensitizing concepts." The connection between theory and research, put sim- ply and abstractly, is that theories raise questions, suggest things to look at, point to what we don't yet know, and research answers questions but also makes us aware of things we hadn't thought of, which in turn suggest theoretical possibilities. I'll give examples of this working back and forth between theory and data later. Among the working ideas that guide me, once I begin to look into something, three are most important: 1. The idea that what sociology studies is how people do things together, what I learned from Blumer (1969, pp. 70-77) to speak of as "joint action." (I prefer to say "col- lective action," but mean the same thing by it.) This means that I always look for all the people involved in whatever I think I am studying, including especially the ones conventionally thought not to be very important. And, further, that I treat everything related to my developing topic-including especially all the physical artifacts-as the product of people acting together. A big research question is how they manage to coordinate their activity so as to produce whatever its result is. 2. The idea of comparison, that you can discover things about one case by looking at another case that seems similar in many ways but isn't quite the same. Placing two or more such cases side by side lets you see how the same xii PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION phenomena-the same forms of collective activity, the same processes-take different forms in different places, what those differences depend on, and how their results differ. 3. The idea of process, that nothing happens all at once, that everything occurs in steps, first this, then that, and that this never stops. So what we take as an end state to be explained is only a place we have chosen to stop our work, not something given in nature (see Becker, Faulkner, and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2005). The sociological analysis consists of finding, step by step, who did what, how they accomplished the coordination their activity required, and what came of their collective activity. I used my year of freedom in Palo Alto to do much of the basic research for what became Art Worlds. This research took two forms-intensive reading and personal experience-and con- sisted of an oscillation between things I learned about how art works were made and ideas I had about what these observations meant (that's how I think of theory). To repeat, the most impor- tant general guiding ideas were that art was, in some way I would discover, collective; that art works resulted from a process; and that comparison would be central to my investigation, that I would always be comparing this art form to that art form, this way of doing things to that way, and that I would expect that com- parison to show me important features of what I was studying. I had been a piano player in bars and nightclubs and striptease joints since my teens, and I knew, from these experiences and other experiences I had had elsewhere in the arts, that works of art got to be what they were through a network of coordinated activities carried on by a lot of different people. My intuition used these experiences to tell me that studying such networks and ac- tivities would be a fruitful way to approach art. Still, I thought I ~d some new experience to reflect on. The area I knew least about from my own experience was visual art-not being able to draw well had left me traumatized since elementary school (see Becker 1998, pp. 132-38)-so I took a class in photography, a vi- sual art that did not require drawing, at the San Francisco Art In- stitute. I got very involved in making photographs and in the then very active photographic world of the San Francisco Bay Area the school introduced me to. Photography became a laboratory in which I could explore my ideas about art worlds. What I learned about the world I was inhabiting from day to day gave me an- xiii PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION swers for which, so to speak, I had no questions, as well as an- swers to questions I had already formulated. So, to get down to specifics, I learned for myself, in the dark- room, how photographers depended on the materials they (and I) bought at the photo supply store. I first learned to make photo- graphic prints on a very lovely paper made by Agfa, called "Record Rapid." Within months of my learning the rudiments of printing on this paper, Agfa stopped producing it, and it soon became clear, when I switched to printing on Varilour, made by DuPont, that printing on any other paper would mean learning again how the paper reacted to different exposure and development times. In case I had not learned the lesson, DuPont soon stopped mak- ing Varilour, and I had to change again. (With the coming of digi- tal photography, all this hard-earned knowledge was quickly outdated, but that's another story.) I was not, of course, the only one inconvenienced when these companies dropped their prod- ucts. Many professionals, for whom this was more important than it was to me, had similar troubles. In fact, as I learned, when platinum-based papers for printing, once used routinely by many photographers, were no longer manufactured, a few diehards continued to print on it, but now they had to make their own pa- per, sensitizing it with a platinum solution. I also took advantage of pieces of "data" my ordinary contacts in the worlds of the arts produced. A friend, Susan Lee, was head of the program in dance at Northwestern University, where I taught. She told me stories about dancers who had been injured when stagehands, failing to clean the stage properly, created danger by leaving pieces of debris around that caused falls. An art dealer I knew casually told me a story of one of "her" artists who had delivered a work to a museum only to find that it was too big to go through the museum's doors and too heavy for its floors to support. My theoretical use of such findings (and I had many similar ones) consisted of generalizing the thing I had observed. Well, what had I observed in my printing experiences? That artists used to working with a particular material would become dependent on that material. When it became unavailable, as when a manu- facturer no longer made it, they might start using some other ma- terial they were not used to or they would fabricate what they could no longer buy themselves. The results would be different, but the photographers would not stop working; they would live with the change. Either way, the theoretical position that was not xiv P R E FA C E T 0 T H E 2 5 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y E D I T I 0 N tenable, based on what I was seeing and experiencing, was a straightforward functionalism, which held that, say, material X was necessary for making art works of type Y, so that if X be- comes unavailable, Y, no longer possible, will cease to exist. The theoretical revision is a small change in wording, but one that has serious consequences: when material X is unavailable, the artist can (a) make the material himself, (b) find someone new to make it, or (c) do without it. If he does without it, the work will no lon- ger be what it might have been, but that doesn't mean it won't ex- ist. In other words, it's not all or nothing. This theoretical result works on the largest scale. It is true not only for something specific and, after all, trivial, like the paper photographs are printed on. In principle, the results hold at the most general level as well, even for whole societies, the phenome- non functionalism always really wanted to generalize about. So, what happens when family forms on which other elements of the society are thought to depend are disrupted or totally changed? Will the society cease to exist? That's the implicit or explicit pre- diction of a serious functionalism. I would say that what holds true for a photographic print made on platinum paper holds true here as well-you can say that the society will cease to exist in the form for which that kind of family was necessary, but the society will not disappear. It will be different, but that's not the same thing as disappearing. In addition to doing this sort of casual observation by partici- pation, I read a lot. My first theoretical thoughts about art arose from some discoveries in fields outside sociology. I had found, through the kind of random and undirected reading I learn most from, several books about music, literature, and visual art that contained ideas that meshed with my own theoretical disposi- tions. Leonard Meyer's Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) used the idea of "convention"-an artificial but agreed on (as we later learned to say, "socially constructed") way of doing something- to analyze the way composers and players used conventional pat- terns of melody, harmony, and rhythm to create emotional tension and release, and thus musical meaning. Meyer's colleague, Bar- bara Hermstein Smith (1968) showed how poets similarly used conventional devices to indicate when a poem was finished. And Ernst Gombrich (1960), the esteemed art historian, had analyzed how painters indicated, through the use of conventional tech- niques, "real" trees, people, and other objects (William Ivins [ 1953] xv PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION had done something similar in his analysis of techniques of etch- ing and engraving, and I knew that book too). "Convention," as these people used the idea, referred to things that the people who made art and the people who read or listened to it.or looked at it shared-to ways of seeing and hearing that were known by everyone involved and thus formed the basis for their collective action. And when I saw that these scholars were talking about the same thing I was-that "collective action" and "convention" were the same thing-I knew that I could use all the detailed research they had done as raw material for my own work. That gave me the courage to go on. I had a piece of theory, if I can dignify it that way, to guide my reading. Fieldworkers know that complaints are especially good data about organizational activity. Why? Because organizations consist of (here's the theory) regularized ways of interacting, ways known to everyone taking part as the way things are done. Partic- ipants take these ways for granted-they are what I was calling "conventions" in the study of the arts-and are upset when others do not behave as expected. And they complain, their complaints making clear what had been taken for granted as "the way things are done here," which is, after all, what a sociologist wants to know. Guided