artworld

Term in aesthetics, originally coined by Arthur Danto (1964), but developed by George Dickie as the key concept within the institutional theory of art. Certain modern works, notably by Duchamp (especially The Fountain), and conceptual art, pose problems for traditional approaches to aesthetics, in so far as they claim the status of works of art, yet seemingly have none of the characteristics traditionally attributed to art. Institutional theory attempts to resolve this problem by arguing that there are no properties inherent to an object which serve to determine it as art. Rather, the status of art work will be conferred upon the object by the artworld. The artworld is defined, by Dickie, as ‘a loosely organised, but nevertheless related, set of persons including artists…, producers, museum directors, museum-goers…, critics…, philosophers of art, and others’ (Dickie 1974:35-6). In summary, it is a largely self-defined group of people, who express an interest in art, and thus negotiate the current status of particular artefacts. According to institutional theory, artefacts that were not originally created as works of art (e.g. medieval or antique works created before the modern concept of ‘art’ had been formulated) may be accorded the status of art now, and similarly, objects once considered to be art may have that status removed from them. The question may legitimately be asked as to whether institutional theory may not more properly be understood as an approach within the sociology of culture than within aesthetics. [AE]

Relatively stable sets of beliefs and evaluations. Such beliefs may develop through direct experience or through socialisation. That strongly held beliefs and value judgements about objects and social groups can exist independently of direct experience makes the study of attitudes of central relevance to the understanding of stereotyping and prejudice. The eliciting of attitudes through questionnaires is fraught with difficulty, as replies may conform to what the respondents perceive to be expected of them, and so avoid socially unacceptable responses. [AE]

The author is superficially understood to be the creative, and individual, source of a written text. The idea that there is a unique creator of a text, and that the task of reading

is, in consequence, a more or less passive process of recovering his or her intentions and meanings, has been variously challenged. Nineteenth-century hermeneuticians, notably Wilhelm Dilthey, challenged the assumption that the author had any privileged insight into the meaning of his or her text by critically examining the active process entailed in reading, and thus the need to construct rather than merely to recover meaning from a text. In effect, the author’s self-understandings are exposed as merely one more interpretation of the text amongst many others. In aesthetics, criticism of the ‘intentional fallacy’ holds that interpretation of a work of art cannot claim to be definitive or authoritative by having recovered the author’s intentions. (Within post-structuralism, Barthes most spectacularly declared the ‘death of the author’ (1977c).) Challenging the author’s status thereby pushes aesthetic reflection towards the intrinsic qualities of the art work or text, and at the extreme undermines the possibility of there being a single, definitive or correct reading.