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Poetics 35 (2007) 4765

www.elsevier.com/locate/poetic

A general theory of artistic legitimation:


How art worlds are like social movements
Shyon Baumann *
Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2J4, Canada
Available online 7 August 2006

Abstract
In this article I develop a general theory for explaining how cultural products are legitimated as art,
whether high or popular art. The theory generalizes from the large body of existing sociological research on
art world development while integrating ideas from the sociology of social movements and from social
psychology. I argue that there is an analogy between social movement success and recognition as art, so that
the major concepts that explain the paths of social movements also apply to art worlds: political opportunity
structures, resource mobilization, and framing processes. In addition, I incorporate the social psychological
perspective on legitimacy to specify the process by which art worlds achieve artistic legitimation.
# 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A central question within the sociology of art concerns how cultural products are legitimated
as art, whether high or popular.1 A large and growing number of studies have convincingly
documented that recognition of art is a social process that cannot be reduced to a reflection of
artistic merit. These studies help to clarify why some culture receives this recognition while some
does not, and why this recognition can wax and wane.
How can we generalize between these studies to understand artistic legitimation as a general
process? In this paper I bring together work from social psychology on legitimation with the
sociological literature on social movements to offer a general theory to explain how some cultural
productions achieve legitimation as art. I contend that the processes by which social movements
succeed and culture is recognized as art are parallel processes of legitimation that share

* Tel.: +1 416 978 8262.


E-mail address: shyon.baumann@utoronto.ca.
1
The distinction of interest here is between cultural products recognized as art and cultural products that are considered
non-art, rather than between high and popular art. Hierarchy between art worlds is a worthy, but separate, phenomenon to
be studied.
0304-422X/$ see front matter # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2006.06.001

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S. Baumann / Poetics 35 (2007) 4765

fundamental similarities. I review the literature on social movements and on artistic recognition
to show how three main explanatory factors are present in each.
Because social movements have received a vast amount of sociological attention over the last
several decades, the area has matured into a well-organized field of study. A 1996 book edited by
some of the most influential scholars in the field synthesized decades of social movements
research to create a comprehensive perspective on social movement development (McAdam
et al., 1996a). This perspective identified three broad explanatory factors: political opportunity
structures, resource mobilization, and framing processes. More recent work on social
movements has elaborated on these factors (Almeida, 2003; Benford and Snow, 2000; Jenkins
et al., 2003; Meyer, 2004; Meyer and Minkoff, 2004; McAdam et al., 2001), demonstrated
how they influence one another or work in concert (Cress and Snow, 2000; Einwohner, 2003;
Ferree, 2003; Koopmans and Olzak, 2004; Soule, 2004), and built bridges between one or more
of them to bodies of knowledge outside social movements (Dixon and Rosigno, 2003; Hedstrom
et al., 2000; Ingram and Rao, 2004). While moving the research forward, this work
simultaneously recognizes the value of the three factors as a basic agenda for social movement
analysis.
Within the sociology of art, Baumann (2001, p. 405) argues that studies of art worlds have
likewise relied on three explanatory factors: a changing cultural opportunity space, the
institutionalization of resources and practices, and a legitimating ideology. I argue that with due
elaboration, the social movement theoretical perspectives can be mapped onto Baumanns
categorization of art world studies. The payoff of this mapping is (1) an outline of a general
theory of art world legitimation, and (2) a foundation for explaining legitimation processes
outside art and protest, in other collective enterprises with ideological commitments.
1. Legitimation as a process
The sociology of art addresses a wide array of questions about cultural production,
content, and reception. Many studies have explored how art is implicated in inequality, politics,
identity, markets, organizations, and other social phenomena. One strain of research within the
sociology of art has focused on understanding how some cultural productions are legitimated. In
this work, legitimation is a process whereby the new and unaccepted is rendered valid and
accepted.
Zelditch (2001, p. 4) notes that [l]egitimacy is one of the oldest problems in social thought.
Accordingly, scholarship on legitimacy has developed in various directions across social
scientific disciplines. Within sociology, there is a great deal of work on legitimacy that is
concerned with different forms of legitimation. For example, social-psychologically oriented
work on interpersonal relations examines the legitimacy of authority, justice, and prestige in faceto-face settings (Berger et al., 1998; Ford and Johnson, 1998; Hegtvedt and Johnson, 2000;
Mueller and Landsman, 2004; Zelditch, 2001). In this case, legitimation refers to the acceptance
of personal claims for status and authority as valid. Likewise, much of the work within political
sociology on the legitimacy of political regimes (Diamond, 1997; Kluegel et al., 1999; Tarifa,
1997; Weil, 1989) discusses a similar form of legitimacy at the society level, explaining the
acceptance of group claims for authority. Yet another body of work on legitimacy examines how
self-concepts develop to rationalize various social conditions such as class position (Della and
Richard, 1980, 1986) or single parenthood (Bock, 2000) to the self.
In contrast to these other fields, the study of legitimation within the sociology of art is
concerned with how cultural productions are repositionedboth institutionally and