by this small piece of theory, my reading took a differ- ent turn and became a kind of fieldwork. I began looking for raw (or "rawer") data. Guided by my axiom that social life is collective action, I looked for material that told me who all the people were who helped in any way to make a work of art. I especially looked for autobiographical materials-books on the arts by participants in them-and especially for books filled with complaints about organizations and fellow workers. These were easy to find. Al- most any book about the arts is filled with such material. Holly- wood composers complain that producers, who commission film scores, don't know anything about music and make impossible requests that cannot be fulfilled (Faulkner, 1983); painters com- plain about the difficulty of finding the materials they want or about collectors and gallery owners who don't pay what the art- ists feel their work is worth (Moulin, 1967); publishers complain that authors make endless changes in their books, and authors complain that publishers don't publicize their books adequately. Other books investigated the activities of people usually thought subsidiary to the "real" work of art. So Sutherland (1976), a liter- ary analyst, showed how publishers played an important part in xvi PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION the construction of Victorian British novels, and Harmetz ( 1977), a film journalist, systematically explored the contribution of ev- eryone who had anything to do with making The Wizard of Oz- the seamstresses who made the costumes, the little people who played the Munchkins, but especially such key personnel as the composers of the musical score, who not only, as she shows, pro- vided such continuity and coherence as the film has (the director, who might have done this, was replaced several times) but also were responsible for the important idea of filming the early se- quences of the film, which take place in Kansas, in black and white, and changing to color when Dorothy arrives in the Land of Oz. Was I just collecting anecdotes, cute stories to make my dry theories "more interesting"? Not at all. I'll explain here the basic method I used then and still use to develop my ideas with the help of empirical instances like these. In the case of art (but it's the same for anything I want to think about), I first list what Everett Hughes described as the cast of characters, all the people who might reasonably (or even unreason- ably) be said to contribute to the event or object I want to analyze (the film, the novel, the musical or theatrical or dance perfor- mance). It's particularly important not to be blinded by conven- tion here. Are stagehands part of the collective effort that creates ballet? Are ticket sellers and parking garage attendants? Most people, I think, would think it unreasonable to add these people to any list of crucial participants. But without them the show would not go on. So I include them. (The most inclusive list con- ventionally produced is the list of film credits that follows any feature film.) Having made my list, I look for trouble, as earlier described. This tack is also unconventional. Most analysts regard troubles and difficulties as perhaps inevitable but by no means central to the understanding of a work of art, and maybe not even a very nice thing to look into. I make them central, supposing that by so doing that I will find the basic forms of cooperation that make the art possible. And then I follow the two other ideas I described as central: process and comparison. I'll combine these by describing how I used an experience I had as I learned photography during my year in Palo Alto, an experience that shaped my understanding of the nature of works of visual art and, beyond that, works of art of all kinds. Photographers usually make many more exposures than they xvii PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION actually use. When I learned to make pictures, before digital pho- tography had been invented, they shot rolls of of film; usually, for those using 35 mm cameras (which most photographers used), thirty-six exposure rolls. They typically made many exposures of the same objects, places, people, and events. At an extreme, the photographer might use a camera fitted with a motor drive (espe- cially when shooting sports events) and might make dozens of ex- posures of the same event in quick succession. After they developed the film, they made what was called a "contact sheet" or a "proof sheet," showing each of the thirty-six exposures. This gave them a convenient way of inspecting what they had done. Most photographers considered this stage of inspection, when they chose among the many exposures they had made of the same or similar matters, crucial. They would decide which of the many similar images was the one they wanted, the one where the light or the framing or the arrangement of people and their expres- sions or of objects best conveyed what the photographer now de- cided was the thing to convey. This process of decision making, which photographers called "editing," produced the raw material for the next step in the process, which was making prints from the chosen negatives. As I learned more about photography, I also learned that print- ing involved many similar small decisions: about the degree of contrast in the paper you chose to print on, about how long you exposed the paper to the enlarger's light and how long the paper remained in the developing solution-all of these contributing to differences in the final photograph. These differences were, in the end, substantial, creating quite different-looking images with quite different meaning and emotional effect. So my initial com- mitment to the theory of process was vindicated by showing up here in such an explicit way in photographers' work. Don't think that all I needed to learn to arrive at the role of process was this one thing about photography. Think of what I've just described, rather, as a metaphor for the accumulation of the hundreds of similar things I learned about all kinds of arts. Here is where the operation of comparison comes in. The key element in the process of editing that photographers engaged in was choice. At a crucial point-the weeding out of large numbers of exposures-the photographer made choices, which then influenced the resulting work. And this process of choice continued. It's not just one choice that influences the final image; it's a continuing series of choices. Well, I could and did ask xviii PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION myself, let's suppose that a similar process of choice affects other art objects and events in a similar way. The research question thus became for me, as I continued my reading and informal in- vestigations, who makes what choices about a work and with what results? Another book seriously influenced my thinking: J. H. Suther- land's account (1976) of the relations between publishers and au- thors in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English literature, the relations between such esteemed novelists as Charles Dick- ens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy and the men who published their books. Sutherland's ex- tensive investigations of the archives of publishing firms revealed that publishers interfered extensively and consequentially in the works they published. They suggested changes in plots and lan- guage, insisted on formats that maximized profits from sales to the then ubiquitous lending libraries, and in many other ways af- fected the content and style of the books they published. Sutherland's examples taught me that other people besides the putative artist were consequentially involved in the editing pro- cess, making choices that helped shape the resulting work. And I carried the comparative operation on with this in mind. Further examples were not hard to find: film editors and composers of film scores, gallery owners and museum curators, literary editors, and so on and so on. I finally saw the list of credits at the end of a big Hollywood film as the ultimate symbol of the cooperative net- works that made the art I was talking about. Comparison consists of finding something in common between two things and then looking for how they differ. Both operations are analytically important. The similarity, in the case of the edit- ing process, lay in the idea of choice, in seeing that art works did not simply pop into existence but were constructed a piece at a time, by the making and placing of every piece. But finding a sim- ilarity led immediately to looking for an underlying dimension of difference. Looking at the differences between examples-between, say, photography and writing novels-produces different versions of that process, introduces different actors, and emphasizes dif- ferent steps. The physical process of making the work is more present for photographers, and all the choices involved seem to be in their hands, while novelists typically produce an original whose copies are made by other people using different kinds of machinery and different production processes (not that authors don't complain about the physical results!). The two aspects of xix PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION the comparison open up new questions for investigation, new roads to follow in later work. Writing a book like Art Worlds is itself a process. I didn't set out to write a book about art. I only wanted to explore my intuition that art was a collective activity and see where that led. Once I became interested in the topic, I began to teach a class in the so- ciology of art, which was then not so common a topic as it has since become. Giving lectures every week on one or another as- pect of what had interested me in my reading and reflection on my own experiences created a framework, an outline of topics. The necessity of interesting students also led me to create little set pieces I could do in class: the story of the man who built the Watts Towers in Los Angeles fascinated students and became the kernel of the chapter on mavericks and their art. As I accumulated examples, compared them, taught about them, and created the framework that could put them in some coherent order, I began to envision papers on this or that aspect of the process. I wrote these papers partly because they told me they wanted to be written, but also in response to invitations to speak here, participate in a conference there, contribute an article to a book or journal. Each request seemed like a summons to do some- thing I should do, though of course I had no obligation to do any of it. After several years, I had accumulated seven or eight articles on