AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
DECEMBER, 1974 VOLUME 39, NO. 6
ART AS COLLECTIVE ACTION
HOWARD S. BECKER
Northwestern University
in Sociological Review 1974, Vol. 39 (December): 767-776
Art works eon be conceived as the product of the cooperative activity of many people. Some of
these people are customarily defined as artists, others as support personnel. The artist's
dependence on support personnel constrains the range of artistie possibilities available to him.
Cooperation is mediated by the use of artistic conventions, whose existence both makes the
production of work easier and innovation more difficult. Artistic innovations oeeur when artists
discover alternate means of assembling the resources necessary. This conception of an art world
made up of personnel cooperating via conventions has implications for the sociological analysis
of social organization.
Adistinguished sociological tradition holds
that art is social in character, this being a
specific instance of the more general
proposition that knowledge and cultural
products are social in character or have a
social base. A variety of language has been
used to describe the relations between art
works and their social context. Studies have
ranged from those that attempted to correlate
various' artistic styles and the cultural
emphases of the societies they were found in
to those that investigated the circumstances
surrounding the production of particular
works. Both social scientists and humanistic
scholars have contributed to this literature. (A
representative sample of work can be found in
Albrecht, Barnett and Griff, 1970).
Much sociological writing speaks of organizations
or systems without reference to the
people whose collective actions constitute the
organization or system. Much of the literature
on art as a social product does the same,
demonstrating correlations or congruences
without reference to the collective activities
by which they came about, or speaking of
social structures without reference to the
actions of people doing things together which
create those structures. My admittedly scattered
reading of materiala on the arts, the
available sociological literature, (especially
Blumer, 1956, and Strauss et al., 1964) and
personal experience and participation in
several art worlds have led me to a conception
of art as a form of collective action.
In arriving at this conception, I have relied
on earlier work by social scientists and
humanists in the traditions I have just
criticized. Neither the examples I use nor the
specific points are novel; but 1 do not believe
they have been used in connection with the
conception of collective activity here proposed.
None of the examples stands as
evidence for the theory. Rather, they
illustrate the kinds of materials a theory about
this area of human life must take account of.
Applying such a conception to the area of art
generates some broader ideas about social
organization in general, which 1 consider in
conclusion. They are evidence that a theory of
the kind proposed is necessary.
COOPERATION AND COOPERATIVE UNKS
Think, wiih respect to any work of
art, of all the activities that must be
carried on for that work to appear as it
finally does. For a symphony orchestra to
give a concert, for instance, instruments
must have been invented, manufactured
and maintained, a notation must have
been devised and music composed using that
notation, people must have learned to play
the notated notes on the instruments, times
and places for rehearsal must have been
provided, ads for the concert must have been
placed, publicity arranged and tickets sold,
and an audience capable of listening to and in
some way understanding and responding to
the performance must have been recruited. A
767
768 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
similar list can be compiled for any of the
performing arts. With minor variations (substitute
materials for instruments and exhibition
for performance), the list applies to the
visual and (substituting language and print for
materials and pubiicaticm for exhibition)
literary arts. Generally speaking, the necessary
activities typically include conceiving the idea
for the work, making the necessary physical
artifacts, creating a conventional language of
expression, training artistic personnel and
audiences to use the conventional language to
create and experience, and providing the
necessary mixture of those ingredients for a
particular work or performance.
Imagine, as an extreme case, one person
who did all these things: made everything,
invented everything, performed, created and
experienced the result, all without the
assistance or cooperation of anyone else. In
fact, we can barely imagine such a thing, for
all the arts we know about involve elaborate
networks of cooperation. A division of the
labor required takes place. Typically, many
people participate in the work without which
the performance or artifact could not be
produced. A sociological analysis of any art
therefore looks for that division of labor. How
are the various tasks divided among the people
who do them?