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intellectually. This repositioning allows the productions to be redefined; from merely


entertainment, commerce, fad, or cultural experimentation or randomness to culture that is
legitimately artistic, whether that be popular or high art.
Although his work on legitimation concerns small-group interactions, Zelditch (2001)
provides a useful set of concepts for specifying the components of legitimation as a process
within the sociology of art. Legitimation occurs when the unaccepted is made accepted through
consensus. This consensus will never be absolute, as there is never complete consensus within a
society about anything. For this reason, consensus needs to be defined minimallyit is issuespecific, near-consensus counts as consensus, and it need only exist at the collective level and not
necessarily at the individual level (Zelditch, 2001, p. 10). For the purposes of art, consensus can
be measured at various levels within an art world (Becker, 1982). Crane (1976) provides a
typology of reward systems that distinguishes between how innovations are evaluated in
different kinds of art worlds, with attention to who functions as gatekeepers in different art
worlds.2 The systems vary from those where cultural innovations are produced for an audience
of fellow innovators (independent reward system) to those in which cultural innovations are
produced for heterogeneous audiences composed of members of a variety of subcultures
(heterocultural reward system) (Crane, 1976, pp. 721722). One way of labeling the audiences
among whom consensus must be reached in these different systems is to distinguish between
internal and external audiences. For external legitimacy, consensus must exist among the general
public. For example, for sculpture to be considered art, there must be consensus among artistic
consumers, broadly defined, that this is the case. For internal legitimacy, consensus must exist
among the inner members of an art world. For example, for abstract sculpture to be considered a
valid genre of sculpture, consensus must exist among sculptors and art scholars and critics that
this is the case.
Consensus is achieved through justification (Zelditch, 2001, p. 10). 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. The justification, for example, for literature as art is so
familiar that it is practically invisible. It is an expressive work, created by an artist the author ,
that can be studiously examined and analyzed, and in which audiences can find beauty,
enjoyment, and a message or philosophy. Literature fits the existing and accepted category
of art.
Legitimacy, of course, is not a dichotomous variable, but rather can be present in widely
varying amounts and among various constituencies. The legitimacy of rap music when it was first
created was quite low, for example, especially among white, middle-class audiences. Raps
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. That is to say, the justifications are found by various
audiences to be convincing arguments for the case for rap as popular art. Should the art world for
rap make claims that rap is a legitimate high art form, it remains to be seen how successful such
claims would be. In contrast, opera is highly legitimated as a high art form. The art world for
opera makes claims that opera is high art, and the justifications for these claims are widely
accepted. As Zelditch (2001, p. 10) notes, [l]egitimacy requires consensus only somewhere, not

2
Cranes article explains how reward systems are common across art, science and religion. Although we are interested
especially in art worlds, further development of Cranes insight about the parallels between these cultural realms offers
the potential for expanding the scope of this paper to legitimation processes in these realms as well.

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S. Baumann / Poetics 35 (2007) 4765

everywhere, a condition which helps us to understand variations in degrees of legitimacy that


cultural productions might have.
There have been numerous studies of the legitimation of cultural productions. Some of the
studies have explained how cultural forms gained widespread legitimacy as popular or high art
(Ardery, 1997; Baumann, 2001; Bowler, 1997; Cherbo, 1997; DiMaggio, 1982, 1992; Levine,
1988; Lopes, 2002; Peterson, 1972; Rachlin, 1993; Sussman, 1997; Watt, 2001; White and
White, 1965; Zolberg, 1997). Other studies have examined how cultural productions that had
legitimacy in one field gained legitimacy in a new field (Molnar, 2005; Rawlings, 2001), or how
cultural productions that had some legitimacy gained yet more (Corse and Westervelt, 2002;
DeNora, 1991; Ferguson, 1998; van Rees, 1983).
These studies of widely divergent artistic forms show how a certain amount of consensus was
achieved regarding their legitimacy. In each case, legitimacy, to greater and to lesser extents, is
generated through a process of collective action. I argue that these case studies of artistic
legitimation can be understood according to a general theory of legitimation. Moreover, I argue
that this theory has been articulated and developed in the sociological literature on social
movements. In the following sections I first explain why several key similarities allow us to apply
insights from social movements to art worlds. I then describe the main components of a general
theory of legitimation opportunities, resources, and framing and show how these concepts are
employed within research on social movements and also how they accurately represent existing
work in the sociology of art on legitimation. I conclude by contrasting my argument with other
recent work on collective enterprises with ideological commitments and by suggesting paths for
future research.
2. How are social movements like art worlds?
Social movements are similar to art worlds in several important aspects. Since the pioneering
work of both Becker (1974, 1982) and Bourdieu (1993), we have understood that art worlds and
cultural fields are sites of collective action. In order to understand the nature of cultural
production and evaluation, and the aesthetic characteristics of culture, we need to analyze the
institutional and social relations of the field or world. Cultural production and reception are acts
that are inherently collective, and the legitimation of culture is always achieved collectively.
Similarly, although there are inconsistencies in the literature concerning some aspects of what
constitutes a social movement, there is consensus that social movements are collective activity
(Olzak and Uhrig, 2001, p. 694).
Most importantly for the purposes at hand, social movements are similar to art worlds in the
goals of their collective action. I argue that social movement success is a process of legitimation
that is parallel to artistic legitimation. There are, of course, many kinds of social movements and
they seek to achieve a variety of goals. Nevertheless, the social movements literature most often
focuses on movements that contain an ideological element to them, in the sense that the
movement strives to promote a counter-hegemonic idea.3 The civil rights movement, for
3

Eyerman and Jamison (1991) make a strong case for focusing the analysis of social movements on what they call
cognitive praxis. They argue that social movements must be understood according to their symbolic and
expressive significance, because social movements are the social action from where new knowledge originates
(Eyerman and Jamison, 1991, p. 48). This perspective on social movements, as a social space where new ideas or
knowledge are formulated and promoted, makes salient a crucial similarity with art worlds, namely the creation and
legitimation of new ideas.

