ABSTRACT
Artworks celebrate identities and relations, either directly or at some remove, and they play into efforts at control over others and the world. A style must signal mutually sustainable reinforcement between the social and cultural aspects of art, in physical terms, and also signal identity in social terms. Innovation in style is a social construction, so that one stands forewarned to be cautious in interpreting the evidence. Producing artists-or critics or directors-may substitute their own selves for artworks as the focus in style, so that change in style may come to be coded in terms of rise and fall of individual artists. The real core of a new style, however, always is dual: it consists in an evolving interaction between its couching in social organization on the one hand and painterly transformations on the other. Judged on their social face, revolutions in art are biggest when they mark transitions from artisanry to art.
