Becker ArtWorldsRevisited

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"Art Worlds" RevisitedAuthor(s): Howard S. BeckerSource: Sociological Forum, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), pp. 497-502Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/684401 .

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Sociological ForunmVol. 5, No. 3, 1990

Review Essays

Art WorldsRevisitedHoward S. Becker1

When Chuck Tilly asked me to write my afterthoughtsaboutArt Worlds(Becker, 1982), I told him I could not do it because I did not have any after-thoughts. Not that I thought it was perfect. Far from it. But I thought it wasdone, that there was no more for me to say about it, although discussion onthe topics it addressedwould of course go on forever just as it had before Iever stuck my two cents in. He persuadedme to think about it some more,and insisted that the idea was not to start second guessing myself, or findingerrors to be corrected, but just to say what I was thinking about now, whatcame to mind as I broodedabout the book. Several things eventually did.Not surprisingly,what came to mind had mostly to do with what I havebeen doing since. We can always find a thread of continuity in what we do,even though it escapes others. So I can see in hindsight, although others maynot, how and whereArt Worldsbroughtsome things I had been thinking aboutto fruition, and startedsome new trails I have been following since, with some-what surprising results.One aspect of the continuityhas to do with story telling. I was exposed,as everyone is in graduateschool, to a wide variety of teaching styles. LouisWirth,cavalierly,used to read his mail aloud to us in class, or translateSimmelfrom the German at sight (not such a great feat as we imagined, since Germanwas his native language) and occasionally just read the Germanaloud, sayingthat it was too beautiful to translate.HerbertBlumer gave monolithic lecturessystematically organized around the central points of his system of socialpsychology. Everett Hughes, whose student I became, gave lectures that al-though they often seemed a little disorganized o new students,were memorablein ways Blumer and Wirth's seldom were.One thing that distinguishedEverett's style from the others was that hetold stories. A lot of stories. Some about his childhood in Ohio, as the son of'Departmentof Sociology, Northwestem University, Evanston,Illinois 60208-1330.

4970884-8971/90/09OO-0497$06.00/0 1990 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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498 Beckera liberal minister n what was then Ku Klux Klancountry; iery crosses burningon the lawn, moves from one town to another when the sermons got tooprogressive for the congregation. Some about the jobs he had held when hewent to graduateschool: in the Gary steel mills (we found it hard to imaginebookish, eccentric Everett in that company), in Chicago settlement houses, su-pervising the "recreation"of immigrantchildren. Most of all, he told storiesabout his research experiences: his travels in pre-HitlerGermany, his majorcommunity studyin Quebec, his studies of race relations n industiy in Chicagoduring World War II.Everett's stories always made a point. The germ of his justly famous"Good People and Dirty Work" is a story he quotes from his field notes(Hughes, 1971:90-91), in which some respectable Germans explain to him(believing, he said, that they could speakfreely to someone so obviously Anglo-Saxon) that what the Nazis did was terrible, yes, but still, after all, the Jewswere a problemand something had to be done about them. He developed, fromthat commonplace but terrifying experience, an elegant theory that went farbeyond the particularcase that elicited it. But the story embodies the generalsociological point he made from it: when membersof a society agree that cer-tain distasteful,shameful, awful thingshave to be done, they will createa moraldivision of labor, in which some people do the dirty work, allowing everyoneelse to get the benefit of it being done without having to be morally responsiblefor its doing.When it came time for me to teach (on my arrivalat Northwestem in1965), I quickly discovered that I had neither the temperamentnor scholarlyequipmentto give carefully organizedlecturesa' a Blumeror summarize itera-ture as thoroughly as I had heard Tamotsu Shibutani do. My mail was notinteresting enough to read to students and I could not translatefrom anythingat all, so I could not imitateWirth.But I could tell stories as Hughes had, andtelling stories graduallytook up more and more of the class time I put in.This became morepronouncedwhen, in 1971, I beganteachingthe sociol-ogy of the arts. I starteddoing that class more or less accidentally.I had spentthe previous year on a fellowship, doing a lot of reading and thinking aboutthe arts, because I had decide that I was getting bored with the sociology ofeducation, in which I had worked for many years, and needed a new field.What could be better than the arts? I had played the piano for a living, mywife was a visual artist, my sister-in-lawan actress,so I had a lot of experienceand "acquaintancewith" to draw on. I also had an intuitive feeling that whatwas then being done in the sociology of artwas overly philosophical, relyingtoo much on the idea thatworks of art "reflect"their environing society; thatseemed entirelytoo muchof a verbalgame. I thoughttherewould be somethinginterestingto do if I just applied the ideas of the sociology of work (thatterm



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Art Worlds Revisited 499had begun to replace the "sociology of occupations and professions") to art,looked at the arts as the work some people did.