Nothing in the technology of any art
makes one division of tasks more "natural"
than another. Consider the relations between
the composition and perfonnance of music. In
conventional symphonic and chamber music,
the two activities occur separately; although
many composers perform, and many performers
compose, we recognize no necessary
connection between the two and see them as
two separate roles which may occasionally
coincide in one person. In jazz, composition is
not important, the standard tune merely
furnishing a framework on which the
performer builds the improvisation listeners
consider important. In contemporary rock
music, the performer ideally composes his
own music; rock groups who play other
people's music (Bennett, 1972) carry the
derogatory title of "copy bands." Similarly,
some art photographers always make their
own prints; others seldom do. Poets writing in
the Westem tradition do not think it
necessary to incorporate their handwriting
into the work, leaving it to printers to put the
material in readable form, but Oriental
calligraphers count the actual writing an
integral part of the poetry. In no case does the
character of the art impose a natural division
of labor; the division always results from a
consensual definition of the situation. Once
that has been achieved, of course, participants
in the world of art' regard it as natural and
resist attempts to change it as unnatural,
unwise or immoral.
Participants in an art world regard some of
the activities necessary to the production of
that form of art as "artistic," requiring the
special gift or sensibility of an artist. The
remaining activities seem to them a matter of
craft, business acumen or some other ability
less rare, less characteristic of art, less
necessary to the success of the work, and less
worthy of respect. They define the people
who perform these special activities as artists,
and everyone else as (to borrow a military
term) support personnel. Art worlds differ in
how they allocate the honorific title of artist
and in the mechanisms by which they choose
who gets it and who doesn't. At one extreme,
a guild or academy (Pevsner, 1940) may
require long apprenticeship and prevent those
it does not license from practicing. At the
other, the choice may be left to the lay public
that consumes the work, whoever they accept
being ipso facto an artist. An activity's status
as art or non-art may change, in either
direction. Kealy (1974) notes that the
recording engineer has, when new technical
possibilities arose that artists could use
expressively, been regarded as something of an
artist. When the effects he can produce
become commonplace, capable of being
produced on demand by any competent
worker, he loses that status.
How little of the activity necessa'ry for the
art can a person do and still claim the title of
artist? The amount the composer contributes
to the material contained in the final work has
varied greatly. Virtuoso performers from the
Renaissance through the nineteenth century
embellished and improvised on the score the
composer provided (Dart, 1967, and Reese,
1959), so it is not unprecedented for
'The concept of an art world has recently been
used as a central idea in the analysis of key issues in
aesthetics, (See Dickie, 1971, Danto, 1964, and
Blizek, n.d.). I have used the term in a relatively
unanalyzed way here, letting its meaning become
dear in context, but intend a fuUei analysis in
another paper.
ART AS COLLECTIVE ACTION 769
contemporary composers to prepare scores
whicb give only tbe sketdiiest directions to
tbe performier (though the counter-tendency,
for composers to restrict the interpretative
instance, knew enough music to take part in
performing the parlor son^ of Stephen Foster
just as his Renaissance countetpart could
participate in performing madrigk. In such
freedom of the performer by ^ving increas- cases, cooperation occurssimply and readily,
ingly detailed directions, has until recently
been mote prominent). John Cage and
Kariheinz Stockhausen (Womer, 1973) are
regarded as composers in the world of
contemporary music, though many of their
scores leave much of the material to be played
to the decision of the player. Artists need not
handle the materials from which the art work
is made to remain artists; architects seldom
build what they design. The same practice
raises questions, however, when sculptors
construct a piece by sending a set of
specifications to a machine shop; and many
people balk at awarding the title of artist to
authors of conceptual works consisting of
specifications which are never actually embodied
in an artifact. Marcel Duchamp
outraged many people by insisting that he
created a valid work of art when he signed a
commercially produced snowshovel or signed
a reproduction of the Mona Lisa on which he
had drawn a mustache, thus classifying
Leonardo as support personnel along with the
snowshovel's designer and manufacturer. Outrageous
as that idea may seem, something like
it is standard in making collages, in which the
entire work may be constructed of things
made by other people. The point of these
examples is that what is taken, in any world
of art, to be the quintessential artistic act, the
act whose performance marks one as an artist,
is a matter of consensual definition.