various aspects of what I now saw as a sort of unified theory. I laid the articles I had done out on the floor and saw-it was a visual discovery as much as a product of rational thought-where the holes were and what I would have to write to fill them up. I finally had to confront the question that is probably the single most difficult one for any writer to answer: when am I through? Is this research done? Is this book done? How will I know? Isn't there always one more thing that must be done? (See, again, Becker, Faulkner, and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2005.) With Art Worlds I did not have to worry about whether I had done enough interviews or observation. My data, my examples, only had to cover a wide enough variety of situations and art forms so that I could feel I was not leaving out anything obvious that could make my analytic framework more complex. Complexity was my goal, not generalizability. Or, rather, my generalizations were going to be about what was possible, what would be worth looking for in an investigation of artistic activity. So, in essence, I just had to decide when enough was enough. xx PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION I solved the problem by starting to think about my work on the question of art as collective activity as itself a process, in which writing a book was a stage, but not the last stage. The book was, rather, a progress report on a line of work that extended into the future. My generalizations might be wrong or incomplete, but they were, after all, provisional, as all scientific conclusions nec- essarily are (see Latour, 1987). So I never intended to provide a comprehensive Theory of Art, the capital letters signifying unity, completeness, definitiveness. That has never been my idea of theory. To me theory is a more or less coherent set of ideas that tell me what to look for as I con- tinue my investigations of a topic, and that was what I expected An Worlds to provide, to me and to anyone who read it and thought the ideas worth pursuing. In the best Kuhnian sense (Kuhn, 1970), the object of the book was to provide a framework that would continue to generate researchable ideas. The project continues, to this day, as I continue to explore some of those researchable ideas. But it also involves, as the ideas in the book suggest, other people. This is not the story of a heroic thinker working in isolation to create a new vision and bring it to fruition. No such Romantic events are involved. When I wrote Arl Worlds I found people to think with-all the authors I consulted, some of whom I have mentioned here, and also the people I talked to who were actively engaged in art work and with some of whom I collaborated, as a student or colleague. I continued looking for colleagues that way, but also found people with whom actually to cooperate on specific projects. I'll trace out one such line of work that came into being after the book. My early work on the book had led me to become interested in the work of French sociologists of art. The only one known in the United States at the time was Pierre Bourdieu, but I was much more interested in the more ethnographic and exciting work of Raymonde Moulin. She had written a book on art markets in France in the mid-twentieth century (Moulin, 1967) that I pos- sessed but could not read, because at the time I did not read French, though I had passed an examination for the doctorate certifying that I could. I taught myself to read French in order to read Moulin's study, and this led to meeting her, to being invited to spend a month at her Centre at the CNRS, and thus meet- ing Pierre-Michel Menger, Dominique Pasquier, Sabine Chalvon- Demersay, and other sociologists of art, many of whom also gave xxi PREFACE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION me books and papers in French to read. The more I read, the easier it was to read still more. Then Alain Pessin invited me to Grenoble to take part in a con- ference on the "sociologie des oeuvres" (Majastre and Pessin, 2001). I wrote a paper for this meeting (''L'oeuvre elle-meme") that.explored the implications of the argument in Art Worlds, that works of art have no stable existence but are continually chang- ing. This topic continued to occupy me, and when I had an op- portunity to organize a conference on the sociology of art for the Social Science Research Council of New York, I made it the focus of our meeting. A number of social scientists and humanists collab- orated in this venture to produce a book of essays (Becker, Faulkner, and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2005) exploring various facets of the problem (two of the papers on which the conference was based- mine and Menger's-had been presented at the Grenoble meet- ing). And, by no means least, as Robert Faulkner and I discussed the paper he was presenting at the conference, which dealt with the way jazz players practiced, we discovered a topic we both wanted to work on: the jazz repertoire, how it came into being and was maintained and deployed in the ordinary working life of musicians. We are well started on this project now. I don't mean to recommend to researchers wanting to know when their work is done that they learn a new language, find new colleagues, and do more research. The lesson I draw from my ex- perience is, rather, that we are never through, but occasionally stop to tell our colleagues what we have learned. Preface to the First Edition Maybe the years I spent playing the piano in taverns in Chicago and elsewhere led me to believe that the people who did that mundane work were as important to an understanding of art as the better-known players who produced the recognized classics of jazz. Growing up in Chicago-where Louis Sullivan's democratic philos- ophy was embodied in the skyscrapers of the downtown I loved to prowl around and Moholy-Nagy's Institute of Design gave a Mid- western home to the refugee Bauhaus' concern for the craft in art-may have led me to think that the craftsmen who help make art works are as important as the people who conceive them. My rebellious temperament may be the cause of a congenital antielit- ism. Learning the "Chicago tradition" of sociology from Everett C. Hughes and Herbert Blumer surely led to a skeptici~m about con- ventional definitions of the objects of sociological study. All those things had a part in forming the attitude of this book, quite different from the one with which sociologists usually ap- proach the arts. I have treated art as the work some people do, and have been more concerned with patterns of cooperation among the people who make the works than with the works themselves or with those conventionally defined as their creators. In doing that, I have found it natural to use the style of analysis I and many others have used in analyzing other kinds of work and work settings. That has inevitably meant treating art as not so very different from other xxiii XXiV PRE FA C E T 0 T H E F I R S T E D I T I 0 N kinds of work, and treating people defined as artists as not so very different from other kinds of workers, especially the other workers who participate in the making of art works. The idea of an art world forms the backbone of my analysis. "Art world" is commonly used by writers on the arts in a loose and metaphoric way, mostly to refer to the most fashionable people associated with those newsworthy objects and events that com- mand astronomical prices. I have used the term in a more technical way, to denote the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that art world is noted for. This tautological definition mirrors the analysis, which is less a logically organized sociological theory of art than an exploration of the potential of the idea of an art world for increasing our under- standing of how people produce and consume art works. Each chapter approaches that idea from a slightly different vantage point, suggesting the important features of art worlds, outlining how they come into existence and persist, noting how their opera- tions affect the form and content of art works, and reinterpreting standard questions in analyses of the arts in ways suggested by all the foregoing. I think it generally true that sociology does not discover what no one ever knew before, in this differing from the natural sciences. Rather, good social science produces a deeper understanding of things that many people are already pretty much aware of. This is not the place to pursue that argument. But I should say that what- ever virtue this analysis has does not come from the discovery of any hitherto unknown facts or relations. Instead, it comes from exploring systematically the implications of the art world concept. Though the basic idea seems commonplace, many of its implica- tions are not. Thus, it seems obvious to say that if everyone whose work contributes to the finished art work does not do his part, the work will come out differently. But it is not obvious to pursue the implication that it then becomes a problem to decide which of all these people is the artist, while the others are only support personnel. Because my focus has been on forms of social organization, I have frequently compared art forms and works which have quite different reputations as art. I have spoken of Titian and comic strips in the same breath and have discussed Hollywood film scores or rock-and-roll tunes as seriously as the work of Beethoven or Mozart. In fact, since the problem of reputation is central to the XXV + P R E FA C E T 0 T H E F I R S T E D I T I 0 N analysis, such comparisons occur frequently. I remind readers who find them offensive that the principle of analysis is social organi- zational, not aesthetic. This approach seems to stand in direct contradiction to the dominant tradition in the sociology of art, which defines art as something more special, in which creativity comes to the surface and the essential character of the society expresses itself, especially in great works of genius. The dominant tradition takes the artist and art work, rather than the network of cooperation, as central to the analysis of art as a social phenomenon. In light of this differ- ence, it might be reasonable to say that what I have done here is not the sociology of art at all, but rather the sociology of occupations applied to artistic work. I would not quarrel with that way of putting it. I have not argued directly with the more traditional point of view, except in the final chapter, and deal with some of its most important preoccupations only glancingly. It is not that those con- cerns cannot be dealt with in the terms proposed here, but they are not central to the approach I have taken, and