My conviction that there was something to talk about was strengthenedby finding some books that had ideas I could use. LeonardMeyer's Emotionand Meaning in Music (1956), Barbara Hemstein Smith's Poetic Closure(1968), and Ernst Gombrich'sArt and Illusion (1960) all relied on the idea ofartistic conventions-such agreed on elements of art works as musical scalesor the sonnet formn-to explain how art works were made and absorbed bylisteners, readers,and lookers. A little thoughtconvinced me that"convention,"so understood,was pretty much what sociologists had in mind when they talkedaboutfolkways, norms, culture,sharedunderstandings, r any of the manyotherwords we use to talk about how people manage to do things together. I made"convention"the comerstone of the course.Art Worldsgrew out of that course. The first time I taughtit I recordedthe lectures and had them transcribed.The manuscriptwas the basis of theseveral articles that preceded the book, and of the organizationof the bookitself.That course was probably the first one I had ever taught where I gotseriously interested in "teaching," in dreaming up things to do in class thatwould get people's attention, things they would rememberbeyond the remem-bering necessary for passing tests (since I never gave tests, that was irrelevantin my class anyway). My story telling got more elaborate.My best storywas of the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, those magnificentworks by a totally unprofessional artist who had nothing to do with any or-ganized artworld, an immigrantItalian tile setter who, so far as anyone couldever discover, had just wanted "to make something big." Simon Rodia was aperfect experimentthe world had done for me, an experiment that allowed meto test some implications of my ideas about how artists' participation n artworlds shaped the work they did. Because Rodia had, as he bragged when hecompared himself to the Catalan architect Gaudi, whose work his resembled,"done it all himself," comparinghim to more conventional artists made it clearhow not doing it all yourself, taking advantageof the networksof cooperationthat made up art worlds, limited your possibilities. Unlike more professionalartists who relied on others' contributions o get theirwork done, Rodia coulddo whatever he wanted, exactly because he did not need anyone else's coopera-tion. You could not even say what genre or mediumRodiaworked in because,not having to coordinatewhat he did with anyone else, he did not have toaccept the constraintsof any genre.

I built my story on the material in Calvin Trillin's New Yorkerprofileon Rodia (Trillin, 1965), and a photographer riend, David Watanabe,made anice set of slides of the Towers for me when he visited Los Angeles. So Icould spend a class hour telling the story of the Towers, showing pictures of



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500 Beckerthem, quoting Rodia's off-the-wall remarks to interviewers, citing the wrongguesses critics had made about what he was up to by imagining that he wasdoing what conventional artists who did belong to art worlds did, telling howdedicated architects and others preserved the Towers from the wrecking crewsof the City of Los Angeles, who knew an art work when they saw one andknew that these were no such things. Students liked this hour better than almostanything else in the quarter-longclass.More important, it stuck in their minds-the Towers are magnificentstructuresyou do not forget easily, even if you have only seen slides, and thestory of this wonderful eccentric is equally memorable.At the end of the termsome students always hung around to tell me how much they had liked thecourse and, quite often, would explain that one big reason they liked it wasthe story I had told them of the Watts Towers. Furtherquestioning convincedme that they had indeed gotten the point of the course (I had been worriedthat the sociology was lost in the story) and that they had gotten it preciselybecause it was embodied in that story. They rememberedthe story and thenrememberedthe sociological point, which now lived for them.That convinced me that stories were an effective, maybe the most effec-tive, way of transmittingan abstractpoint. So much so that, when I came towrite the final version of the book, I was determined to let stories carry a lotof the weight of the argument.Not to the point of leaving the abstractpointsimplicit. Irving Louis Horowitz had warned me, sternly, against what hedescribed as mindless anti-intellectual art works that refused to make theirpoints explicit. Nevertheless, I began Art Worldswith the story of AnthonyTrollope's manservantwho broughthim coffee and who Trollope generouslycredited with being as responsible for his work as he, Trollope, was himself.I meant to let that servant stand for the networks of cooperation I thoughtcentral to an understanding f art, and wrote the book so that I could mentionhim now and then in a way that would make the reader recall instantly thelarger abstractconception I had in mind. I think thatworked.Other things in the book came out of other classroom stunts. Two inparticularseemed very effective in class and I made them the basis of strongarguments.I used to start my lecture on conventions (as I eventually startedthe chapterin the book) by asking people to guess the next note of a melodyof which I had only given them the first note. If I was lucky, students wouldend up singing theiranswers. And I began a lecture about aestheticsby talkingabout my friend, Bill Arnold, who had organized a photographicexhibit toappearin the advertising spaces on 500 New York City buses (17 photographsto a bus). Could he, I asked students, possibly find the 8500 excellentphotographsthat required?Were there that many good ones? Once they gotthrough checking the arithmetic, they were bemused by the larger issue my



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Art Worlds Revisited 501question raised:how were judgmentsabout the artisticqualityof works relatedto amount of space available for their exhibition?