Whatever the artist, so defined, does not do
himself must be done by someone else. The
artist thus works in the center of a large
network of cooperating people, all of whose
work is essential to the final outcome.
Wherever he depends on others, a cooperative
link exists. The people with whom he
cooperates may share in every particular his
idea of how their work is to be done. This
consensus is likely when everyone involved
can perform any of the necessary activities, so
that while a division of labor exists, no
specialized functional groups develop. Th s
situation might occur in simple communally
^ared art forms like the square dance or in
segments of a society whose ordinary
members are trained in artistic activities. A
well-bred nineteenth centuiy American, for
When specialized profession^ groups take
over the performance of the activities
necessary to an art work's production,
however, their members tend to develop
specialized aesthetic, financial and career
interests which differ substantially from the
artist's. Orchestra! musicians, for instance, are
notoriously more concemed with how they
sound in performance than with the success of
a particular work; with good reason, for their
own success depends in part on impressing
those who hire them with their competence
(Faulkner, 1973a, 1973b). They may sabotage
a new work which can make them sound bad
because of its difficulty, their career interests
lying at cross-purposes to the composer's.
Aesthetic confiicts between support personnel
and the artist also occur. A sculptor
friend of mine was invited to use the services
of a group of master lithographic printers.
Knowing little of the technique of lithography,
he was glad to have these master
craftsmen do the actual printing, this division
of labor being customary and having generated
a hi^y specialized craft of printing.
He drew designs containing large areas of solid
colors, thinking to simplify the printer's job.
Instead, he made it more difficult. When the
printer rolls ink onto the stone, a large area
will require more than one rolling to be fully
inked and may thus exhibit roller marks. The
printers, who prided themselves on being the
greatest in the worid, explained to my friend
that while they could print his designs, the
areas of solid color could cause difficulty with
roller marks. He had not known about roller
marks and talked of using them as part of his
design. The printers said, no, he could not do
that, because roller marks were an obvious
sign (to other printers) of poor craftsmanship
and no print exhibiting roller marks was
allowed to leave their shop. His artistic
curiosity fell victim to the printers' craft
standards, a neat example of how specialized
support groups develop their own standards
and interests.^
My friend was at the mercy of the printers
^The arrangements between artists, plinters and
pubbshers are described in Kase (1973).
770 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
because he did not know how to print
lithographs himself. His experience exemplified
tike choice that faces |he artist at every
cooperative link. He can do things the way
established groups of support personnel are
prepared to dotfiem;he can tiy to make them
do it his way: he can train others to do it
his way; or he can do it himself. Any choice
but the first requkes an additional inwstment
of time and energy to do what could be done
ie^ expenavely if done the standard way. Tlie
artist's involvement with and dependence on
cooperative links thus constrains the kind of
art he can produce.
Similar examples can be found in any fidd
of art. e.e. cummings had trouble getting his
first book of poetry published because
printers were afraid to set his bizarre layouts
(Norman, 1958). Producing a motion picture
involves multiple difficulties of this kind:
actors who will only be photographed in
flattering ways, writers who don't want a
word changed, cameramen who will not use
unfamiliar processes.
Artists often create works which existing
facilities for production or exhibition cannot
accommodate. Sculptors buUd constructions
too large and heavy for existing museums.
Composers write music which requires more
performers than existing organizations can
furnish. Playwd^ts write plays too long for
their audience's taste. When they go beyond
the capacities of existing institutions, their
works are not exhibited or performed: that
reminds us that most artists make scxilptures
w^ch are not too big or heavy, compose
music which uses a comfortable number of
players, or write plays which run a reasonable
length of time. By accommodating their
conceptions to available resources, conventional
artists accept the constraints arising
from their dependence on the cooperation of
members of the existing art world. Wherever
the artist depends on others for some
necessary component he must either accept
the constraintiS they impose or expend the
time and energy necessary to provide it some
other way.