so have a subordinate place in my discussion. Furthermore, I have put those questions in a way that makes them relevant to what I want to talk about and thus does not deal with them adequately in their own terms. I am not sure that the two styles of analysis conflict or contradict one another. They may just be two different sets of questions asked of the same empirical materials. I have, of course, not been the first to think about the arts in this way. There is a hearty tradition of relativistic, skeptical, "demo- cratic" writing about the arts. The example of such ethnomusicol- ogists as Charles Seeger and, especially, Klaus Wachsmann gave me much to think about and to imitate. William Ivins' Prints and Visual Communication started me thinking about many of the problems I take up later and provided some of the tools needed to work on them. Harrison and Cynthia White's analysis of the world of nineteenth-century French painting suggested the advantages of studying all the artists of a period rather than only the great names. These, and other sources I have used liberally in the text, indicate something of the tradition that lies behind what I have done. Like all traditions, its makers are not responsible for what latecomers do in its name. Acknowledgments Because this book focuses on the networks of cooperation and assistance through which work gets done, I am even more con- scious than most authors of how what I have done depends on what a multitude of people and organizations have done for me. I cannot be detailed and specific in my thanks-it would take for- ever. So I have listed names alphabetically and let it go at that, which doesn't mean that I am not truly grateful. I began the work on which the book is based in 1969-70, when I was a Fellow (supported in part by a fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health) of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; there is no better place for the kind of aimless exploratory inquiry I was ready for that year. I completed the first draft of the complete manuscript in 1978-79, while I was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. I thank both organizations for their support. In addition, I have been a member of the Sociology Department of Northwestern University since 1965; it has been a wonderful and encouraging intellectual home. Portions of this book first appeared in somewhat different form in the following journals and books, and are adapted here with the permission of the original publishers: "Art as Collective Action," reprinted from American Sociological Review 39 (December 1974): 767-76, with the permission of the American Sociological Association. xxvi XXVii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS "Art Photography in America," reprinted from Journal of Communication 25 (Winter 1975): 74-78, with their permission. "Art Worlds and Social Types," reprinted from American Behavioral Scientist 19 (July 1976): 703-18, with the permis- sion of Sage Publications. "Arts and Crafts," reprinted from American Journal of So- ciology 83 (January 1978): 862-89, with the permission of the University of Chicago Press. "Stereographs: Local, National and International Art Worlds," reprinted from Edward W. Earle, ed., Points of View: The Stereograph in America-A Cultural History (Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1979), pp. 88-96, with their permission. "Aesthetics, Aestheticians, and Critics," reprinted from Studies in Visual Communication 6 (Spring 1980): 56-68, with their permission. Publishers have granted permission to quote from the following works: Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, University of Cali- fornia Press William Culp Darrah, World of Stereographs, William C. Darrah Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Buferd, The Quitters: Women and Domestic Art, Doubleday & Company, Inc. Raymonde Moulin, Le Marc he de Ia peinture en France, Les Editions de Minuit Fran~oise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, McGraw-Hill Book Company Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Oxford University Press Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Fixed Marks and Variable Constancies: A Parable of Literary Value," by permission of the author Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History, Yale University Press The following friends and colleagues helped in all sorts of ways: Bernard Beck, Nan Becker, H. Stith Bennett, Bennett Berger, Wil- liam Blizek, Philip Brickman, Derral Cheatwood, Kenneth Donow, Edward Earle, Philip Ennis, Carolyn Evans, Robert Faulkner, Eliot Freidson, Jane Fulcher, Blanche Geer, Barry Glassner, Hans XXViii A C K N 0 W L E D G M E N T S Haacke, Karen Huffstodt, Irving Louis Horowitz, Everett C. Hughes, Bruce Jackson, Edward Kealy, Robert Leighninger, Leo Litwak, Eleanor Lyon, Arline Meyer, Leonard Meyer, Dan Mor- ganstern, Chandra Mukerji, Charles Nanry, Susan Lee Nelson, Ri- chard Peterson, Ellen Poole, Barbara Rosenblum, Clinton Sanders, Grace Seiberling, Barbara Hermstein Smith, Carl Smith, Malcolm Spector, Anselm Strauss, Helen Tartar, Susan Vehlow, Gilberta Velho, Klaus Wachsman, Brenda Way, and Nancy Weiss. In this 25th Anniversary Edition, permission to reprint the inter- view with Alain Pessin was kindly granted by the Presses de l'Universite Laval. The interview also appeared in Sociologie de l'art, OPuS 8. 1 Art Worlds and Collective Activitv IT WAS MY practice to be at my table every morning at 5:30A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow my- self no mercy. An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £ 5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy. During all those years at Waltham Cross he was never once late with the coffee which it was his duty to bring me. I do not know that I ought not to feel that I owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had. By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast. ANTHONY TROLLOPE, 1947 , p. 227 The English novelist may have told the story facetiously, but being awakened and given coffee was nevertheless inte- gral to the way he worked. No doubt he could have done without the coffee if he had to; but he didn't have· to. No doubt anyone could have performed that service; but, given the way Trollope worked, it had to be performed. All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people. Through their cooperation, the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be. The work always shows signs of that cooperation. The forms of cooperation may be ephemeral, but often become more or less routine, producing patterns of collective activity we can call an art world. The existence of art worlds, as well as the way their existence affects both the production and consumption of art works, suggests a sociological approach to the arts. It is not an approach that produces aesthetic judgments, although that is a task many sociologists of art have set for themselves. It produces, instead, an understanding of the complexity of the cooperative networks through which art happens, of the way the activities of both Trollope and his groom meshed 1 2 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY with those of printers, publishers, critics, librarians, and readers in the world of Victorian literature, and of the similar networks and results involved in all the arts. ART AS ACTIVITY Think of all the activities that must be carried out for any work of art to appear as it finally does. For a symphony orchestra to give a concert, for instance, instruments must have been invented, manufactured, and maintained, a nota- tion must have been devised and music composed using that notation, people must have learned to play the notated notes on the instruments, times and places for rehearsal must have been provided, ads for the concert must have been placed, publicity must have been arranged and tickets sold, and an audience capable of listening to and in some way under- standing and responding to the performance must have been recruited. A similar list can be compiled for any of the per- forming arts. With minor variations (substitute materials for instruments and exhibition for performance), the list applies to the visual and (substituting language and print for mate- rials and publication for exhibition) literary arts. The list of things that must be done varies, naturally, from one medium to another, but we can provisionally list the kinds of activities that must be performed. To begin, some- one must have an idea of what kind of work is to be made and of its specific form. The originators may get that idea long before actually making the work, or the idea may arise in the process of working. The idea may be brilliant and original, profound and moving, or trivial and banal, for all practical purposes indistinguishable from thousands of other ideas produced by others equally untalented or unin- terested in what they are doing. Producing the idea may require enormous effort and concentration; it may come as a gift, out of the blue; or it may be produced routinely, by the manipulation of well-known formulas. The way the work is produced bears no necessary relationship to its quality. Every way of producing art works for some people and not for others; every way of producing art produces work of every conceivable grade of quality, however that is defined. 