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example, sought wider acceptance of the idea that minorities should enjoy the same legal rights
as the majority. The same characterization can be made of gay rights movements and the
womens movement. Many environmental movements seek to legitimate ideas that overturn
prevailing notions about the subservience of nature to social needs.4 In these and other social
movements, one important goal is to legitimate make accepted an idea that was initially not
widely accepted. This acceptance is key to the further change in the social structure, system of
rewards, or political system (Olzak and Uhrig, 2001, pp. 694695) that social movements seek.5
Ambiguity exists concerning what constitutes social movement success (Andrews, 2001;
Bernstein, 2003; Gamson, 1990; Giugni, 1998). What counts as adequate change? Consider, for
example, how despite many obvious successes of the civil rights movement, there are
lingering inequalities. There are various ways of measuring success for social movements. For
the purposes of this paper, success is conceived as the attainment of legitimacy. This conception
is supported by Gamsons (1990) category of acceptance as a social movement outcome,
whereby targeted audiences come to regard the movements ideas and goals as legitimate.
For a successful outcome, then, the central ideas championed by a movement must gain a
common sense, taken-for-granted character (McLaughlin and Khawaja, 2000, p. 423) among
a target public, either policy-makers or the public at large.6 In the terms of legitimation outlined
above, there must be consensus that the ideas championed by the social movement are justified.
Art world success can also be equated with the attainment of legitimacy. A cultural field is
structured around agents producing belief in the value of goods in question (van Rees and
Dorleijn, 2001, p. 332). While artists themselves work to create art, there are many agents within
cultural fields who assign value to cultural productions and also work to sustain the legitimacy of
those assignments. Art worlds, in this sense, can be said to be doubly concerned with legitimacy.
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.
Ambiguity also exists concerning what constitutes art world success. This ambiguity derives
in part from the fact that different art worlds have different goals and different measures of
success. For some art worlds, particularly new art worlds that are experimental or radical, merely

4
Environmental movements are one example of what are termed new social movements (NSMs) in social movements
research (Larana et al., 1994). NSMs are generally distinguished from other social movements because they are based on
ideology, identity, and values rather than on class-based politics (Bernstein, 2005). As a specific form of social movement,
NSMs are particularly similar to art worlds through their focus on the importance of the acceptance of ideas. However,
NSMs are also largely about identity politics, and it is beyond the scope of this paper to theorize about the role that
identity politics plays in art worlds. Because it is possible to point to examples of legitimation in art worlds involving a
link to identity politics (as in jazz and in rap), future research should incorporate work on identity into studies of art world
development and legitimation.
5
One way of describing the boundaries of a social movement is to say that it includes those participants who would
consider themselves as members. This description is often employed to define other kinds of group membership as well.
For art worlds, though, Beckers (1982) analysis extends the boundaries of art worlds to audience members who merely
know the conventions of an art form. Such audience members are unlikely to consider themselves part of that art world. In
this sense, art worlds differ from social movements. However, to the extent that the legitimation process is driven
primarily by core, as opposed to peripheral, members of the art world, and these members would consider themselves part
of that art world, there exists more similarity than difference between art worlds and social movements on this point.
6
In some social movements literature, especially that which bridges the sociological literature on organizations
(McLaughlin and Khawaja, 2000; Minkoff, 1994; Olzak and Uhrig, 2001), legitimacy often refers to the acceptance of the
tactics or organizational forms that social movements adopt. Although clearly related, perhaps even causally related, the
legitimacy of tactics and organizational forms is analytically distinct from the legitimacy of social movement ideas or
goals. It is the legitimation processes of ideas that are argued to be parallel to the legitimation processes in art worlds.

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producing anything at all might be considered success. However, most art worlds exist with an
audience in mind, whether that be a restricted, elite audience, or a mass audience.7 Acceptance by
an audience that the art worlds activities are legitimate culture, high or popular art, constitutes
the main measure of an art worlds success.8
3. Success in social movements and art worlds: three explanatory factors
In this section I describe the three concepts from social movements research that are employed
to explain social movement success. I show how each concept has analogs within the body of case
studies that comprise the work in the sociology of art on artistic legitimation. I achieve two goals
simultaneously: (1) I bridge these two disparate areas of research to show how the sociology of
art can benefit from social movements research, and (2) I synthesize work in the sociology of art
to show that independent studies complement one another to support a general theory of artistic
legitimation.
3.1. Opportunity: exogenous factors facilitate success
Sometimes labeled political opportunities and sometimes opportunity structures as well
as several variants thereof, this perspective has developed in the social movements literature to
refer chiefly to characteristics of the political environment in which movements operate. Having
been in use for several decades, the concept has achieved near canonical stature in the study of
social movements (Almeida, 2003, p. 345).
As it has been employed by researchers, the concept has been criticized for being
overextended (Gamson and Meyer, 1996) as well as for being imprecisely or uselessly
conceptualized (Goodwin and Jasper, 1999). Nevertheless, the concept endures in the literature,
and it is the subject of both theoretical fine tuning and empirical testing. The core of the concept is
that context matters. We can better understand how social movements emerge, evolve, and most
importantly for the present discussion how they succeed if we understand what is going on in
the wider society that influences them. For example, Almeida and Stearns (1998) argue that the
likelihood of success of local grassroots environmental movements in Japan was influenced by
the presence of a national anti-pollution movement. Once established, this national movement
could lend financial, strategic, and ideological assistance to local movements, thereby helping
them to succeed. Another example comes from Meyer (2003) who argues that the success of the
anti-nuclear movement in New Zealand was facilitated by the political context specific to New
Zealand. The state was more loosely nested within the Western security alliance, and there were
no existing US bases that would have required removal. As such, the political costs for adoption
of a ban in New Zealand were relatively low, helping the movement to succeed.
Within the sociology of art, the analogous idea was labeled by DiMaggio (1992, p. 44) as an
opportunity space, referring to the existence of competitors, commercial substitutes, or
publics and patrons of new wealth. The core idea is that certain exogenous factors can affect the
7

The elite, restricted audience corresponds more closely to the internal legitimacy of an art world, and the mass
audience corresponds to the external legitimacy of an art world, as discussed above.
8
Although this paper emphasizes work on the legitimation of innovations new productions in art worlds, it is worth
noting that the process of artistic legitimation applies equally to the rediscovery of artistic works and art worlds. Just as
social movements may be revolutionary or reactionary, artistic legitimation may involve the embrace of culturally
innovative work or a positive reevaluation of formerly rejected or disputed art.

