ABSTRACT
THE INSTITUTIONAL THEORY OF ART WAS put forward some years ago as a philosophical account of how something gets to be a work of art. It was provoked by certain hard cases that seemed to test the borderlines of the concept of art, such as Duchamp's readymades or, later on, the Brillo boxes and soup cans of Andy Warhol. In its crudest form—and under critical pressure the theory underwent considerable refinement in the writings of its chief exponent, Professor George Dickie, of University of Illinois at Chicago Circle—something is a work of art when decreed to be such by a loose constellation of individuals who are defined by their institutional identities to be within something called “the art world”: curators, art writers, collectors, dealers, and, of course, artists themselves who, for whatever reasons, put forward certain objects as candidates for assessment as works of art. In general, something receives that status when some segment of the art world prevails, and the objects in question become occasions for appreciation and interpretation of a kind that has no application to things that are not works of art. Exhibiting something in an art show is typical of an enfranchising maneuver, and the gallery or the museum serves as a powerful transformative agency for making into artworks objects that antecedently seemed as distant from that category as, say, an ordinary snow shovel, a pile of dirt, a heap of hemp, a hole in the floor, a bundle of newspapers, or, in the classic instance, a urinal.
