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The aim of the book, so far as I can tell, seems to be an effort to demystify the artwork (at least the Renaissance version connected to the artist as genius) through an analysis of the political economy of the art world:
"All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people. Through their cooperation, the artwork we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be." (1)
Beyond this, Becker explores several of the interactions that serve to constitute these art worlds, including an analysis of conventions:
"various groups and subgroups share knowledge of the conventions current in a medium, having acquired that knowledge in various ways. Those who share such knowledge can, when the occasion demands or permits, act together in ways that are part of the cooperative web of activity making that world possible and characterizing its existence." (66)
Because the work seems to be organized as a survey, it's a bit difficult to tease out Becker's actual arguments outside of "this is what this aspect of the art world is like." Of course we could always quibble with points of fact, or complicate the picture with variations in type and through time, but I think the central argument remains fairly straightforward. Now I wonder whether it took a whole book to actually make this argument -- but then again, concrete examples of different facets of the art world are obviously crucial to de-mystifying the work of art, so I suppose it was necessary. But I honestly couldn't help a bit of annoyance that it took working through such a work to arrive at this conclusion. Which is, perhaps, a testament to the work's value, that so many years later it seems so obvious.
If I had to pick a section of the book where Becker's own brand of sociological analysis/argumentation seems most obvious, it would have to be his discussion of aesthetics, particularly his "solution" to the institutional theory of art (151). Where Dickie's much-discussed (and much-berated) assertion that "every person who sees himself as a member of the artworld is thereby a member" seems to allow for a host of crucial (and I suppose ultimately unsolvable) philosophical issues, Becker's response is simple: "Sociological analysists need not decide who is entitled to label things art... We need only observe who members of the art world treat as capable of doing that, who they allow to do it in the sense that once those people have decided something is art others act as though it is." (151) According to Becker, then, sociological analysis does not provide answers, but descriptions. Hence "Art Worlds."
I think the reason he does not use it has to do more with the book having been written nearly 25 years ago than with his not considering the term. Do others agree? If he were writing today, would he use the term "art community" to describe what he is talking about? Or would "art world" still be a better phrase? (and by the way, he does slip in related terms, such as canonical, integrated, etc.)
I guess what I'm asking, and Fred is probably one person who can answer this: Is an art world a "community" in the sense that the term is so widely used today?
If you forced me to answer my question, I'd probably say that an art world might be considered a kind of community, but that many communities do not exhibit the characteristics of an art world. (And I mean art-related communities.) The art world seems to be more tightly focused on issues of production, evaluation, and validation, while communities form around a greater variety of concerns and in a greater variety of ways. But I'd rather hear what others think.
According to Wikipedia [link], “a community is an amalgamation of living things that share an environment community is an amalgamation of living things that share an environment.. What characterizes a community is sharing interaction in many ways. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs and a multitude of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the degree of adhesion within the mixture, but the definitive driver of community is that all individual subjects in the mix have something in common. This is even true in biological communities … Continuity of the connections between leaders and leaders, leaders and followers, followers and followers is vital to the strength of a community. Members, both leaders and followers, individually hold the collective personality of the whole. With sustained connections and continued conversations, participants in communities, regardless of degrees of inclusion, develop emotional bonds, intellectual pathways, enhanced linguistic abilities, and even a higher capacity for critical thinking and problem-solving. It could be argued that successive and sustained contact with other humans might help to remove some of the tensions of isolation, due to disenfranchisement, thus opening creative avenues that would have otherwise remained impassable."
"To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry--an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld."
As Alfredo notes, Becker seems to also apply this 'world' to the material objects and the systems of cooperation that extend both Danto's artworld and the definitions of 'community' cited above.
As a side note, it is interesting that Henry started us off by asking about the distinction between world/community considering that last week we never questioned whether "Synthetic Worlds" are indeed 'worlds.'
The community, then, would still hinge around that shared core -- participation in an art world, in MMORPGs, etc. -- but it would be derived from the immersive experience of the actual world.
As for Daniel's question, I'm still very much up in the air on this one. Castronova and others indeed seem to go to great lengths to argue that synthetic worlds are worlds, insofar as our perceptive apparatus (I hate this word) seems to process the information similarly -- movement, depth, but also emotional reactions and attachments. The fact that it's in fact a flat surface, that the information isn't processed through all five senses, doesn't really seem all that important, well maybe sometimes. But as Henrik mentioned last week, the fact that causality as we know it, that there are physical, irreversible consequences to our actions in the real world that might not exist in the synthetic world, might just be the one crucial difference in all of this.
I guess what I am saying is that there might be a difference between musicians "down to earth" quality and the artsy gallery world you cited in your earlier post. I think of Becker more as being immersed in a smoky bar, feeding off the other musicians and the audience.
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