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likelihood that an art world will succeed in attaining legitimacy. Although not always labeled as
such, various studies of art worlds have pointed to important elements of an opportunity space.
Some of these elements are broad changes in the wider society. Peterson (1972, p. 147), for
example, notes that the ideological interpretation of jazz in the cultural media has closely
paralleled official attitudes towards blacks in this country. That is to say that jazz, a cultural
production that was strongly African American in its practitioners and audiences, was more
readily elevated to artistic status after the reduction in discriminatory attitudes about blacks
among the public and elites, a relationship documented by Lopes (2002) as well. DeNora (1991)
contends that an ideology of serious classical music was formulated in the late 18th century by
the Viennese aristocracy when the bourgeoisie became wealthy enough to threaten the
aristocracys monopoly on classical music concerts. The distinctions that were drawn between
the composers claimed by aristocrats and the large number of other composers created status
differences between musical geniuses and the average composer. In this case, a new art world
was prompted by economic change among the group who comprised the art world. In their
studies of the establishment of cultural hierarchy in the United States, both DiMaggio (1982) and
Levine (1988) cite class and ethnic conflict during a time of rapid industrialization and
urbanization as important to the timing of the elevation of the high arts. The need for elites to
culturally segregate themselves created an opportunity for certain cultural productions to serve as
high art mechanisms of distinction. Watt (2001) connects the rise of the novel in 18th century
England with changing socioeconomic conditions that created a reading public with the time and
propensity to read long fiction. Baumann (2001) argues that films elevation to an art form in the
US was facilitated by the drastic growth in the number of people with post-secondary education,
which created a pool of potential patrons.
Other elements of the opportunity space can be more specific to the art world in question. For
example, in their study of the rise of Impressionism in France, White and White (1965) cite the
inability of the Royal Academic system to provide work for the growing number of painters
centered in Paris as a reason why an alternate system developed for painting and its distribution
and evaluation. Also, advances in paint technology opened the door to amateur painters by
increasing the locations where painting could be done and the colors available and by decreasing
the need for some of the artisan skills in preparing materials. Both developments were significant
in making possible the rise of Impressionism. DiMaggio (1992) reasons that when movies
became popular, they in effect diverted much of the working class audience for serious theater,
helping to legitimate theater as art. In a similar vein, Baumann (2001) cites the advent of
television as a lower status dramatic alternative to film as a factor in films artistic legitimation.
The idea that exogenous factors are relevant in explaining legitimation processes is common
in the study of social movements and art. However, the sociology of art can benefit from recent
advances in social movements research that clarify and refine the concept of an opportunity
space. Meyer and Minkoff (2004) argue that analysts need to make a set of distinctions when
examining the role of the political environment, including: (1) structural factors versus signaling
factors that work at a symbolic or communicative level; (2) general factors within the political
environment versus factors that are specific to the movement under study; (3) factors that
influence mobilization versus factors that influence social movement success; and (4) factors that
movement members are cognizant of versus those factors of which they are unaware.
While the second of these distinctions has already been taken into account above, the first,
third, and fourth must be applied to art worlds to explain how different factors have different roles
to play within legitimation processes. Regarding the difference between structural factors and
symbolic factors, existing studies of artistic legitimation often group these kinds of factors

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together. By noting this distinction in the kinds of exogenous factors at play, research would
better emphasize the two different causal mechanisms they imply. For example, the
organizational changes in the French art world studied by White and White imply a causal
mechanism of resource provision: the changes in the artistic environment influenced the
availability and distribution of resources in ways that favored the growth of Impressionism. In
contrast, the evolution of widely-held values and beliefs about race and racial differences cited in
the studies of jazz by Peterson and Lopes points to a different mechanism. In that case, an
exogenous factor is relevant because it created prestige and status for an artistic form, quite
helpful for legitimation. Future research on artistic legitimation should be careful to maintain this
distinction by specifying which types of exogenous variables are at work, structural or symbolic.
Regarding the distinction between factors influencing mobilization and factors influencing
legitimation, this difference should be noted in future research because it allows for a clearer,
more nuanced, and more accurate depiction of the legitimation process. For example, the socioeconomic changes cited by DeNora the bourgeoisies threat to the economic supremacy of the
aristocracy in accounting for the formation of an art world for serious classical music speaks
in the first instance to the formation or initiation of that art world. In contrast, the changes in
attitudes towards race cited by Peterson and Lopes speak directly to the acceptance, not
formation, of an art world for jazz. So why include environmental factors that influence art world
formation in this discussion? Since there can be no legitimation unless there has been a prior
initiation, it makes sense to think of art world formation as an essential part of the legitimation
process. What is needed is not to excise from studies of legitimation those exogenous factors that
are significant primarily for their influence on art world formation. Instead, future research
should be careful to specify at which point in the legitimation process environmental factors are
operating.
Meyer and Minkoff (2004) also argue for a distinction between factors that movement
members are cognizant of from those factors of which they are unaware. Likewise, within the
sociology of art, we should distinguish between these factors because they imply very different
mechanisms within the legitimation process. Consider, for example, how the advent of television
might have created an opportunity for film (Baumann, 2001). Were film world participants
strategizing about how best to position film vis-a`-vis television? Was televisions influence a
function of how audiences subconsciously evaluated films vis-a`-vis television? As a feature of
the opportunity space for film, television could have functioned in both manners simultaneously.
There is no need to define one or the other outside the concept of an opportunity space. However,
there is value in specifying how a given factor operates in order to determine the kind of response
an opportunity generates within an art world. The degree to which art world participants are
acting strategically and with agency is an important dimension of the legitimation process. This
issue is the topic of the next section.
The usefulness of these distinctions is that they save the concept of an opportunity space from
doing too much analytical work on its own. 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.
3.2. Resources: endogenous factors facilitate success
The core of this concept is the inverse of political opportunities. Here, endogenous factors
matter. There is intuitive appeal to the idea that social movement success depends on the power
drawn from accrued resources.