To say that the artist must have the
cooperation of others for the art v>^oTk to
occur as it finally does does not mean that he
cannot work without that cooperation. The
art work, after all, need not occu?^ as it does,
but can take many other forms, including
those w^ich allow it to be done without
others' help. Thus, thou^ poets do depend
cm printers and pubtishens (as cummii^*
example indicates), one can produce poetiy
without them. Russian poets \(4iose work
circulates in prirately copted typescripts do
that, as did Emfly IMckinson (Johraon, 1955).
In both c^es, the poetry does not circulate in
conventional print because the artist would
not accept the censor^p or rewriting
impcKed by th<Ke who would publidi the
work. The poet either has to reproduce and
circulate his work himself or not have it
drculated. But he can still write poetry. My
argument thus differs from a functionalism
that asserts that the artist must have
cooperation, ignoring the possibility that the
cooperation can be foregone, thou^ at a
price.
The examples given so far emphasize
matters more or less extemal to the art
work—exhibition space, printing or musical
notation. Relations of cooperation and
constraint, however, penetrate the entire
process of artistic creation and composition,
as will become clear in looking at the nature
and function of artistic conventions.
CONVENTIONS
Producing art works requires elaborate
modes of cooperation among specialized
personnel. How do these people arrive at the
terms on which they will cooperate? They
could, of couree, decide everything fresh on
each occasion. A group of musicians could
discus and agree on such matters as which
sounds would be used as tonal resources, what
instruments mi^t be constructed to make
those sounds, how those sounds jjvould be
combined to create a musical language, how
the language would be used to create works of
a particular length requiring a given number of
instruments and playable for audiences of a
certain size recruited in a certain way.
Something like that sometimes happens in, for
instance, the creation of a new theatrical
group, althou^ in most cases only a small
number of the questions to be decided are
actually considered anew.
People who cooperate to produce a work
of art usually do not decide things afresh.
Instead, they rely on eariier agreements now
, become customary, agreements that have
become part of the conventional way of doing
things in that art. Artistic conventions cover
ART AS COLLECTIVE ACTION 771
the decisions that must be made with
to works produced in a given art
world, even thou^ a particular convention
may be revised foi a given work. Thus,
conventions dictate the material to be used,
as when musici^s agree to base their music
on the notes contained ixi a set of modes, or
on tiie diatonic, pentatonic or diromatic
scides with their associated harmonies. Conventions
dictate the abstractions to be used to
convey particular ideas or experiences, as
when painters use the laws of perspective to
convey the illusion of thi«e dimensions or
photographers use black, white and shades of
^ay to convey the interplay of li^t and
color. Conventions dictate the fonn in which
materials and abstractions will be combined,
as in the muacal use of the sonata form or the
poetic use of the sonnet. Conventions suggest
the appropriate dimensions of a work, the
proper length for a musical or dramatic event,
the proper size and shape of a painting or
sculpture. Conventions regulate the relations
between artists and audience, specifying the
rights and obligations of both.
Humanistic scholars—art historians, musicologists
and literary critics-have found the
concept of the artistic convention useful in
accounting for artists' ability to produce art
works which produce an emotional response
in audiences. By using such a conventional
organization of tones as a scale, the composer
can create and manipulate the listener's
expectations as to what sounds will follow. He
can then delay and frustrate the satisfaction
of those expectations, generating tension and
release as the expectation is ultimately
satisfied (Meyer, 1956, 1973; Cooper and
Meyer, 1960). Only because artist and
audience share knowledge of and experience
with the conventions invoked does the art
work produce an emotional effect. Smith
(1968) has shown how poets manipulate
conventional means embodied in poetic forms
and diction to bring poems to a clear and
satisfying conclusion, in which the expectations
produced early in the lyric are
simultaneously and satisfactorily resolved.
