How to Study Art Worlds: On the Societal Functioning of Aesthetic Values

314 Pages·2010·1.64 MB·English

by  Hans van Maanen

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Th e present study tries to fi nd out how the organisation of art worlds M
serves the functioning of the arts in society. Th e book studies thoroughly
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how George Dickie, Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, Nathalie Heinich, Hans van Maanen
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and Niklas Luhmann approach this question, but the conclusion is that n
their theories only touch the thinking on the arts’ societal functioning e
instead of discussing it. n
HOW TO STUDY
Hence in How to Study Art Worlds the author turns to such art
philosophers as Kant, Gadamer, Shusterman and Schaeff er among
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others to defi ne the values the arts can generate and the functions
they can serve. On the basis of this in the third part of the book it is O ART WORLDS
discussed what the various institutional approaches in relation to the
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art philosophical concepts have to off er to the organisation of art world
practices in such a way that the arts will be supported in realising their On the Societal Functioning

values in society. T
O of Aesthetic Values
Hans van Maanen is professor of art and society at the Department
of Arts, Culture & Media Studies of the University of Groningen, the
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Netherlands.
T AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
Th is study stands on the highest level of commentary in this area, and will  U
be taken as a primary source of reference for the study of the art world and
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sociology of art in general; therefor it would be a mandatory purchase for any
university that has an arts and humanity faculty; and it is also an important Y
individual reference text book for both graduate students and academics.

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Dr Jonathan Vickery, Director of Graduate Studies Centre for Cultural Policy Studies,
University of Warwick and  editor of Aesthesis: International Journal of Art and Aesthetics R
in Management and Organizational Life
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isbn 978 90 896 4152 6 L
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Amsterdam University Press • www.aup.nl
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how to study art worlds

How to Study
Art Worlds
On the Societal Functioning
of Aesthetic Values
Hans van Maanen
Cover: Studio Jan de Boer, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Design: V3-Services, Baarn, the Netherlands
isbn 978 90 8964 152 6
e-isbn 978 90 4851 090 0
nur 640 / 756
© Hans van Maanen / Amsterdam University Press, 2009
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part
of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans-
mitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author
of the book.
Table of Contents
Introduction 7
part one The Art World as a System
1 The Institutional Theory of George Dickie 17
2 T he Institutionalist Pragmatism of Howard S. Becker and
Paul DiMaggio 31
3 Pierre Bourdieu’s Grand Theory of the Artistic Field 53
4 From Theory to the Methodology of Singularity:
Bruno Latour and Nathalie Heinich 83
5 Niklas Luhmann’s System of Artistic Communications 105
6 How Art Worlds Help the Arts to Function 125
part two On Values and Functions of the Arts
7 What Philosophers Say that the Arts Do 149
 Table of Contents
part three How to Study Art Worlds
Introduction 205
8 Foundations for the Functioning of Art Systems 207
9 How Distribution Conditions the Functioning of Art 241
10 How Aesthetic Values Become Contextualized 275
Epilogue: For a Second Life of Artistic Experiences 291
References 
Introduction
From 1960 onwards, first art philosophy and then art sociology gave birth to a
stream of theories describing and analyzing the dynamics of the world of arts.
This was in reaction to the difficulties encountered when attempting to under-
stand artworks as artefacts with particular distinctive features that are produced
by the unique activity of artists. While each of the scholars who contributed to
this approach emphasized the importance of the relationship between the pro-
duction of art and the reception of it, they mainly studied the domain of produc-
tion; very little attention was paid to the domains of distribution and reception in
these attempts to understand how the arts function in society.
On the basis of a critical overview of the art world, as well as field, network,
and system theories, this study attempts to bring together the thinking on the
organizational side of the world of arts and an understanding of the functions art
fulfils in a culture; to put it more precisely: to find out how the organization of the
art worlds serves the functioning of arts in society.
It is not at all superfluous to rethink the relationship between theoretical ap-
proaches and how the art worlds function in a practical way. On the contrary, in
both areas one can notice a tendency to avoid making distinctions between vari-
ous types of art; instead, a more general idea of art or even culture is favoured.
As a consequence, the value of art can be formulated only on a very general level,
whereas in practice very different types of art function in very different ways
for very different groups of users. Hence, this book has two aims: first, to pro-
vide art world practitioners with a theory regarding what the arts can do – both
within local communities as well as in society at large – in order to support the
strengthening of the societal power of the different forms of art and, second, to
supply theoreticians with information regarding the organizational consequences
of theories for making the arts function in society.
In 1964, Arthur Danto introduced his notion of ‘the Art world’ as an answer to
the changes in aesthetic production in the 1950s and 1960s. He described the dif-
 Introduction
ficulties when giving meaning to the products of these changes, called artworks,
which, however, look like everyday objects. He argued in his famous article in
the Journal of Philosophy that ‘to see something as art requires something the eye
cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of
art: an art world’ (Danto 1964: 577). The art world is considered a world in which
artists, museums, collectors and others create and discuss developments in art; it
is a context in which a work can be seen as an artwork.
Since this 1964 article, the term ‘art world’ has established its place in philo-
sophical and sociological thinking on art, first in the institutional approach of
George Dickie and the interactional approach of Howard S. Becker in the Eng-
lish-speaking world, and then on the European continent as well, particularly
under the substantial influence of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu, however, strongly
preferred the term ‘field’ instead of ‘world’ and attacked Becker for his ‘pure de-
scriptive, even enumerative’ understanding of the latter term.1 The main ways
of thinking based on the art world concept during the last three decades of the
twentieth century will be discussed in the first part of this book by following
the most influential authors on this subject: George Dickey, Howard S. Becker,
Paul Dimaggio, Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour and Nathalie
Heinich. A glance at the table of contents will make clear how institutional ap-
proaches changed over time: from Danto’s and Dickie’s efforts to understand art
in a historical and institutional context, via Bourdieu’s attempt to develop a com-
plete theory on the dynamics of the artistic (and other) fields to the de-struc-
turalization and ‘rhizomization’ in the particularly French reaction to Bourdieu.
Luhmann, finally, developed a meta-theory of how social systems operate and
relate to each other, not considering actors, individuals or organizations as the
basic elements of such systems anymore, but communications; communications
in the sense of utterances, including artworks. It can be questioned, by the way,
whether the last two approaches can be called institutional any longer.
Although the specific values of these approaches will be discussed thoroughly
here, this book seeks to find agreements between ways of thinking and oppor-
tunities to connect various points of view, rather than to detail the differences
between the approaches discerned. Because of this none of the authors will be
studied extensively; only those parts of their work that are concerned with how
organizational relations in an art world, field, or system might influence the func-
tioning of the arts in society will be discussed. Sometimes it was necessary to give
some background to make the ways of thinking understandable; additionally, I’ve
attempted to return to these authors’ key insights and to avoid the (often more
than interesting but too specific) details that didn’t serve the aim of this book.
Nowadays, it is safe to say that the core of the original notion of an ‘art world’
as meant by Danto – the necessity of understanding an historical-theoretical