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.
Art Worlds challenges the tenets of traditional aesthetics-the artist as genius and the beautiful work as expression and embodiment of genius.
Art is the work that some people do. It requires an “extensive division of labor” (p. 13) and “elaborate cooperation” (p. 28) among many people:
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- artists, patrons, critics, gallery owners, librarians, jazz club owners, teachers, audiences, and even those who make the tools of the trade (ink, canvas, paints, instruments.
These different individuals together constitute an art world
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- “the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works the art world is noted for” (p. x)
“Artists produce what the distribution system can and will carry” (p. 129). [Also see. Peterson & Anand 2004 – The Production of Culture]
Change in art, he argues, is a social process, requiring shifts in the constituent elements of the art world.
Paradigm shift: shifts, “the structure of artistic revolutions,” are initiated by individuals, acting as individuals: “Change takes place . . . because artists whose work does not fit and who thus stand outside the existing systems attempt to start new ones and because established artists exploit their attractiveness to the existing sys- tem to force it to handle work they do which does not fit” (p. 136).
“artistic work lasts when it has an organizational basis that preserves and protects it” (p. 350).
“artistic work lasts when it has an organizational basis that preserves and protects it” (p. 350).
Creative products that replicate and reproduce, such as mass consumer products, risk being ‘boring and featureless’ (Becker, 1982, p. 63).
Innovation demands novelty: creative products must be distinctive and comprehensible (Becker, 1982).
Innovation involves teaching ‘audiences something new: a new symbol, a new form, a new mode of presentation’ (Becker, 1982, p. 66). Thus, innovation involves individuals in a joint undertaking of training the audiences into those artwork-specific conventions with innovative character.
Becker (1982) cautions us that most innovations lead to dead ends, not to producing new art worlds.