3 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY Once conceived, the idea must be executed. Most artistic ideas take some physical form: a film, a painting or sculp- ture, a book, a dance, a something which can be seen, heard, held. Even conceptual art, which purports to consist solely of ideas, takes the form of a typescript, a talk, photographs, or some combination of those. The means for the execution of some art works seem to be easily and routinely available, so that part of the making of the art work causes no one any special effort or worry. We can, for instance, have books printed or photocopied with relatively little trouble. Other art works require skilled exe- cution. A musical idea in the form of a written score has to be performed, and musical performance requires training, skill, and judgment. Once a play is written, it must be acted, and that requires skill, training, and judgment too. (So, in fact, does printing a book, but we are less aware of that.) Another crucial activity in the production of art works consists of manufacturing and distributing the materials and equipment most artistic activities require. Musical instru- ments, paints and canvas, dancers' shoes and costumes, cameras and film-all these have to be made and made avail- able to the people who use them to produce art works.. Making art works takes time, and making the equipment and materials takes time, too. That time has to be diverted from other activities. Artists ordinarily make time and equip- ment available for themselves by raising money in one way or another and using the money to buy what they need. They usually, though not always, raise money by distributing their works to audiences in return for some form of payment. Of course, some societies, and some art activities, do not operate within a money economy. Instead, a central govern- ment agency may allocate resources for art projects. In an- other kind of society, people who produce art may barter their work for what they need, or may produce work in the time available to them after they have met their other obli- gations. They may perform their ordinary activities in such a way as to produce what we or they might identify as art, even though the work is not commonly called that, as when women produced quilts for family use. However it is done, work gets distributed and the distribution produces the 4 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY means with which further resources for making further work can be gathered. Other activities that we can lump together as "support" must also take place. These vary with the medium: sweeping up the stage and bringing the coffee, stretching and priming canvases and framing the finished paintings, copy editing and proofreading. They include all sorts of technical activi- ties-manipulating the machinery people use in executing the work-as well as those which merely free executants from normal household chores. Think of support as a residual category, designed to hold whatever the other categories do not make an easy place for. Someone must respond to the work once it is done, have an emotional or intellectual reaction to it, "see something in it," appreciate it. The old conundrum-if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?-can be solved here by simple definition: we are interested in the event which consists of a work being made and appreciated; for that to happen, the activity of response and appreciation must occur. Another activity consists of creating and maintaining the rationale according to which all these other activities make sense and are worth doing. Rationales typically take the form, however naive, of a kind of aesthetic argument, a philosophical justification which identifies what is being made as art, as good art, and explains how art does some- thing that needs to be done for people and society. Every so- cial activity carries with it some such rationale, necessary for those moments when others not engaged in it ask what good it is anyway. Someone always asks such questions, if only the people engaged in the activity themselves. Subsidiary to this is the specific evaluation of individual works to determine whether they meet the standards contained in the more general justification for that class of work or whether, per- haps, the rationale requires revision. Only by this kind of critical review of what has been and is being done can par- ticipants in the making of art works decide what to do as they move on to the next work. Most of these things cannot be done on the spur of the 5 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY moment. They require some training. People must learn the techniques characteristic of the kind of work they are going to do, whether it be the creation of ideas, execution, some one of the many support activities, or appreciation, response, and criticism. Accordingly, someone must carry on the edu- cation and training through which such learning occurs. Finally, to do all this supposes conditions of civic order such that people engaged in making art can count on a certain stability, can feel that there are some rules to the game they are playing. If systems of support and distribution rely on notions of private property, the rights to that property must be guaranteed in some way. The state, pursuing its interest in the ends for which people are mobilized for col- lective action, must allow the production of the objects and events which are the art, and may provide some support itself. I have repeatedly spoken in the imperative: people must do this, the state must not do that. Who says so? Why must any of these people do any of these things? It is easy enough to imagine or remember cases in which these activities have not been carried out. Recall how I began: "Think of all the activities that must be carried out for any work of art to ap- pear as it finally does." That is, the imperatives all operate if the event is to occur in a specific way and no other. But the work need not occur in that way, or in any other particular way. If one or another of these activities does not get done, the work will occur in some other way. If no one appreciates the work, it will go unappreciated. If no one supports its doing, it will go unsupported. If specific items of equipment are not available, the work will be done without them. Naturally, doing without any of these things affects the work produced. It will not be the same work. But that is far differ- ent from saying that it cannot exist at all unless these activities are performed. Any of them can be performed in a variety of ways with an equal variety of results. Poets, for instance, depend on printers, editors, and pub- lishers to circulate their work. But should those facilities not be available, for political or economic reasons, they may find other means of circulating it. Russian poets circulate their 6 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY work in privately typed manuscripts, readers retyping the manuscript to make further circulating copies, when the government printing houses will not allow official printing or distribution. If the commercial publishers of capitalist countries will not publish a book, poets can, as American poets often do, mimeograph or photocopy their work, per- haps making unofficial use of the equipment of some school or office for which they work. If, that done, no one will distribute the work, they can distribute it themselves, giving copies away to friends and relatives, or just handing it out to strangers on street corners. Or one can simply not distrib- ute the work, and keep it for oneself. Emily Dickinson did that when, after a few unfortunate experiences with edi- tors who altered her "illiterate" punctuation, she decided that she would not be able to publish her work in the form she wanted (Johnson, 1955). Of course, by using other than the conventional means of distribution or no channel of distribution at all, artists suffer some disadvantages, and their work takes a different form than it might have if regular distribution had been available. They usually see this situation as an unmixed curse, and hope to gain access to regular channels of distribution, or whatever other conventional facilities they find unavailable. But since, as we will see, the regular means of carrying on support activities substantially constrain what can be done, not to have them available, inconvenient or worse as that may be, also opens up otherwise unavailable possibilities. Access to all the regular means of doing things is a mixed blessing. This is not, then, a functionalist theory which suggests that activities must occur in a particular way or the social system will not survive. The social systems which produce art sur- vive in all sorts of ways, though never exactly as they have in the past. The functionalist suggestion is true in the trivial sense that ways of doing things will not survive exactly as they are unless all the things necessary to that survival con- tinue to aid in it. It is misleading in suggesting that there is any necessity for such ways to survive exactly as they are. 7 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY THE DIVISION OF LABOR Given that all these things must be done for an art work to occur as it actually does, who will do them? Imagine, as one extreme case, a situation in which one person did everything: made everything, invented everything, had all the ideas, performed or executed the work, experienced and appre- ciated it, all without the assistance or help of anyone else. We can hardly imagine such a thing, because all the arts we know, like all the human activities we know, involve the cooperation of others. If other people do some of these activities, how do the participants divide up the jobs? Think of the opposite ex- treme, a situation in which each activity is done by a separate person, a specialist who does nothing but that one operation, much like the division of tasks on an industrial assembly line. This too is an imaginary case, though some arts approximate it in practice. The list of credits which ends the typical Hol- lywood feature film gives explicit recognition to such a finely divided set of activities. The fine divisions are traditional in the making of large-budget films, partly enforced by union jurisdictional arrangements and partly by the traditional reward system of public credit on which careers in the film industry are based (Faulkner, forthcoming, discusses the role of credits in the careers of Hollywood composers). There seems to be no limit to the fineness of the division of tasks. Consider the list of technical credits for the 1978 film Hurricane (see Chart 1). The film employed a director of photography, but Sven Nykvist did not actually operate the camera; Edward Lachman did that. Lachman, however, did not do all the jobs associated with operating the camera; Dan Myhram loaded it and, when the focus had to be shifted in the course of filming a scene, Lars Karlsson "pulled" the focus. If something went wrong with a camera, camera me- chanic Gerhard Hentschel fixed it. The work of clothing and making up the actors, preparing and taking care of the script, preparing scenery and props, seeing to the continuity of the dialogue and the visual appearance of the film, even 8 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY CHART 1 HURRICANE, TECHNICAL CREDITS Directed by Jan Troell Produced by Dino de Laurentiis Screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. Based on the novel Hurricane by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall Executive Producer Lorenzo Semple, Jr. Director of Photography Sven Nykvist, A.S.C. Music composed by Nino Rota Film Editor Sam O'Steen Production, Costumes and Sets designed by Danilo Donati Second Unit Director Frank Clark 1st assistant director Jose Lopez Rodero 2nd assistant director Fred Viannellis 3rd assistant director Ginette Angosse Lopez Assistant to director George Oddner Second unit assistant director Giovanni Soldati