One of the most persistent of our cultural myths features the artist as a solitary romantic with special talents who works in a rarified aesthetic environment to create unique objects of high art and personal expression. It is easy enough to understand the lure of such a myth: making art is a job of long hours (often) without pay, nonexistent job security, and ambivalent social status. In addition, works of art made by individuals of unusual abilities and vision are likely to be more valuable than products from some kind of aesthetic assembly line, so the marketplace nourishes the myth. Although the romantic concept of the artist dates no earlier than the 15th century and is peculiar to western European cultures, it has shaped nearly all contemporary art history and criticism. Art Worlds, by Howard Becker, provides a different perspective on artists and art making.
Becker defines art work as "the kind of work some people do . . . not so very different from other kinds of work," and artists as not so very different from other kinds of workers. Art worlds include all those who contribute to the final form of the artwork, from designers and manufacturers of equipment and raw materials to vendors, promoters, patrons, critics, archivists, historians and audiences. Drawing upon his own experience as sociologist, photographer, and musician (not necessarily in that order), Becker describes a fascinating galaxy of art-world workers from quilt makers to electronic music composers. His concern lies not with their artworks per se, nor with the titular artist in those worlds, but with divisions of labor among the network of cooperating people, all of whose efforts are essential to the final outcome.
Some of the labor in Becker's art worlds involves production. As products, artworks are different from the products of other industries, but not so very different. Like other products, artworks have uses, among them contemplation, collection, ostentatious display -- as well as education, entertainment, catharsis and spiritual nourishment. The production of artworks, which requires equipment and materials, is constrained by the kinds of equipment and materials available -- how much depends in part on how monopolistic the art market is and in part how innovative the artworkers are. It is also constricted or challenged by conventional expectations of what a photograph, a poem, a novel, or a performance ought to be.
Artworks require audiences; distribution and promotion of some sort must connect the works with their appropriate and appreciative audiences. Because in our overproducing culture there are usually too many artists and thus too many artworks for the needs of the available market, traditional economic market mechanisms weed out the ostensibly talented, who make a living, from the others, who generally do not. Becker includes, along with the wealthy, art students and graduates among the primary audiences for contemporary art. Trained in technical and aesthetic matters, they are well-suited to translate new kinds of artworks for audiences.
Marketing artworks requires the encouragement by dealers of stable art production in order to satisfy and expand stable art consumption. In concert with critics and historians, dealers clean up the messy edges of art production, and define what generally can be marketed and preserved, and thus what is ultimately to be considered art.
Finally, there are the effects on art worlds of the state, which supports those artworks considered favorable to its interests, and ignores or suppresses those which are adjudged worthless, irrelevant, tasteless, detrimental or subversive.
Art Worlds, of which I have drawn only the most skeletal outline here, presents the cooperating art worlds in intimate, eminently readable, and quite fascinating manner. In studying the structures of these worlds, Becker makes some quite radical propositions about the nature of our cultural industries, and he does so without stridency, polemic, or excessive jargon. Ideology consists of making a set of constructed beliefs seem to be natural and inevitable. Becker dismantles the ideological myth of the artist as solitary romantic in no uncertain terms. In its stead he offers a very reasonable real art world which makes sense, and which -- by providing a working model of community -- suggests that the ultimate value in art lies not in the precious objects but in the relationships surrounding its production and consumption. Art Worlds will probably be found in the bookstores under Sociology, Popular Culture or Psychology; its true audience, however is artists . . . for whom it should be required reading -- including the bibliography.
The following illustration appeared with this review:
The Bus Show, installed. (Photograph courtesy Afterimage, Visual Studies Workshop). Caption: "Because no one could know where any particular photograph was at any particular time, The Bus Show could not really be reviewed, and no artist could gain much in reputation from participation in it."
Ira Nowinski, Untitled, photograph. Caption: "Neither artists, art historians, curators or collectors would think that this museum employee had much to do with 'art.' But without him, or someone else to do what he does, this painting would never get up on the museum's wall."
Walker Evans, House and Billboard, Atlanta, Georgia 1936, photograph. Caption: "Walker Evans, working under the constraints of a government agency, created a style that made painters and other established artists take documentary photography seriously."