Gombrich (I960) has analyzed the visual
conventions artists use to create the illusion
for viewers that they are seeing a realistic
depiction of some aspect of the world. In all
these cases (and in others like stage design,
dance, and film), the possibility of artistic
experience arises from the exfetence of a body
of conwntions that artists and au(^n<»s can
refer to in making sense of the work.
Conventions make art p(%sible in anotiier
sense. Because decisicms can be made quicldy,
because plans can be made simply by referring
to a conventitmal WEO' of doing thin^, artists
can devote more time to actually doing their
work. Conventions thus make possible the
e^y and effident coordination of activity
among artists and support pereonnel. Ivins
(1953), for instance, ^ows how, by uang a
convention^ized scheme for rendering ^adows,
modeling and other effects, several
graphic artists could collaborate m producii^
a single plate. The same conventions made it
possible for viewers to read w^at were
essentially arbitrary marks as rfiadows and
modeling. Seen this w^, the concept of
convention provides a prant of contact
between humanists and sociologists, being
interchangeable with such familiar sociologjcai
ideas as norm, rule, shared understanding,
custom or folkway, all referring in one way or
another to the ideas and understan^ngs
people hold in common and through which
they effect cooperative activity. Burlesque
comedies could stage elaborate three man
skits without rehearsal because they had only
to refer to a conventional body of skits they
all knew, pick one and as^gn the parts. Dance
musicians \^o are total strangers can play all
ni^t with no more prearrangement than to
mention a title ("Sunny Side of the Street,"
in C) and count off four beats to give the
tempo; the title indicates a melody, its
^companying harmony and perh^s even
customary background figures. Tlie conventions
of character and dramatic structure, in
the one case, and of melody, harmony and
tempo, in the other, are familiar enough that
audiences have no difficulty in re^onding
appropriately.
Though standardized, conventions are
seldom rigd and unchanging. They do not
specify an inviolate set of rules everyone must
refer to in settling questions of what to do.
Even where the directions seem quite specific,
they leave much unsettled which gels resolved
by reference to customary moctes of interpretation
on the one hand and by negotiati<ni IMI
the other. A tradition of performance
practice, often codified in book form, tdls
performers how to inten)ret the m ^ c ^
Kores or dramatic scripts they perform.
Seventeenth century scorw, for instance,
772 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
contained relatively UtUe information; but
contemporary books explained how to deal
with questions of instnimentation, note
v^ues, extemporization and the realization of
embelii^ments and ornaments. Performers
read their music in the li^t of all these
customary styles of interpretation and thus
were able to coordinate their activities (Dart,
1967). The same thing occurs in the visual
arts. Much of the content, symbolism and
coloring of Italian Renaissance reli^ous
painting was conventionally gven; but a
multitude of decisions remained for the artist,
so that even within those strict conventions
different works could be produced. Adhering
to the conventional materials, however,
allowed viewers to read much emotion and
meaning into the picture. Even where
customary interpretations of conventions
exist, having become conventions themselves,
artists can agree to do thin^ differently,
negotiation making change possible.
Conventions place strong constraints on
the artist. They are particularly constraining
because they do not exist in isolation, but
come in complexly interdependent systems,
so that making one smdl change often
requires making changes in a variety of other
activities. A system of conventions gets
embodied in equipment, materials, training,
available facilities and sites, systems of
notation and the like, all of which must be
changed if any one segment is.
Consider what a change from the conventional
western chromatic musical scale of
twelve tones to one including forty-two tones
between the octaves entails. Such a change
characterizes the compositions of Harry
Partch (1949). Western musical instruments
cannot produce these microtones easily and
some cannot produce them at aU, so
conventional instruments must be reconstructed
(as Partch does) or new instruments
must be invented and built. Since the
instruments are new, no one knows how to
play them, and players must train themselves.