Second unit assistant manager Goran Setterberg Camera operator Edward Lachman Second unit & Underwater camera operator Sergio Martinelli Focus puller Lars Karlsson Second unit focus puller Sergio Melaranci Loader DanMyhrman Camera mechanic Gerhard Hentschel Gaffer Alfio Ambrogi Special effects Glen Robinson Aldo Puccini Joe Day Special effects crew Jack Sampson Raymond Robinson Joe Bernardi Wayne Rose Construction Manager Aldo Puccini TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE TANK AND VILLA LALIQUE C.G.E.E. ALSTHOM-PATEETE UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF MICHEL STREBEL Choreographer Coco Technical consultant Milton Forman Art director Giorgio Postiglione Illustrator Mentor Huebner 9 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY Make-up artist Massimo de Rossi Assistant make-up Adonellade Rossi Script supervisor Nikki Clapp Hair stylist Ennio Marroni Props George Hamilton Wardrobe Franco Antonelli Sound mixer Laurie Clarkson Boom men John Stevenson John Pitt Key grip Mario Stella Stunt co-ordinator Miguel Pedregosa Stuntmen Pablo Garcia Roman Ariznavarreta Still Photographer Frank Conner Special Stills Alfonso Avincola Unit publicist Tom Gray Dialogue coach Norman Schwartz Assistant film editor Bobbie Di Production Auditor Brian Gibbs Assistant Auditor Rex Saluz Crane Operator DanHoge Casting by McLean/Ebbins/ Man sou Local Casting and Dialogue Coach John Alarimo Vehicles Fiat the management of financial matters during filming-all these jobs were similarly divided among a number of people whose names appeared on the screen. These credits still do not give full expression to the fineness of the division of labor involved; someone must have typed and duplicated copies of the script, someone else copied the parts from Nino Rota's score, and a conductor and musicians, here unnamed, per- formed that music. In fact, situations of art making lie somewhere between the extremes of one person doing everything and every smallest activity being done by a separate person. Workers of various kinds develop a traditional "bundle of tasks" (Hughes, 1971, pp. 311-16). To analyze an art world we look for its characteristic kinds of workers and the bundle of tasks each one does. Nothing in the technology of any art makes one division of 10 \RT WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY tasks more "natural" than another, although some divisions are so traditional that we often regard them as given in the nature of the medium. Consider the relations between the composition and performance of music. In conventional symphonic and chamber music in the mid-twentieth cen- tury, the two activities occur separately and are seen as two different, highly specialized jobs. That was not always true. Beethoven, like most composers of his time, also performed, both his own music and that of others, as well as conducting and improvising on the piano. Even now, an occasional per- former composes, as did the piano virtuosi Rachmaninoff and Paderewski. Composers sometimes perform, often be- cause performance pays a great deal better than composi- tion. Stravinsky, for instance, wrote three pieces for piano, two with orchestral accompaniment, designed to be playable by a pianist of no greater virtuosity than himself (the one without orchestra was written for two pianos, so that he and his son Soulima could play it in towns too small to have a symphony orchestra). Performing these pieces (he reserved performance rights for himself for a number of years) and conducting his own works allowed him to maintain the standard of living he had originally developed on the basis of his professional association with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russe (see White, 1966, pp. 65-66, 279-80, and 350). The training of classical musicians reinforces this division of labor. Philip Glass, a contemporary composer, has ex- plained that the people who enter the Juilliard School of Music to study composition are usually, when they enter, competent performers on some instrument. Once they enter the school, however, they spend more time composing and correspondingly less time on their instrument, while people specializing in instrumental performance continue to prac- tice full time. Soon the instrumental specialists play so much better than the would-be composers that the latter stop playing; they can write things that are easy for the instru- mentalists but that they themselves cannot play (Ashley, 1978). In jazz, composition is much less important than perfor- mance. The standard tunes musicians play (blues and old ll ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY popular songs) merely furnish the framework for the real creation. When musicians improvise, they use the raw ma- terials of the song, but many players and listeners will not know who actually composed "Sunny Side of the Street" or "Exactly Like You"; some of the most important improvisa- tory frameworks, like blues, have no author at all. One might say that the composer is the player, considering the improv- isation the composition. In rock music, the two activities are, ideally, carried on by the same person. Fully competent performers compose their own music. Indeed, rock groups who play other people's music get tagged with the derogatory label "copy groups," and a young group comes of age the day it begins to play its own compositions. The activities are separate-performing is not simultaneous with composing, as it is in jazz-but both belong to one person's bundle of tasks (Bennett, 1980). The same variations in the division of tasks can be found in every art. Some art photographers, like Edward Weston, always made their own prints, regarding printing as integral to the making of the picture; others, like Henri Cartier-Bres- son, never made their own prints, leaving that to technicians who knew how they wanted it done. Poets writing in the Western tradition do not ordinarily incorporate their own handwriting into the finished product, leaving it to printers to put the material into a readable form; we see autograph copies of their poetry only when we are interested in the revisions they made in their own hand on the manuscript (see, for instance, Eliot, 1971) or in a rare case such as that of William Blake, who engraved his own plates, on which poems appeared in his own hand, and printed them himself, so that his hand was part of the work. But in much Oriental poetry the calligraphy is as important as the poem's content (see figure 1); to have it printed in mechanical type would destroy something crucial. More mundanely, saxophone and clarinet players buy their reeds at the music store, but oboists and bassoonists buy pieces of cane and manufacture their own. Each kind of person who participates in the making of art works, then, has a specific bundle of tasks to do. Though the FIGURE 1. Page from a set of Shokunin-e ("depictions of var- ious occupations"}, Edo period (1615-1868 A.D.}, Japan. In Western literature, only the poem's words are important, but in much Orien- tal literature the calligraphy is equally important, and the callig- rapher as important an artist as the poet. Ink and wash on paper. Artist, poet, and calligrapher unknown. The poem reads, "Sounds of hammering continue I Clear moon above I People, listening, wonder.... "(Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the A very Brundage Collection.) 13 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY allocation of tasks to people is, in an important sense, arbitrary-it could have been done differently and is sup- ported only by the agreement of all or most of the other participants-it is not therefore easy to change. The people involved typically regard the division of tasks as quasi- sacred, as "natural" and inherent in the equipment and the medium. They engage in the same work politics Everett Hughes (1971, pp. 311-15) describes among nurses, attempt- ing to get rid of tasks they regard as tiresome, dirty, or be- neath their dignity, seeking to add tasks that are more inter- esting, rewarding, and prestigious. Every art, then, rests on an extensive division of labor. That is obviously true in the case of the performing arts. Films, concerts, plays, and operas cannot be accomplished by lone individuals doing everything necessary by them- selves. But do we need all this apparatus of the division of labor to understand painting, which seems a much more solitary occupation? We do. The division of labor does not require that all the people involved in producing the art object be under the same roof, like assembly-line workers, or even that they be alive at the same time. It only requires that the work of making the object or performance rely on that person performing that activity at the appropriate time. Painters thus depend on manufacturers for canvas, stretch- ers, paint, and brushes; on dealers, collectors, and museum curators for exhibition space and financial support; on crit- ics and aestheticians for the rationale for what they do; on the state for the patronage or even the advantageous tax laws which persuade collectors to buy works and donate them to the public; on members of the public to respond to the work emotionally; and on the other painters, contem- porary and past, who created the tradition which makes the backdrop against which their work makes sense (see Kubler, 1962, and Danto, 1964, 1973, and 1974 on tradition). Similarly with poetry, which seems even more solitary than painting. Poets need no equipment, other than what is conventionally available to ordinary members of society, to do their work. Pencils, pens, typewriters, and paper are enough, and, if these are not available, poetry began as an 14 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY oral tradition and much contemporary folk poetry still exists only in that form (until folklorists like Jackson, 1972 and 1974, or Abrahams, 1970, write it down and publish it). But this ap- pearance of autonomy is likewise superficial. Poets depend on printers and publishers, as painters do on distributors, and use shared traditions for the background against which their work makes sense and for the raw materials with which they work. Even so self-sufficient a poet as Emily Dickinson relied on psalm-tune rhythms an American audience would recognize and respond to. All art works, then, except for the totally individualistic and therefore unintelligible works of an autistic person, in- volve some division of labor among a large number of peo- ple. (See the discussion of the division of labor in Freidson, 1976). ART AND ARTISTS Both participants in the creation of art works and mem- bers of society generally believe that the making of art