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What do these researchers have in mind when referring to resources? Resources can be
tangible or intangible; 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.9 The ability of a
movement to mobilize resources is crucial to determining its path. To see how resources are
central in studies of movement success, consider the heavy emphasis scholars place on social
movement organizations (SMOs). The reason for this emphasis is the simple fact that movements
most often occur through the efforts of SMOs. SMOs not only generate and direct movement
resources, but they can also be conceived as resources in themselves. In this way, for example,
organizations that advocate on behalf of the homeless are both resource-seeking they need
money, office supplies, etc. to survive and a resource at the disposal of the movement to
ameliorate the conditions for the homeless (Cress and Snow, 1996).
Resources are also central to explanations of art world legitimation. The title of the relevant
chapter in Beckers (1982) seminal work on art worlds, chapter 3, is Mobilizing Resources.
The mobilization of resources is the grounding concept of an art world because it so strongly
shifts the perspective away from art as the creation of an individual artist toward art as collective
action. Mobilization is a necessary condition of success. To explain artistic legitimation, we need
to know which resources are mobilized and to understand the particular benefits brought by
particular kinds of resources.
Various kinds of resources are frequently involved in artistic legitimation. Some resources
take a physical form, such as institutional settings and venues and equipment or supplies. Other
resources do not take concrete form, such as organizational principles, labor, and prestige or
status. Both kinds of resources contribute to legitimation, but the distinction echoes the division
between structural and symbolic environmental factors. Physical resources help to accomplish
the practical work involved in art worlds while non-physical resources help to accomplish the
necessary symbolic work.
Different kinds of art worlds rely to varying extents on different kinds of resources. Opera, for
example, requires vast physical resources in terms of the construction of appropriate venues and
the provision of the equipment and supplies necessary to stage an opera. The cultural field of poetry,
however, requires less in the way of physical, financial, and personnel support. The lesson we learn
from Bourdieu and Becker, however, is that although poetry requires few resources in its physical
production, the symbolic production of its value is a larger enterprise altogether. The labor of
publishers, critics, and scholars involved in the evaluation and teaching of poetry are valuable
resources necessary for poetrys legitimation. The same is true of opera, in addition to its physical
resources.Becauseallartiscollective action,the successfulcreationanddeploymentofvarioustypes
of resources are required for any art world to endure and to attain recognition as art in the first place.
The resources inherent in art museums are perhaps the most commonly cited within the
sociology of art. Museums assist in art worlds in the provision of both physical and non-physical
resources. Their ability indeed their mission to collect, preserve, restore, display, and promote
art gives them an enormous amount of control over the value, visibility, and survival of cultural

9
Cress and Snow (1996, p. 1090) cite legitimacy itself as a resource. This is of course true insofar as the attainment of
legitimacy regarding initial claims can be used to win acceptance of later claims. Or legitimacy based on preexisting
institutional or personal authority can also be capitalized on by a social movement to advance its goals. However, if
legitimacy exists as a resource, it is nonetheless true that a movement is seeking to expand or to further that legitimacy by
gaining acceptance of its further goals.

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productions. What is more, as centers of cultural authority, their decisions about which cultural
productions to sponsor are accepted as legitimate by other art world members as well as by the
wider art public for art (Bourdieu, 1993). Museums have played a role in legitimating painting
and sculpture as high art in 19th century Boston (DiMaggio, 1982) and the legitimation of
African religious and tribal artifacts as high art (Zolberg, 1997).
Similarly, high status galleries provide a physical space to bring together works or art. These
works are then packaged to an art-buying public, often an early step in a process of
consecration where the actions of museums come near the end. These institutions also have the
cultural authority to persuasively label certain cultural productions as art. Studies of the art of the
insane (Bowler, 1997), African art (Rawlings, 2001), and Pop Art (Cherbo, 1997) convincingly
document the role played by private galleries. High status private auction houses such as
Sothebys and Christies in New York are another resource in art worlds. Association with these
houses is helpful in itself to provide prestige, but they also provide visibility, and by connecting
art works with new owners they participate in the preservation of art, such as was the case for
American folk art (Ardery, 1997).
Yet another key provider of resources are universities. Like museums, they are one of the
legitimating organizations par excellence (Bourdieu, 1993). Universities serve as a resource in
diverse ways. Through their curricula, universities can preserve and disseminate knowledge of
cultural content while simultaneously bestowing legitimacy on that content by its very inclusion.
This same function can be achieved more intensively when a university creates a department or
research center devoted to an art. In this way, literature departments serve to sustain the place of
fiction and poetry among the arts, while departments of film and photography do the same for
those genres. The role of universities has been argued to have helped to legitimate modern dance
(DiMaggio, 1992; Sussman, 1997) and jazz (Peterson, 1972).
In order to work effectively, and in order to be in agreement with existing conceptions of what
art is, there must be a division of labor within art worlds. The internal dynamics of an art world, to
the extent that they create a sensible and working division of labor, can serve as a non-physical
resource. Battani (1999), for example, shows how the role of the photographer was socially
constructed into a useful resource within the art world of photography in the 19th century in the
US. The photographer developed as separate from the other, more practical and supporting, roles
needed in photographic practice. This division of labor was itself a symbolic resource, serving to
put forward an artist within this new art world. In contrast to this symbolic resource, physical
resources were provided by emergent firms supply houses to specialize in the production and
distribution of the materials necessary to carry it out, and by journals to disseminate knowledge
about photographic techniques.
The sociology of art can especially benefit by borrowing an emphasis in the social movements
literature on a particular kind of non-physical resourcetactics and strategies. Existing studies
of the sociology of art tend not to characterize resource mobilization as strategic or tactical. The
acts of utilizing or creating resources are often conceptualized instead as contributions toward an
apolitical goal of art world development. This difference in emphasis is understandable.
Strategizing and tactical deployment are the conscious activities of social movement participants
because they come together precisely to influence the balance of power regarding a particular
issue. This self-concept is less salient for most art world members, who come together for
cultural production. Nonetheless, art world success depends on gaining power, and savvy art
world members will recognize the necessity of strategy and tactics. Studies that document and
explain tactical repertoires in social movements (Clemens, 1993; Olzak and Uhrig, 2001;
Rucht, 1990) can be adapted to the context of cultural production to demonstrate how art worlds

