Hans Van Maanen

Hans van Maanen van Hans e present study tries to nd out how the organisation of art worlds serves the functioning of the arts in society. e book studies thoroughly how George Dickie, Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, Nathalie Heinich, and Niklas Luhmann approach this question, but the conclusion is that Hans van Maanen their theories only touch the thinking on the arts’ societal functioning instead of discussing it. Hence in How to Study Art Worlds the author turns to such art philosophers as Kant, Gadamer, Shusterman and Schae er among STUDYTO HOW HOW TO STUDY others to de 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 discussed what the various institutional approaches in relation to the ART WORLDS art philosophical concepts have to o er to the organisation of art world practices in such a way that the arts will be supported in realising their values in society. On the Societal Functioning Hans van Maanen is professor of art and society at the Department of Aesthetic Values of Arts, Culture & Media Studies of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS is study stands on the highest level of commentary in this area, and will be taken as a primary source of reference for the study of the art world and 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 individual reference text book for both graduate students and academics. ART WORLDS ART 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 in Management and Organizational Life • .. 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 The 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 understand 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 production of art and the reception of it, they mainly studied the domain of production; 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 approaches 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 various 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 philosophical 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 approaches 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 functioning 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 Introduction context for a work in order to consider it art – has very quickly been banished to the margins of the Anglo-Saxon discussion in order to make room for an institutional attack on the old functionalist idea that works can be identified as artworks because of their specific values and functions. Whereas during the 1970s and 1980s, Monroe C. Beardsley had to defend this latter approach as best he could on the American side of the Atlantic, in Europe functionalists were supported historically by a long philosophical tradition of seeking out the distinctive features of art. In his Definitions of Art (1991), Stephen Davies investigated this discussion thoroughly for the Anglo-Saxon part of the world, but in spite of his deep respect for the possibility of specific values and functions in art, he finally drew the conclusion that Something’s being a work of art is a matter of its having a particular status.

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