These classroom experimentsforeshadowed and preparedme for some-thing else I connect to the Art Worldsexperience: my still-growing interest inalternate forms of presenting social science materials,both photographicanddramatic.At the same time that I startedworking on the book, I also began makingphotographs.Thatwas a daring step for someone who thoughthimself visuallytone deaf, which first grade drawinghad convinced me I was. I quickly learnedthat I was never going to be anotherAnsel Adams but that I had a certain flairfor documentaryphotography,and furthermore, ould help others teach them-selves how to make images that had social content. I taught a course indocumentaryphotography or several years (Northwesternproved open to thiskind of experimentation), curated an exhibit called "Exploring SocietyPhotographically" Becker, 1981), which was shown at Northwesternand else-where around the country, and wrote several pieces for photographic ournals(reprinted n Becker, 1986:223-317). I came to see that this interest coincidedwith the developing concern in many of the social sciences for the rhetoricalcharacterof our presentations (Latourand De Noblet [1985] made clear thevisual aspect of this concern), and that led to what is now a substantial nterestof mine in the sociology of science.When Art Worldswas done and out, I began to feel uneasy about nothaving done any "real research,"work involving interviewing and observingin a systematic way, in many years. I was fortunateenough to find, in MichalMcCall, a researchpartnerwho sharedmy interest in the sociology of art,hadherself done some substantialresearchin that area (McCall, 1977, 1978), andwas willing to collaborate n what became (after Lori Morris oined us) a three-city study of theatrical communities in the United States. When it came timeto start presentingour results, Michal had the wonderful idea of doing thesereports as staged readings of our notes and analyses, performances in whichall three of us would participate. One of our scripts, originally performed atan American Sociology Association meeting, has been published (Becker etal., 1989), andanother,which tells the history of this development and discussesour methodological problems, was presented at a conference called "EditingReality" organizedby Bruce Jackson andDiane Christianat the State Universityof New York in Buffalo and will be published in the conference proceedings."PerformanceScience," as Michal named it, is a very rich field of pos-sibilities. In the spring of 1989, I cotaughta course, with Dwight Conquergoodof Northwestern'sDepartmentof PerformanceStudies, called "Performance ndSocial Science," in which we worked with students from performance, heater,and social science to explore ways of presenting social science that take ad-vantage of theatrical thinking and knowledge. I have no idea where this will



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502 Beckerlead. One of the students in the class is writing a term paper about it, foranother class, treating it as an instance of the formation (possibly) of a new"art world." Dwight and I are so excited by what the class producedthat weare planning a paper about it ourselves. We will see.

REFERENCESBecker, Iloward S.1981 Exploring Society Together. Evanston,IL: Mary and Leigh Black Gallery.1982 Art Worlds. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.1986 Doing Things Together. Evanston, IL:NorthwesternUniversity Press.Becker, Iloward S., Michal M. McCall, andLori V. Morris1989 "Theatres and communities: Threescenes." Social Problems 36:93-116.Gombrich, Ernst1960 Art and Illusion:A Studyin the Psychol-ogy of Pictorial Representation. Prin-ceton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press.hlughes, Everett C.1971 The Sociological Eye. New Brunwsick,NJ: TransactionBooks.Latotir, Brtino and Jocelyn De Noblet, eds.1985 Les vues de l'esprit:visualisationet con-naissance scientifique. Culture Techni-

que 14. Paris: Centre de Recherchesurla Culture Technique.McCall, Michal M.1977 "Artwithout a market: Creatingartisticvalue in a provincial art world." Sym-bolic Interaction1:32-43.1978 "The sociology of female artists."Studies in Symbolic Interaction 1:289-318.Meyer, Leonard1956 Emotion and Meaning in Music.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Smith, Barbara Ilerrnstein1968 Poetic Closure: A Study of How PoemsEnd. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.Trillin, Calvin1965 "I know I want to do something."TheNew Yorker, 29(May):72-120.

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