S. Baumann / Poetics 35 (2007) 4765

57

might learn from or imitate one another.10 Because artists must demonstrate sufficient
disinterestedness to maintain credibility, their strategic and tactical behavior is not always
evident. Nevertheless, artists often are strategic. Moreover, supporting members of art worlds are
not held to the same standard of disinterestedness. Future research on artistic legitimation should
be sensitive to the extent to which art world building is indeed constituted by strategies and
tactics, the existence of which are resources at the disposal of art world members.
3.3. Discourse, ideology, and frames: legitimation requires an explanation
A third main explanatory factor in social movement success points to the role of ideas.
Movements goals and tactics need to be framed (Snow et al., 1986) in order to be made
comprehensible, valid, acceptable, and desirable. This means that they need to be explained,
marketed, or packaged in a way that convinces or resonates with a target audience.
Framing processes have been a central concept within the study of social movements for at
least the last two decades as scholars have utilized framing as a way of bringing a cultural element
back in to the area. McAdam et al. (1996b, p. 6) credit David Snow with a conception of framing
that they themselves employ: the conscious strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion
shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective
action. While the role of framing in mobilization is interesting, it is the role of framing in
helping to achieve legitimation for the goals of a social movement that is of interest here.
Like political opportunity, the concept of framing has been criticized for being employed too
liberally and without sufficient coherence. Through its various incantations, framing is invoked to
represent far too many phenomena that scholars wish to label as cultural. Oliver and Johnston (2000)
argue that framing is a valuable concept that should continue to be central in social movement
research,butto beuseful itshouldbe employed inaway that respects pastwork onideology.Ideology,
they explain, is a complex system of related ideas that combines an explanation of the world with
normativeprescriptionsforbehavior.Thecontrastwithframingliesinthedifferencebetweencontent
and process. Framing, as per Snows formulation cited above, is an activity that convinces audience
members about how to derive a correct understanding or meaning. Ideology, on the other hand,
contains those values and ideas to which framing appeals in order to be convincing.
As Oliver and Johnston (2000) explain, the analytic utility of separating frames and ideologies
can be seen in the case of abortion in the US. Various elements within the pro-choice and pro-life
movements in the US framed the issue differently in ways that invoked different ideologies. The
womens movement framed abortion as a womens issue, appealing to a feminist ideology that
upheld womens autonomy and rights. Religious groups, however, framed abortion as a religious
issue, appealing to a Christian ideology that upheld the value of the sanctity of all life. There are
two different frames invoking elements of two different ideologies. Frames and ideologies are
both necessary concepts.
Ferree and Merrill (2000) provide yet further sophistication to the thinking of framing by
explaining how the concept of discourse relates to frame and ideology. Discourses, Ferree and
Merrill (2000, p. 455) argue, are broad systems of communication that link concepts together in
a web of relationships through an underlying logic, and they point to the example of medical
10
This point is recognized by DiMaggio (1992) regarding the organizational forms available to art worlds. He argues
that theater, dance and opera in the US borrowed the preexisiting organizational form nonprofit trusteeship invented
for museums and orchestras.

