"Art Worlds" Revisited Author(s): Howard S. Becker Source: Sociological Forum, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), pp.

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Sociological ForunmVol. 5, No. 3, 1990

Review Essays

Art Worlds Revisited

Howard 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 afterthoughts. Not that I thought it was perfect. Far from it. But I thought it was done, that there was no more for me to say about it, although discussion on the topics it addressed would of course go on forever just as it had before I ever stuck my two cents in. He persuaded me to think about it some more, and insisted that the idea was not to start second guessing myself, or finding errors to be corrected, but just to say what I was thinking about now, what came to mind as I brooded about the book. Several things eventually did. Not surprisingly,what came to mind had mostly to do with what I have been 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 may not, how and where Art Worldsbroughtsome things I had been thinking about to fruition, and startedsome new trails I have been following since, with somewhat surprisingresults. One aspect of the continuity has to do with story telling. I was exposed, as everyone is in graduate school, to a wide variety of teaching styles. Louis Wirth, cavalierly, used to read his mail aloud to us in class, or translateSimmel from the German at sight (not such a great feat as we imagined, since German was his native language) and occasionally just read the German aloud, saying that it was too beautiful to translate.HerbertBlumer gave monolithic lectures systematically organized around the central points of his system of social psychology. Everett Hughes, whose student I became, gave lectures that although they often seemed a little disorganizedto new students,were memorable in ways Blumer and Wirth's seldom were. One thing that distinguished Everett's style from the others was that he told stories. A lot of stories. Some about his childhood in Ohio, as the son of
'Departmentof Sociology, Northwestem University, Evanston, Illinois 60208-1330. 497
0884-8971/90/09OO-0497$06.00/0e 1990 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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a liberal ministerin what was then Ku Klux Klan country;fiery crosses burning on the lawn, moves from one town to another when the sermons got too progressive for the congregation. Some about the jobs he had held when he went to graduateschool: in the Gary steel mills (we found it hard to imagine bookish, eccentric Everett in that company), in Chicago settlement houses, supervising the "recreation"of immigrant children. Most of all, he told stories about his research experiences: his travels in pre-Hitler Germany, his major community study in Quebec, his studies of race relationsin industiy in Chicago during 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 speak freely to someone so obviously AngloSaxon) that what the Nazis did was terrible,yes, but still, after all, the Jews were a problem and something had to be done about them. He developed, from that commonplace but terrifying experience, an elegant theory that went far beyond the particularcase that elicited it. But the story embodies the general sociological point he made from it: when members of a society agree that certain distasteful,shameful, awful things have to be done, they will create a moral division of labor, in which some people do the dirty work, allowing everyone else to get the benefit of it being done without having to be morally responsible for its doing. When it came time for me to teach (on my arrival at Northwestem in 1965), I quickly discovered that I had neither the temperamentnor scholarly equipmentto give carefully organized lectures a'la Blumer or summarizeliterature as thoroughly as I had heard Tamotsu Shibutani do. My mail was not interesting enough to read to students and I could not translatefrom anything at all, so I could not imitate Wirth. But I could tell stories as Hughes had, and telling stories gradually took up more and more of the class time I put in. This became more pronouncedwhen, in 1971, I began teaching the sociology of the arts. I starteddoing that class more or less accidentally. I had spent the previous year on a fellowship, doing a lot of reading and thinking about the arts, because I had decide that I was getting bored with the sociology of education, 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, my wife was a visual artist,my sister-in-lawan actress, so I had a lot of experience and "acquaintancewith" to draw on. I also had an intuitive feeling that what was then being done in the sociology of art was overly philosophical, relying too much on the idea that works of art "reflect"their environing society; that seemed entirely too much of a verbal game. I thoughttherewould be something interestingto do if I just applied the ideas of the sociology of work (that term

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had 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 strengthened by finding some books that had ideas I could use. Leonard Meyer's Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), Barbara Hemstein Smith's Poetic Closure (1968), and Ernst Gombrich'sArt and Illusion (1960) all relied on the idea of artistic conventions-such agreed on elements of art works as musical scales or the sonnet formn-to explain how art works were made and absorbed by listeners, readers,and lookers. A little thoughtconvinced me that "convention," so understood,was pretty much what sociologists had in mind when they talked or any of the many other about folkways, norms, culture,sharedunderstandings, words we use to talk about how people manage to do things together. I made "convention"the comerstone of the course. Art Worlds grew out of that course. The first time I taught it I recorded the lectures and had them transcribed.The manuscriptwas the basis of the several articles that preceded the book, and of the organization of the book itself. That course was probably the first one I had ever taught where I got seriously interested in "teaching," in dreaming up things to do in class that would get people's attention,things they would rememberbeyond the remembering necessary for passing tests (since I never gave tests, that was irrelevant in my class anyway). My story telling got more elaborate. My best story was of the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, those magnificent works by a totally unprofessional artist who had nothing to do with any organized art world, an immigrantItalian tile setter who, so far as anyone could ever discover, had just wanted "to make something big." Simon Rodia was a perfect experiment the world had done for me, an experimentthat allowed me to test some implications of my ideas about how artists' participationin art worlds shaped the work they did. Because Rodia had, as he bragged when he compared himself to the Catalan architect Gaudi, whose work his resembled, "done it all himself," comparinghim to more conventional artists made it clear how not doing it all yourself, taking advantageof the networks of cooperation that made up art worlds, limited your possibilities. Unlike more professional artists who relied on others' contributionsto get their work done, Rodia could do whatever he wanted, exactly because he did not need anyone else's cooperation. You could not even say what genre or medium Rodia worked in because, not having to coordinate what he did with anyone else, he did not have to accept the constraintsof any genre. I built my story on the material in Calvin Trillin's New Yorker profile on Rodia (Trillin, 1965), and a photographerfriend, David Watanabe,made a nice set of slides of the Towers for me when he visited Los Angeles. So I could spend a class hour telling the story of the Towers, showing pictures of

