George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art
An important breakthrough in the history of attempts at defining art came when, in reaction to neo-Wittgensteinian claims that art just can’t be defined (see last week's notes), the philosopher George Dickie came up with a traditional definition of art, one that gives necessary and sufficient conditions for something’s being a work of art. Rather than looking at overt characteristics of art, the kinds of visible relationships between artworks, he concentrated on relational properties: specifically, relations that hold between members of the artworld (as defined by Dickie) and putative works of art (i.e. works that might be considered to be works of art).
Dickie has subsequently developed his ideas in more complex directions, but his early formulation of a definition is the simplest and most influential. He maintained that a work of art is 1) An artifact, 2) Some aspect of which has had conferred upon it the status of work of ‘candidate for appreciation’ by a member or members of the artworld. This quasi-legalistic definition is easily misunderstood, and many have taken him to be saying that anything that is treated as a work of art by an elite in-group, the artworld, is thereby art. This isn’t quite his position, though he does believe that. Other people can also transform artifacts into artworks, though. He thought that anyone could be a member of the artworld – it wasn’t an exclusive club. It isn’t solely the artworld of gallery owners and rich purchasers that usually goes under that name (though these people are all part of it).
Dickie’s theory only attempts to define art in a classificatory sense. It is entirely neutral over the question of whether a work of art has artistic value. His question is the question of whether it is art or not, not the question of whether it is any good of its kind. For thinkers like Clive Bell and R.G. Collingwood, to call something a work of art is to imply that it is of value to us; not for Dickie. A work of art may be utterly worthless. But it is still a work of art rather than something else. As Dickie put it, it is possible to make a work of art out of a sow’s ear, but that won’t automatically turn it into a silken purse. In other words, just about anything that is an artifact can be a work of art, but that won’t transform it into something particularly beautiful or artistically valuable.
What happens typically is that an artist confers the status of work of art upon some object by treating it as suitable for attention. The word ‘status’ here might seem to imply that the object acquires extra value because of its newly given art label. But that is not what he means by ‘status’: the word is not used to suggest high status, but is meant to be completely neutral about the value of something’s being a work of art. So, for example, Damien Hirst, on this account, conferred the status of work of art upon a dead tiger shark which he put in a glass and metal tank filled with formaldehyde and entitled ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’. By treating it as an object worthy of a certain sort of contemplation, Hirst made it a work of art. Whether the work is a good one or not is a further question. But it is certainly a work of art on this theory because it has the appropriate history (even though you would not be able to tell this simply by looking at it – you might take it to be a straightforward zoological specimen from a natural history museum). The requisite history involves a member or member of the artworld conferring the status of candidate for appreciation on aspects of the world, something that was achieved by its inclusion in the Saatchi Gallery collection (from which it has subsequently been sold), but which it also achieved before that by Damien Hirst’s treatment of it.
Criticism of Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art
This approach to the art question illuminates some developments in 20th Century art, notably how Marcel Duchamp was able to turn a urinal into a work of art with his famous ‘Fountain’ – a factory-produced urinal, signed ‘R. Mutt’ and entered into a public open exhibition in New York in 1917. Yet many people are worried that the theory trivializes the notion of ‘work of art’ in that it allows that just about anything can be a work of art and that just about anyone can make a work of art.
Richard Wollheim (read an obituary of Wollheim written by Arthur Danto) attacked Dickie’s theory by setting up what is known as a dilemma. A dilemma presents two options (the ‘horns’ of the dilemma), one of which must be chosen, neither of which is attractive. Here, Wollheim suggests that either the artworld has good reasons for conferring the status of candidate for appreciation on some object or it doesn’t.. This is how Wollheim states the dilemma:
The crucial question to ask of the definition is this: Is it to be presumed that those who confer status upon some artifact do so for good reasons, or bad reasons, or is there no such presumption? Might they have no reason, or bad reasons, and yet their action be efficacious given that they themselves have the right status – that is, they represent the artworld? (Wollheim, Art and Its Objects 2nd ed., 1980, p.160).
Wollheim sums up the dilemma:
Roughly, if the theory takes one alternative, it forfeits its claim to be an Institutional theory of art: if it takes the other, it is hard to see how it is an Institutional theory of art. (Wollheim, 1980, p. 164).
Take the first horn of the dilemma, the possibility that the members of the artworld have good reasons for conferring the status of candidate for appreciation on particular objects. Perhaps they do so because the objects embody thoughts, or because they are beautiful, or challenging, for example. Once we go down this route, the reasons justify the status conferral, and the objects have the appropriate qualities prior to the conferral of status. The question then is whether these qualities mean that the object is already a work of art, or that the conferral of status is required still on top of having the qualities to make the object and artwork. If it is already a work of art because of the qualities it has independently of any action by members of the artworld, then the Institutional Theory is redundant – it is not the conferral of status of candidate for appreciation that makes something a work of art.
But, actually, defenders of the Institutional Theory are likely to deny that good reasons for conferral of artwork status are required. If the people in question are genuinely members of the artworld, then their membership gives them the power to confer status of candidate for appreciation on any artifact whatsoever, regardless of whether they have good reasons for this. This is the second horn of the dilemma: the members of the artworld aren’t required to have good reasons for what they do. But Wollheim is adamant that this approach violates two powerful intuitions about art that most of us share. First, the idea that conferral of status of might be arbitrary goes against the suggestion that there is an important connection between something being a work of art and its being a good work of art. As Wollheim suggests:
…it seems a well-entrenched thought that reflection upon the nature of art has an important part to play in determining the standards by which works of art are evaluated. (Wollheim, 1980, p.163).
Wollheim, then, rejects the Institutionalists’ claim that we can neatly separate off the classificatory questions about art from evaluative ones: for him the two are clearly intertwined.
The second intuition that the Institutional Theory violates, according to Wollheim, is that there is something important about the status of being a work of art. On the Institutional Theory the activity of making works of art – in the classificatory sense of simply conferring the status of candidate for appreciation on a variety of artefacts - can be completely trivial.
Further reading: Nigel Warburton The Art Question
George Dickey was faaaaar ahead of his time....
Posted by: wedding tiaras | March 13, 2011 at 06:31 PM