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discourse as a way that doctors communicate about health through an underlying logic that
centers on diseases and cures. Ferree and Merrill embrace Oliver and Johnstons
conceptualization of ideology and frames, and envision the relationship between these concepts
and discourse as an inverted pyramid. Because it is the least analytically coherent and most
broad, discourses are at the top of the inverted pyramid, while ideologies are one level down.
Ideologies are considerably more coherent than discourses because they are organized around
systematic ideas and normative claims (Ferree and Merrill, 2000, p. 455). At the lowest level,
then, is the concept of frame, which is a way of talking and thinking about things that links idea
elements into packages (Ferree and Merrill, 2000, p. 456).
In sum, discourses have a loose logic and provide the vocabulary and concepts needed for
communication; ideologies have a coherent logic that provides an understanding of the world as
well as norms and values; and frames are tight cognitive structures that direct thinking and
interpretation about a concrete issue, condition, event, or object. Framing is the discursive
process of applying frames. It is the work that seeks to convince a target audience about the
correct perspective to be used and the correct conclusions to be drawn, and it is done by applying
(and sometimes inventing) a frame, which invokes the reasoning or values of an ideology,
through the tools made available in a discourse.
Within the sociology of art, ideas are accorded a central role in the legitimation of culture.
Compared to the social movements literature, however, there is far less agreement about how to
label and understand the role of ideas. Molnar (2005, p. 130), for example, shows how modernist
architecture was imported into Hungary and that interpretive schemes and strategies play a
decisive role in the reception and legitimation of internationally diffused foreign ideas and
cultural models. In explaining the elevation of great composers and serious works of classical
music in late 18th- and early 19th-century Vienna, DeNora (1991, p. 314) claims that aristocrats
developed an ideology of serious music and that this aesthetic was based on a hierarchical
scheme of evaluation in contrast to the more inclusive aesthetic that preceded it. Baumann (2001,
p. 405) argues that a legitimating ideology was developed within the art world for film and
disseminated through film reviews, and that this ideology was a key factor in films elevation to
art in the US. In his examination of how some literary works become consecrated as
masterpieces, van Rees (1983) assesses the fundamental roles of three different types of
critical discourse. In explaining the elevation of theater, dance, and opera as legitimate art
forms, DiMaggio (1992, p. 44) argues that these art worlds imitated the earlier high art worlds of
art museums and symphonies, and that the justifications developed by founders of the nations
first art museums and orchestras served as ready-made ideological resources that cultural
entrepreneurs could employ across a range of other art forms. In other words, a clearly
articulated ideology (DiMaggio, 1992, p. 22) played a role in these cases of artistic legitimation.
The sociology of art can clearly benefit from theoretical advances within the social
movements literature on framing. Studies of art world legitimation have not settled on a common
set of concepts for explaining how culture is legitimated ideationally. I argue that the distinctions
between discourse, ideology, and frames reviewed above can be applied to work in the sociology
of art to clarify how ideas function to legitimate culture in fundamentally similar ways across
cultural genres. Moreover, this set of concepts can be reconciled with Beckers pioneering work
on the role of aestheticians and critics in art worlds.
Becker (1982) persuasively argues that aestheticians (or philosophers of art) and critics play
essential, but different, roles within art worlds. Aestheticians study the premises and arguments
people use to justify classifying things and activities as beautiful, artistic, not art, good
art, bad art, and so on. They construct systems with which to make and justify both the

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classifications and specific instances of their application. Critics apply aesthetic systems to
specific art works and arrive at judgments of their worth and explications of what gives them that
worth (Becker, 1982, p. 131).
To translate Becker into the terminology of the social movements literature, aestheticians create
ideologies of art, and critics frame particular works of art by appealing to the theories and values of
specific ideologies.11 An example of an ideology of art is the Romantic ideology of art, which
explains art as the product of a uniquely gifted creative individual.12 It values art for its
characteristics of personal expression. In contrast, the institutional ideology of art explains art as a
product of the relationship between a cultural product and its context. Art is valued according to how
well it innovates in response to its cultural environment. For any given cultural production, a critic
can explain how that work should be understood according one of these or another ideology of art.
The concept of discourse can be incorporated into this analysis without need for translation.
Discourse refers to the vocabulary and a related set of concepts for communicating within a given
field. 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. Thus,
while metaphor might be part of the discourse for art generally, blank verse is part of the
discourse of poetry more specifically.
How then, are discourses, ideologies, and frames employed to legitimate cultural productions as
art? To see how these categories apply in practice we can look at the example of film. Baumann
(2001) argues that US film criticism changed in the 1960s. At that time, film critics began to more
intensively employ a vocabulary and techniques a discourse that were common within other high
art worlds. Significantly, film reviews also began to focus on the role of the director as the driving
creative force in filmmaking. This focusing on the role of the director was a framing activity, wherein
critics framed films as essentially the products of individuals, thereby appealing to the Romantic
ideology of art in order to justify why films should be legitimately considered art. In addition, critics
began to interpret films for their messages or meanings. This framed films as art within the
established ideology of art as a form of communication between an artist and an audience.
This act of framing in accordance with ideologies of art is invoked repeatedly in sociological
studies of artistic legitimation, even if the labels of frame and ideology are not employed in
the manner specified here. For example, Ardery (1997) shows how US folk artists works were
framed by curators, gallery owners, and art critics as authentic art because the artists were
untrained, unsophisticated, and financially disinterested. It can be argued that this frame
implicitly references a Romantic ideology of art.
Corse and Westervelt (2002) explain the canonization of a particular work of artKate
Chopins novel The Awakening. The authors demonstrate that the key to the novels increasing
legitimation over time was the application by literary scholars of new interpretive strategies to
reevaluate the book, particularly in the period 19501979 (Corse and Westervelt, 2002, p. 152).
The novels feminist themes were highlighted and explicated in a way that successfully resonated
with scholars and audiences at that point in history. Corse and Westervelt (2002, p. 156) argue
that In order for the congruence between a cultural text and the social environment to be
perceived, an interpretive strategy that constructs the text in those terms must be available. By

11
Aestheticians and critics are not always distinct populations. An aesthetician can engage in criticism, and vice versa.
The two activities, however, are distinct, even when performed by the same individual.
12
Romanticism is, of course, a larger ideology to which the Romantic ideology of art is linked.

