Shyon Baumann, “A general theory of artistic legitimation: How art worlds are like social movements”

“a general theory for explaining how cultural products are legitimated as art, whether high or popular art”
“the major concepts that explain the paths of social movements also apply to art worlds”
Distinction between art and not-art, rather than high and low art
“recognition of art is a social process that cannot be reduced to a reflection of artistic merit”
Why some culture gets recognition as art and other does not, and can change over time?
Artistic legitimation as a general process
The way social movements succeed in their goals is parallel to processes of legitimation
In social movements, three explanatory factors:
Political opportunity structures
Resource mobilization
Framing processes
In art worlds, likewise:
A changing cultural opportunity space
The institutionalization of resources and practices
Legitimating ideology
Combining these conceptual frameworks may help to understand other processes of legitimation outside of art and social movements
Legitimacy as acceptance of claims of status/authority as valid
How are cultural products repositioned institutionally and intellectually and thus redefined as legitimate art?
Consensus is never absolute (near-consensus)
Various levels of consensus within an art world
Different kinds of “reward systems” within art worlds (who are the gatekeepers?)
External VS internal legitimacy (artistic consumers in general VS inner members of an art world)
“A justification is an argument made to explain how the unaccepted is in fact acceptable because it conforms to existing, valid norms, values, or rules.”
What about when justifications are made in order to distinguish radically between the new kind of art (as in realist film theory)?
The legitimacy of a form can vary considerably over time and in different contexts
“Rap’s legitimacy has steadily increased so that it now enjoys recognition as a legitimate popular art. This recognition reflects a fairly wide, though by no means absolute, consensus that the justifications for rap as art are valid.”
There is no consensus on whether rap is a high art form, unlike opera
“legitimacy requires consensus only somewhere, not everywhere,” Zelditch (2001, p. 10)
Legitimacy generated through a process of collective action – art worlds and cultural fields are sites of collective action (as are social movements)
General theory of legtimation: opportunities, resources, and framing
Social movement success as a process of legitimation
Social movements attempt to “legitimate – make accepted – an idea that was initially not widely accepted.”
“Success” does not necessarily mean actual change, but the acceptance of the idea as common sense or taken-for-granted
Art worlds are doubly concerned with legitimacy (artists themselves + other agents)
“Not only do the claims about artistic status need to be justified, but the right to make claims, and the bases on which those claims are made, need to be justified as well.”
Many different kinds of “success” in art worlds – usually in relation to some kind of audience acceptance, whatever that audience might be (restricted and elite/internal, mass/external)
Three concepts to explain social movement success:
“Opportunity: exogenous factors facilitate success”
“political opportunities” or “opportunity structures”
The environment in which movements operate – context
Analogous to the “opportunity space” in art
“certain exogenous factors can affect the likelihood that an art world will succeed in attaining legitimacy.”
Structural VS symbolic external variables
Factors influencing mobilization/emergence VS legitimation/acceptance
Factors that members are cognizant of VS unaware
“To be useful, sociologists of art need a concept of opportunity space that provides further guidance about how to understand the different roles played by different kinds of exogenous factors.”
“Resources: endogenous factors facilitate success”
Mobilizing tangible or intangible resources (“they can take the form of money, labor, knowledge, experience, network connections and institutionalized relationships, prestige and status, physical equipment or assets, informal traditions, organizational forms, emotional energy, and leadership.”)
“To explain artistic legitimation, we need to know which resources are mobilized and to understand the particular benefits brought by particular kinds of resources.”
“Resources” can range from institutional settings to prestige or status
Practical work/symbolic work
Distinguish between resources for physical production and resources for symbolic production of its value
Museums, private galleries, universities, etc.
“in order to be in agreement with existing conceptions of what art is” (Again, what about new conceptions of art that emerge alongside the legitimation of a form?)
Tactics and strategies (indie music/indie games) – how do art worlds imitate and learn from one another?
“Discourse, ideology, and frames: legitimation requires an explanation”
The role of ideas – framing of goals and tactics to make them “comprehensible, valid, acceptable and desirable.”
Framing is always linked to/appeals to (but is distinct from) ideology (“a complex system of related ideas that combines an explanation of the world with normative prescriptions for behavior”)
Discourses (“broad systems of communication that link concepts together in a web of relationships through an underlying logic”) provide the tools through which ideology can be invoked in the process of applying/inventing a frame
Discourse (general ways of talking about art) > Ideology (theories of art) > Frame (specific applications of theories of art)
These distinctions can “clarify how ideas function to legitimate culture in fundamentally similar ways across cultural genres”
“aestheticians create ideologies of art, and critics frame particular works of art by appealing to the theories and values of specific ideologies.
“The art world, in the sense of the field of cultural production in general, possesses a discourse of common terms and ideas for discussing art. More narrowly defined art worlds, such as the art world for poetry, possess elements of discourse that are specific to that art world.”
Critics of a new form mimic criticism of established forms (preexisting ideas and values)
“The general theory of artistic legitimation can be stated as follows: Discrete areas of cultural production attain legitimacy as art, high or popular, during periods of high cultural opportunity through mobilizing material or institutional resources and through the exercise of a discourse that frames the cultural production as legitimate art according to one or more preexisting ideologies.”
Parallels also to scientific/intellectual movements
Degrees of success/failure, not a binary – many possible outcomes in many different contexts
Framing “instructs targeted audience members about how to correctly perceive and interpret specific issues, conditions, events, and objects. Framing is made convincing by invoking the ideas and values in ideologies which already have currency. In this way, framing justifies the movement’s or art world’s ideas as legitimate by building consensus.”
Legitimation framework enables “comparisons across symbol-producing realms”

George Dickie, “A Tale of Two Artworlds” (and Arthur Danto, "Responses and Replies")

George Dickie, “A Tale of Two Artworlds,” in Danto and his critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 73-78.