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them, quoting Rodia's off-the-wall remarks to interviewers, citing the wrong guesses critics had made about what he was up to by imagining that he was doing what conventional artists who did belong to art worlds did, telling how dedicated architects and others preservedthe Towers from the wrecking crews of the City of Los Angeles, who knew an art work when they saw one and knew that these were no such things. Studentsliked this hour better than almost anything else in the quarter-longclass. More important, it stuck in their minds-the Towers are magnificent structuresyou do not forget easily, even if you have only seen slides, and the story of this wonderful eccentric is equally memorable.At the end of the term some students always hung around to tell me how much they had liked the course and, quite often, would explain that one big reason they liked it was the story I had told them of the Watts Towers. Furtherquestioning convinced me that they had indeed gotten the point of the course (I had been worried that the sociology was lost in the story) and that they had gotten it precisely because it was embodied in that story. They rememberedthe story and then rememberedthe sociological point, which now lived for them. That convinced me that stories were an effective, maybe the most effective, way of transmittingan abstractpoint. So much so that, when I came to write the final version of the book, I was determinedto let stories carry a lot of the weight of the argument.Not to the point of leaving the abstractpoints implicit. Irving Louis Horowitz had warned me, sternly, against what he described as mindless anti-intellectual art works that refused to make their points explicit. Nevertheless, I began Art Worlds with the story of Anthony Trollope's manservantwho brought him coffee and who Trollope generously credited 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 thought central to an understanding of art, and wrote the book so that I could mention him now and then in a way that would make the reader recall instantly the larger abstractconception I had in mind. I think that worked. Other things in the book came out of other classroom stunts. Two in particularseemed very effective in class and I made them the basis of strong arguments. I used to start my lecture on conventions (as I eventually started the chapter in the book) by asking people to guess the next note of a melody of which I had only given them the first note. If I was lucky, students would end up singing their answers. And I began a lecture about aesthetics by talking about my friend, Bill Arnold, who had organized a photographic exhibit to appear in the advertisingspaces on 500 New York City buses (17 photographs to a bus). Could he, I asked students, possibly find the 8500 excellent photographs that required?Were there that many good ones? Once they got through checking the arithmetic, they were bemused by the larger issue my

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question raised: how were judgments about the artistic quality of works related to amount of space available for their exhibition? These classroom experiments foreshadowed and preparedme for something else I connect to the Art Worlds experience: my still-growing interest in alternate forms of presenting social science materials, both photographic and dramatic. At the same time that I startedworking on the book, I also began making photographs.That was a daring step for someone who thought himself visually tone deaf, which first grade drawing had convinced me I was. I quickly learned that I was never going to be anotherAnsel Adams but that I had a certain flair for documentaryphotography,and furthermore,could help others teach themselves how to make images that had social content. I taught a course in documentaryphotographyfor several years (Northwesternproved open to this kind of experimentation), curated an exhibit called "Exploring Society Photographically"(Becker, 1981), which was shown at Northwesternand elsewhere around the country, and wrote several pieces for photographicjournals (reprintedin Becker, 1986:223-317). I came to see that this interest coincided with the developing concern in many of the social sciences for the rhetorical character of our presentations (Latour and De Noblet [1985] made clear the visual aspect of this concern), and that led to what is now a substantialinterest of mine in the sociology of science. When Art Worlds was done and out, I began to feel uneasy about not having done any "real research,"work involving interviewing and observing in a systematic way, in many years. I was fortunateenough to find, in Michal McCall, a researchpartnerwho shared my interest in the sociology of art, had herself done some substantialresearch in that area (McCall, 1977, 1978), and was willing to collaboratein what became (after Lori Morrisjoined us) a threecity study of theatricalcommunities in the United States. When it came time to start presenting our results, Michal had the wonderful idea of doing these reports as staged readings of our notes and analyses, performances in which all three of us would participate.One of our scripts, originally performed at an American Sociology Association meeting, has been published (Becker et al., 1989), and another,which tells the history of this developmentand discusses our methodological problems, was presented at a conference called "Editing Reality"organizedby Bruce Jackson and Diane Christianat the State University of New York in Buffalo and will be published in the conference proceedings. "PerformanceScience," as Michal named it, is a very rich field of possibilities. In the spring of 1989, I cotaught a course, with Dwight Conquergood of Northwestern'sDepartmentof PerformanceStudies, called "Performance and Social Science," in which we worked with students from performance,theater, and social science to explore ways of presenting social science that take advantage of theatrical thinking and knowledge. I have no idea where this will

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lead. One of the students in the class is writing a term paper about it, for another 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 produced that we are planning a paper about it ourselves. We will see.

REFERENCES
Becker, Iloward S. 1981 Exploring Society Together. Evanston, IL: Mary and Leigh Black Gallery. 1982 Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1986 Doing Things Together. Evanston, IL: NorthwesternUniversity Press. Becker, Iloward S., Michal M. McCall, and Lori V. Morris 1989 "Theatres and communities: Three scenes." Social Problems 36:93-116. Gombrich, Ernst 1960 Art and Illusion:A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 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 connaissance scientifique. Culture Technique 14. Paris: Centre de Recherche sur la CultureTechnique. McCall, Michal M. 1977 "Art without a market: Creating artistic value in a provincial art world." Symbolic Interaction1:32-43. 1978 "The sociology of female artists." Studies in Symbolic Interaction 1:289318. Meyer, Leonard 1956 Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Barbara Ilerrnstein 1968 Poetic Closure:A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trillin, Calvin 1965 "I know I want to do something." The New Yorker, 29(May):72-120.

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