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translating their terminology into the terminology of the social movements literature, we can see
how their article provides empirical support for a more general theory of how ideas work to
legitimate culture. The Awakening was reframed in the 19501979 period when the ideology of
feminism gained currency, and these frames were couched in elements of a new discourse that
had been generated in order to communicate about that ideology.
As a final example, consider Lopess (2002, pp. 177178) argument that one component of the
rise of a jazz art world was the establishment of jazz criticism which evaluated jazz in a manner that
mirrored the criticism of legitimate music. Jazz enthusiasts rested their claims for the quality of jazz
on its complexity, traditions, emotional vitality, and the need for serious learning of jazzs history,
practitioners, and its variants in order to be understood. Again, we can see the work of these critics as
an act of framing wherein jazz was framed as a standard, rather than anarchic or dangerous, musical
form. This framing called upon preexisting ideas and values about the nature of legitimate art.13
4. Conclusion
The major goal of this paper is to outline the main components of a theory of artistic
legitimation. To achieve this goal, I employ two analytical tools: (1) I synthesize and abstract
from a large number of studies of artistic legitimation, and (2) I draw parallels between art worlds
and social movements, borrowing the language and perspectives developed by social movements
scholars. 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. The main benefit for the sociology of art is a theoretical advancement
beyond the current state of tenuously linked cased studies of artistic legitimation toward an
understanding of a process that is common across art worlds.
I suggest that this framework for explaining the legitimation of ideas in social movements and
in art might also be applicable more broadly. Recent work by Frickel and Gross (2005, p. 206)
adumbrates a general theory for explaining the emergence and success of intellectual/scientific
movements (SIMs), which they define as collective efforts to pursue research programs or
projects for thought in the face of resistance from others in the scientific or intellectual
community. Their article places a heavy emphasis on scientific change, though they also mean
to make their theory applicable to other kinds of knowledge production. They borrow directly
from social movement research to sketch their theory, generating propositions that rely on the
concepts of resources, opportunities, and framing.14 While Frickel and Gross do not address art
13

This particular aspect of my argument about the role of framing in achieving legitimacy finds support in recent work
by Zelditch and Walker (2003) on the legitimacy of regimes. They identify consonance as a necessary condition of
legitimacy by which they mean that a claim to legitimacy applies general principles to a particular case (Zelditch and
Walker, 2003, p. 233). For art worlds, the general, preexisting principles of what can count as art must be shown to be
applicable to the art in question.
14
The analysis of knowledge production according to the insights and concepts of social movements was carried out
earlier by Eyerman and Jamison (1991, p. 59): we want to argue that much if not all new knowledge emanates from the
cognitive praxis of social movements, that new ideas both in and out of science are the often unconscious results of new
knowledge interests of social movements. In fact, because Eyerman and Jamison argue that social movements are
significant on account of the role they play in knowledge production social movements and knowledge production are
not merely similar but are one and the same both in and out of science, their work offers a deeper and more coherent
synthesis of these two disparate areas.

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worlds, it is clear that there are important parallels between an intellectual movement and an
art world. Each involves collective action through a network of actors who champion a counterhegemonic idea. Despite the parallels, I depart from Frickel and Gross most importantly in my
understanding of how to conceive of success and in how to explain the importance of the
central social movements concepts, most notably in the relevance of framing.
Regarding success, I incorporate from the social psychological literature a conception of
legitimation as a social process involving justification and consensus, and I argue that social
movement success and art world success are kindred legitimation processes. As Frickel and
Gross (2005, p. 227) acknowledge, they explain only two main outcomessuccess or failure.
This false dichotomy is not sufficiently precise to describe the outcomes of interest. Social
movements can vary greatly in their success, which is to say that their core ideas might be highly
legitimated (e.g., women have the legal right to vote, and who would disagree this idea?), or
somewhat legitimated (same sex unions have limited legal recognition and some public opinion
support) or lack legitimation (the North America Man/Boy Love Association has few supporters
among the public and no legal victories). By putting the concept of consensus at the forefront of
understanding success, I provide a way of understanding social movement or art world outcomes
as continuous rather than dichotomous.
By specifying the link between justification and legitimation, I also provide an alternative way
of understanding the role of framing. Frickel and Gross (2005, p. 223) argue that framing is
relevant primarily as a way to explain how a movements ideas resonate with participants
intellectual self-concepts. Framing, they argue, creates a narrative that represents the
movement to insiders and outsiders, one that offers an attractive enough element of identity to
gain support. To be sure, framing of this sort occurs and is part of the process of mobilizing
support for a movement, social, scientific, or intellectual. However, recruitment should not be
confused with success. If framing is primarily about identity, how can an outsider accept the
movements ideas as valid without joining the movement? In contrast, I argue that framing is
primarily relevant to the success of social movements and art worlds because it is the activity that
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 movements or art
worlds ideas as legitimate by building consensus.
Future research should test the applicability of the legitimation framework described here to
areas outside of art and protest. In particular, does the concept of legitimation developed within
the social-psychological literature, linked as it is to justification and consensus, deserve a central
place in the analysis of how new ideas become dominant or accepted? Can Lamonts (1988)
analysis of the success of Jacques Derrida in the US, for example, be reconciled with this general
theory of legitimation? When she claims that Derridas work was reframed (Lamont, 1988, p.
615) for an American audience, can we see here the same kind of reframing identified by Oliver
and Johnston (2000) in social movements?15
The extension of this legitimation framework would help to answer a call by Peterson (1994,
p. 178) for comparisons across symbol-producing realms in order to understand better the

15

This article does not attempt to incorporate the large literature on legitimation within the sociology of organizations.
This research typically investigates the causes and consequences of the legitimacy of organizational forms or industry
niches (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Hannan et al., 1995; Human and Provan, 2000; Ruef and Scott, 1998). Future
research should explore the similarities and contradictions of legitimation processes in art and organizations.

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processes of cultural production. In the present case, such comparison allows for analytical
leverage on the question of how these realms function to achieve legitimacy, an important
question for the study of not only art but other fields in which the advancement of new ideas is a
central feature.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ziad Munson for helpful comments and for pointing me to many useful
references, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms.
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Shyon Baumann is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. His research interests are in the
sociology of arts, culture, and the media. His current projects include a study of gourmet food journalism and a study of
race and gender in advertising. His book on the growth of an art world for Hollywood films is forthcoming from Princeton
University Press.

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