re- quires special talents, gifts, or abilities, which few have. Some have more than others, and a very few are gifted enough to merit the honorific title of "artist." A character in Tom Stoppard's Travesties expresses the idea succinctly: "An art- ist is someone who is gifted in some way that enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted" (Stoppard, 1975, p. 38). We know who has these gifts by the work they do because, these shared beliefs hold, the work of art expresses and embodies those special, rare powers. By inspecting the work we see that someone special made it. We think it important to know who has that gift and who does not because we accord people who have it special rights and privileges. At an extreme, the romantic myth of the artist suggests that people with such gifts cannot be subjected to the constraints imposed on other members of society; we must allow them to violate rules of decorum, propriety, and common sense everyone else must follow or risk being pun- ished. The myth suggests that in return society receives work 15 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY of unique character and invaluable quality. Such a belief does not appear in all, or even most, societies; it may be unique to Western European societies, and those influenced by them, since the Renaissance. Michael Baxandall (1972) pinpoints the shift in European thinking on this point as occurring in the fifteenth century, finding evidence of it in the changes in the contracts made between painters and the purchasers of their work. At one point, contracts specified the character of the painting, the methods of payment, and, especially, the quality of the col- ors to be used, insisting on the use of gold and the more ex- pensive varieties of blue (some being considerably cheaper than others). Thus, a contract in 1485 between Domenico Ghirlandaio and one client specified, among other things, that the painter should: colour the panel at his own expense with good colours and with powdered gold on such ornaments as demand it... and the blue must be ultramarine of the value about four florins the ounce.... (Quoted in Baxandall, 1972, p. 6) This resembles the contract one might make with a builder, specifying the quality of steel and concrete to be used. At the same time, or even earlier, some clients were speci- fying materials less and skill more. Thus, a contract in 1445, between Piero della Francesca and another ecclesiastical client, while it did not fail to specify gold and ultramarine, put a greater emphasis on the value of the painter's skill, insisting that "no painter may put his hand to the brush other than Piero himself" (Quoted in Baxandall, 1972, p. 20.). Another contract was more detailed: The said master Luca is bound and promises to paint (1) all the figures to be done on the said vault, and (2) especially the faces and all the parts of the figures from the middle of each figure upwards, and (3) that no painting should be done on it without Luca himself being present.... And it is agreed (4) that all the mixing of colours should be done by the said master Luca himself.... (Quoted in Baxandall, 1972, p. 23) This is a very different kind of contract. Here the client wants 16 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY to be sure that he is getting his money's worth in something rarer than four-florin ultramarine, namely, the unique skill of an artist. "The fifteenth-century client seems to have made his opulent gestures more and more by becoming a conspic- uous buyer of skill" (Baxandall, 1972, p. 23). This shift moves only part of the way to today's fully developed belief that the art work consists mainly of the expression of the skill and vision of a great artist. It recog- nizes the artist as someone special, but awards artists no special rights. That came later. Nevertheless, because artists have special gifts, because they produce work thought to be of great importance to a society, and because they therefore get special privileges, people want to make sure that only those who really have the gift, the talent, and the skill get the position. Special mech- anisms sort out artists from nonartists. Societies, and me- dia within societies, vary in how they do this. At one extreme, a guild or academy (Pevsner, 1940) may require long ap- prenticeship and prevent those it does not license from practicing. Where the state does not allow art much auton- omy and controls the institutions through which artists get their training and work, access to skills may be similarly restricted. At another extreme, exemplified by such countries as the United States, everyone can learn; participants in the making of art rely on market mechanisms to weed out the talented from the others. In such systems, people keep the idea that artists have a special gift but do not believe that there is any way to tell who has it outside of letting everyone try and then inspecting the results. Participants in the making of art works, and members of society generally, regard some of the activities necessary to the production of a form of art as "artistic," requiring the special gifts or sensibility of an artist. They further regard those activities as the core activities of art, necessary to make the work art rather than (in the case of objects) an industrial product, a craft item, or a natural object. The remaining activities seem to them a matter of craft, business acumen, or some other ability less rare, less characteristic of art, less necessary to the work's success, less worthy of respect. They 17 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY define the people who perform these other activities as (to borrow a military term) support personnel, reserving the title of "artist" for those who perform the core activities. The status of any particular activity, as a core activity which requires special artistic gifts or as mere support, can change. As we have seen, making paintings was once thought of as skilled work, but no more than that, and became defined as something more special in the Renaissance. In a later chapter we will consider how craft activities become redefined as art, and vice versa. Here it will be sufficient to cite the example of the recording engineer and sound mixer, the person who handles the technical end of recording music and preparing the result for commercial reproduction and sale. Edward Kealy (1979) documents the shift in the status of that technical activity. Up to the mid-1940s: The sound mixer's skill lay in using to advantage the acoustic design of the studio, deciding upon the placement of a hand- ful of microphones, and mixing or balancing microphone outputs as the musical performance was recorded. Very little editing was possible since the performance was recm:ded di- rectly on a disc or single track tape. The primary aesthetic question was utilitarian: how well does a recording capture the sounds of a performance? (P. 9) After World War II, technical developments made "high fidelity" and "concert hall realism" possible. The good mixer-craftsman would make sure that unwanted sounds were not recorded or at least minimized, that the desired sounds were recorded without distortion, and that the sounds were in balance. The recording technology itself, and thus the sound mixer's work, was to be unobtrusive so as not to destroy the listener's illusion that he was sitting in Philhar- monic Hall rather than his own living room. (P. 11) With the advent of rock music, musicians whose instruments themselves embodied electronic technology began to exper- iment with recording technology as part of the musical work. Since they often had learned to play by imitating highly engineered recordings (Bennett, 1980), they naturally wanted to incorporate those effects into their work. Such equipment 18 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY as multitrack recorders made it possible to edit and combine separately recorded elements and to manipulate electroni- cally the sounds the musicians produced. Rock stars, rela- tively independent of corporate discipline, began to insist on control over the recording and mixing of their performances. Two things happened. On the one hand, signaled by the prominent credits given to mixers on record albums, sound mixing began to be recognized as an artistic activity requir- ing special artistic talent. On the other hand, people who had established themselves as musical artists began to take over the job themselves or to recruit ex-musicians to do it. Sound mixing, once a mere technical specialty, had become integral to the art process and recognized as such (Kealy, 1979, pp. 15-25). The ideology posits a perfect correlation between doing the core activity and being an artist. If you do it, you must be an artist. Conversely, if you are an artist, what you do must be art. This produces confusion when, from either a com- monsense point of view or from the standpoint of the art's tradition, that correlation does not occur. For instance, if the idea of gift or talent implies the notion of spontaneous ex- pression or sublime inspiration (as it does for many), the businesslike work habits of many artists create an incon- gruity. Composers who produce so many bars of music a day, painters who paint so many hours a day-whether they "feel like it or not"-create some doubt as to whether they can be exercising superhuman talents. Trollope, who arose early so that he could get in his three hours of writing before going to work as a civil servant in the British Post Office, was almost a caricature of this businesslike, "unartistic" approach: All those I think who have lived as literary men,-working daily as literary labourers,-will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he should have so trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those 'three hours-so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom,-and it is still my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient to myself,-to 19 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went. (Trollope, 1947, pp. 227-28) Another difficulty arises when someone claiming to be an artist does not do some of what is regarded as the irreducible core of what an artist must do. Since the definition of the core activity changes over time, the division of labor between artist and support personnel also changes, leading to diffi- culties. How little of the core activity can a person do and still claim to be an artist? The amount the composer contributes to the material contained in the final work has varied greatly. Virtuoso performers from the Renaissance through the nine- teenth century embellished and improvised on the score the composer provided (Dart, 1967, and Reese, 1959), so it is not without precedent that contemporary composers prepare scores which give only the sketchiest directions to the per- former (the counter-tendency, for composers to restrict the interpretative freedom of the performer by giving increas- ingly detailed directions, has until recently been more prom- inent). John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen (Wormer, 1973) are regarded as composers in the world of -contempo- rary music, though many of their scores leave much of the material to be played to the decision of the player. Artists need not handle the materials from which the art work is made to remain artists; architects seldom build what they design. The same practice raises questions, however, when sculptors construct a piece by sending a set of specifications to a machine shop, and many people balk at awarding the title of artist to authors of conceptual works consisting of specifications never actually embodied in an artifact. Marcel Duchamp violated the ideology by insisting that he created a valid work of art when he signed a commercially produced snowshovel or a reproduction of the Mona Lisa on which he had drawn a mustache (see figure 2), thus classifying Leo- nardo as support personnel along with the snowshovel's de- signer and manufacturer. Outrageous as that idea may seem, something like it is standard in making collages, entirely constructed of other people's work. Another confusion arises when no one can tell which one FIGURE 2. Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. When Marcel Du- champ drew a mustache on a commercial reproduction of the Mona Lisa and signed it, he turned Leonardo into one of his support per- sonnel. (Private collection. Photograph courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) 21 ART WORLDS AND COLLECTIVE ACTIVITY or ones of the several people involved in the production of the work have the special gift and therefore the right both to receive the credit for the work's ultimate character and to direct the activities of the others. Eliot Freidson (1970) has pointed out that in the cooperative activity of the medical world participants agree that the doctor has that special gift and those special rights. But which of several major kinds of participants in making a film occupies a similarly undisputed leading role? Auteur theorists insist that films be understood as the expression of a director's controlling vision, hobbled though it may have been by the constraints imposed by studio superiors or the noncooperation of actors. Others think the writer, when allowed, actually controls the film, while still others think film is an actor's medium. I don't suppose anyone would argue that the production auditor or focus puller has a vision that informs the film, but Aljean Harmetz (1977) makes a good case that E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen, the people responsible for the music of The Wizard of Oz, provided that film's continuity. This problem takes a special form in the question that arises over whether we ought, in responding to a work of art, to give some special weight to the maker's intentions, or whether a number of possible interpretations can be made, the maker's not being especially privileged (Hirsch, 1979). We can rephrase this: do we conventionally recognize the author as providing something special in the making of the work, something no one else could provide? If audience members believe the author has done that, they will naturally defer to his or her intentions in their responses. But they may not think so; the performers of and listeners to jazz evidently do not think that the composers of jazz standards merit any special deference with respect to how their songs should be played. Participants in the making of art works may agree as to whose intentions-author's, interpreter's, or audience's- take priority, in which case the issue creates no theoretical or practical difficulty. Those problems arise when participants disagree and standard practice produces unresolvable con- flict. The philosophical and aesthetic problem is thus solved by a sociological analysis; such a solution does not, of course, solve the problem. It merely makes it the object of study. 22 AR T W 0 R L D S A N D C0 L L E CT I VE ACT I VI T Y Finally, because the artist's position as artist depends on the production of art works which embody and express his special talents and gifts, participants in art worlds worry about the authenticity of art works. Did the artist supposed to have done this work really do it? Has anyone else inter- fered with the original work, altered or edited it in some way so that what the artist intended and created is not what we now have before us? Did the artist, once the work was made, alter it in the light of subsequent experience or criticism and, if so, what does that mean with respect to the artist's abili- ties? If we judge the artist on the basis of the work, we must know who really did the work, and therefore deserves the judgment we make of its worth and the worth of its maker. It is as though making art works is a competition, like a school test, and we have to render a fair judgment based on all the facts. Because of this emphasis on the work-person equation, entire scholarly disciplines devote themselves to establishing who actually painted which paintings and whether the paintings now exhibited under the name of X are actually X's work, whether the scores we hear played were written by the person alleged to have written them, whether the words in a novel were written by the person whose name is on the title page or were plagiarized from someone else who deserves the credit or blame. Why do these things matter? The work, after all, does not change if we learn that someone else did it; the plays are the same words, whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote them, aren't they? Yes and no. Borges' (1962) story about Pierre Menard stresses this ambiguity. Pierre Menard, he says, is a French writer who, having written many conventional novels and books, decides to write Don Quixote-not a retelling of the story, but the actual Don Quixote of Cervantes. After much work, he has managed to write two chapters and a fragment of a third. The words are identical to Cervantes'. But, Borges points out, Cervantes was writing in the lan- guage of his time whereas Menard is writing in an archaic language which, furthermore, is not his native tongue. And so on. Who writes the words and when they are written affect our judgment of what the work consists of and therefore of 23 AR T W 0 R L D S A N D C0 L L E CT I VE A CT I VI T Y what it reveals about the person who made it. (For further remarks on Borges' story, see Danto , pp. 6-7.) It matters not only because we appreciate and judge the work differently, but also because artists' reputations are a sum of the values we assign to the works they have produced. Each work that can definitely be attributed to Titian adds to or subtracts from the total on the basis of which we decide how great an artist Titian was. That is why plagiarism evokes such violent reactions. It is not just property that is being stolen, but the basis of a reputation as well. The reputation of the artist and the work reinforce one another: we value more a work done by an artist we respect, just as we respect more an artist whose work we have ad- mired. When the distribution of art involves the exchange of money, reputational value can be translated into financial value, so that the decision that a well-known and respected artist did not do a painting once attributed to him means that the painting loses value. Museums and collectors have suf- fered severe financial losses as a result of such changes of attribution, and scholars often find themselves under consid- erable pressure not to withdraw attributions on the basis of which important investments have been made (Wollheim, 1975). Trollope found the problem of the importance of the art- ist's name to the judgment of the work sufficiently interest- ing to undertake an experiment: From the commencement of my success as a writer... I had always felt an injustice in literary affairs which had never afflicted me or even suggested itself to me while I was unsuc- cessful. It seemed to me that a name once earned carried with it too much favour.... I felt that aspirants coming up below me might do work as good as mine, and probably much better work, and yet fail to have it appreciated. In order to test this, I determined to be such an aspirant myself, and to begin a course of novels anonymously, in order that I might see whether I could obtain a second identity,-whether as I had made one mark by such literary ability as I possessed, I might succeed in doing so again. (Trollope, 1947, pp. 169-70) He wrote, and published anonymously, two stories, in which 24 AR T W 0 R L D S A N D C0 L L E CT I VE ACT I VI T Y he tried to disguise both his style and his way of telling a story: Once or twice I heard the [stories] mentioned by readers who did not know me to be the author, and always with praise; but [they] had no real success.... Blackwood [the publisher], who of course knew the author, was willing to publish them, trusting that works by an experienced writer would make their way, even without the writer's name.... But he did not find the speculation answer, and declined a third attempt, though a third such tale was written for him.... Of course there is not in this any evidence that I might not have suc- ceeded a second time as I succeeded before, had I gone on with the same dogged perseverance.... Another ten years of unpaid unflagging labour might have built up a second repu- tation. But this at any rate did seem clear to me, that with all the increased advantages which practice in my art must have given me, I could not at once induce English readers to read what I gave to them, unless I gave it with my name. (Trollope, 1947, pp. 171-72) Trollope concluded: It is a matter of course that in all things the public should trust to established reputation. It is as natural that a novel reader wanting novels should send to a library for those by George Eliot or Wilkie Collins, as that a lady when she wants a pie should go to Fortnum and Mason. Fortnum and Mason can only make themselves Fortnum and Mason by dint of time and good pies combined. If Titian were to send us a portrait from the other world... it would be some time before the art critic of The Times would discover its value. We may sneer at the want of judgment thus displayed, but such slowness of judgment is human and h

Art Worlds by Howard S. Becker PDF

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript