ABSTRACT
Art Worlds, written by the sociologist Howard S. Becker and published in 1982, was a book-in-between. In the first place, it could have been based on the art world discussion of the 1960s and 1970s, but it only devoted an isolated chapter to this discussion, while at the same time it came out too early to react to Bourdieu’s field theory, which was not to be extensively explained and demonstrated until 1992 in Les règles de l’art (The Rules of Art, 1996). 1 Secondly, Becker’s book does not make any theoretical choices, except for the one that the art world has to be studied from a symbolic interactionist point of view, but that view alone does not offer a choice of theoretical defences for its position from among the contemporaneous theories such as structuralism, institutionalism, constructivism or deconstructivism. Thirdly, Becker’s theoretical work on art was an activity positioned somewhere adjacent to his main concerns, which were with sociological methodology and the study of deviant behaviour. 2 Art Worlds is his only monograph on this topic, although based on a series of articles published over the years between 1974 and 1980.