Respond to Danto's critiques/misunderstandings in “The Artworld Revisited: Comedies of Similarity” and comment on his approach
Different versions of the artworld
How does the prescribing of artistic status take place?
Artworld is not a homogeneous empowering elite of experts
Dickie stresses the role of the artist
“My basic claim is that the artworld is a structure of roles within which artists create art.”
Artworld relations
Danto: “the Art World as the historically ordered world of artworks, enfranchised by theories which themselves are historically ordered.”
Does Danto actually argue that a group confers the status of art, or is he concerned with “what is required for someone to realize that a certain kind of thing can be a work of art”?

Arthur Danto, “Responses and Replies,” in Danto and his critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 193-216.  

“a world consisting of works of art, a self-enriching community of ontologically complex objects, often inter-referential [... intertextual ...] and which above all had a historical vector, so that something could be part of that world at one time but not at an earlier time.”
“Discourse of reasons”
Seeing something as art VS being art
“I don't believe any institutional theory gives us a definition of art, simply a certain account of how something gets to be received as art.”
Also, therefore, a factor in the creation of art: “artist and audience are caught up together in the evolving discourse of reasons.”
Historical /cultural factors
Institutionalism =/= ontology, and Danto is more interested in creating ontologies than sociologies
Dickie, on the other hand, attempts to make his institutional theory also a definition/ontology

George Dickie, “A Tale of Two Artworlds”

George Dickie, “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (July 1969): 253-256.

Descriptive use of “work of art” indicates that a thing belongs to a certain category of objects
“Artifactuality” as the genus of art (but what exactly is artifactuality? Dickie does not elaborate)
Art can be defined even if all or some of its subconcepts cannot be (painting, novel, tragedy)
In addition to artifactuality, a second, social property – non-exhibited, relational
No guarantee that current conceptions bear any resemblance to historical conceptions
What we do with certain objects (ie: works of art)
“(1) an artifact upon which (2) some society or some sub-group of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.” [Later version: “A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).”]
Only a candidate, not necessarily appreciated
Can be conferred by a single person (often the artist)? Perhaps in a preliminary, small-scale sense
More broadly, an artifact acquires status within the system of the artworld
The (aesthetic) appreciation characteristic of experiences of artworks: “in experiencing the qualities of a thing one finds them worthy or valuable” (applies to all kinds of artworks)
“Official” status of candidate for appreciation is conferred by the artworld – authority (however scattered, heterogeneous and ambiguous that authority might be)
A certain institutional setting
Artifactuality is acquired at the same time as status of candidate for appreciation (two distinct properties)
“It all depends what is done with the paintings.”
This theory 1) doesn't presume “good” art (value-neutral); 2) is not overloaded; 3) is not based on any metaphysical/unempirical theory; 4) is broad enough to cover all things generally considered art without strain; 5) accounts for the specific practices of the artworld;
“A work of art is an object of which someone has said, 'I consider this object a work of art.'”

Arthur Danto, "The Artworld"

Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (October 1964): 571-584.

- Socrates: reflect; Hamlet: reveal
- Socrates focuses his discussion of art on mimesis because at the time artists were engaging in imitation
- Photography - discarding of mimesis in art
- "telling artworks from other things is not so simple a matter, even for native speakers, and these days one might not be aware he was on artistic terrain without an artistic theory to tell him so."
- Art theory does not just distinguish/identify art, it make art possible
- Changes in art necessitate changes in art theory, or else new artworks would be deemed bad or not-art (expand/revise to include)
- "Non-facsimile"
- "To mistake an artwork for a real object is no great feat when an artwork is the real object one mistakes it for." - how to distinguish?
- A bed cannot not be a bed
- Not a bed with paint on, an artwork made up of a bed and some paint (mistaking the artwork for part of itself)
- Different senses of "is" - "the is of artistic identification" - some property or part of the artwork must be designated by this "is"
- "One artistic identification engenders another artistic identification," requires/precludes others
- Making artworks different from one another even if they contain the same real objects
- (Obviously must be linked to the real objects)
- We must master this "is" in order to understand why a work is art
- "To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld."
- Context
- [Popular artworlds?]
- Why can't the Brillo company make art, while Warhol cannot but make art? (Has the distinction between art and reality broken down?)
- Cannot separate the work from the (gallery) context - mistake the part for the whole
- The differences is in the theory of art, which supports the work (historically specific, "occasionality")
- "The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible."
- Art as a discourse
- The Brillo box of the artworld is distinguished (if by nothing else) by the "is" of artistic identification
- "Retroactive enrichment of the entities in the artworld" - previous works can now be discussed in terms of new predicates/criteria/theories/works
- "Pure" paintings can only exist in relation to impure paintings - the same predicates apply!
- Perpetual intensification of the matrix of artistic possibility that also enriches the entire rest of the artworld
- Importance of institutions in structuring this artworld/matrix of possibilities (For Danto, this is only of sociological interest...)