ABSTRACT
In the introduction this book set itself the task of examining ‘how the organization of art worlds serves the functioning of art in society’. Later, this functioning of art was understood to be the realization of its potential values. In the first part it could be observed that the authors discussed there who, in general, took an institutional approach or variations thereon, hardly broached the way in which art acquires meaning in a society. Their focus was mainly on the dynamics in the field of the aesthetic production – possibly influenced by forces in adjoining fields – and on the notions by which these dynamics can be studied. In that respect, paradoxically enough, institutionally oriented authors are still trapped in a certain autonomism, or at least, are not inclined to adopt the relative nature of the autonomy, that they firmly acknowledge, as a basis to study the way in which aesthetic values can be contextualized. Nevertheless, what did surface as one of the results of this first part was the key art sociological question of ‘What does art do?’ And thus the question put was not only about the values of art, as is asked in the second part of this study, but also about the means and the routes by which these values of art obtain a function in systems other than the aesthetic, a second life so to speak.