Conventional Westem notation is inadequate
to score forty-two tone music, so a new
notation must be devised, and players must
learn to read it. (Comparable resources can be
taken as given by anyone who writes for the
conventional twelve chromatic tones). Consequently,
whereas a performance of music
scored for the conventional set of tones can
be performed adequately after relatively few
houre of rehearsal, forty-two tone music
requires much more woric, time, effort and
resources. Partch's music has typically come
to be performed in the following wjy: a
university invites him to spend a year. In the
fall, he recruits a group of interested students,
who build the instruments (which he has
already invented) under his direction. In the
winter, they learn to play the instruments and
read the notation he has devised. In the
spring, they rehearse several works and finally
give a perfomiance. Seven or eight months of
work finally result in two hours of music,
hours which could have been filled with other
music after eight to ten hours of rehearsal by
trained symphonic musicians playing the
standard repertoire. The difference in the
resources required measures the strength of
the constraint imposed by the conventional
system.
Similarly, conventions specifying what a
good photograph should look like are
embodied not only in an aesthetic more or
less accepted in the world of art photography
(Rosenbium, 1973), but also in the acceptance
of the constraints built into the neatly
interwoven complex of standardized equipment
and materials made by major manufacturers.
Available lenses, camera bodies,
shutter speeds, apertures, films, and printing
paper all constitute a tiny fraction of the
things that could be made, a selection that can
be used together to produce acceptable prints;
with ingenuity they can also be used to
produce effects their purveyors did not have
in mind. But some kinds of prints, once
common, can now only be produced with
great difficulty because the materials are no
longer available. Specifically, the photosensitive
material in conventional papers'is a silver
salt, which produces a characteristic look.
Photographers once printed on paper sensitized
with platinum salts, until it went off the
market in 1937 (Newhall, 1964, p. 117). You
can still make platinum prints, which have a
distinctively softer look, but only by making
your own paper. Not surprisingly, most
photographers accept the constraint and ieam
to maximize the effects that can be obtained
from available silver-based materials. They
likewise prize the standardization and dependability
of mass-produced materials; a roll
of Kodak Tri-X film purchased anywhere in
the world has ^proximately the same
characteristics and will produce the same
ART AS COLLECTIVE ACTION 773
results as any other rdl, that being the
opportunity that is the obverse of the
constraint.
The limitations of conventional practice,
clearly, are not totd. One can always do
things differently if one is prepared to pay the
price in increased effort or decreased circiQation
of one's work. The experience of
composer Chades Ives exemplifies the latter
possibility. He experimented with
polytonality and polyrhythms before they
became part of the ordinary performer's
competence. The New York players who tried
to play his chamber and orchestral music told
him that it was unplayable, that their
instruments could not make iho&e sounds,
that the scores could not be played in any
practical way. Ives finally accepted their
judgment, but continued to compose such
music. What makes his case interesting is that,
according to his biographers (CoweU and
Cowell, 1954), though be was also bitter
about it, be experienced this as a great
liberation. If no one could play his music,
then he no longer had to write music that
musicians could play, no longer had to accept
the constraints imposed by the conventions
that regulated cooperation between contemporary
composer and player. Since, for
instance, his music would not be played, he
never needed to finish it; be was quite
unwilling to confirm John Kirkpatrick's
pioneer reading of the Concord Sonata as a
correct one because that would mean that he
could no longer change it. Nor did he have to
accommodate his writing to the practical
constraints of what could be financed by
conventional means, and so he wrote his
Fourth Symphony for three orchestras. (Tbat
impracticality lessened with time; Leonard
Bernstein premiered the work in 1958 and it
has been played many times since.)
In general, breaking with existing conventions
and their manifestations in social
structure and material artifacts increases the
artist's trouble and decreases the circulation
of his work, on the one hand, but at the same
time increases his freedom to choose unconventional
alternatives and to depart substantially
from customary practice. If that is true,
we can understand any work as the product of
a choice between conventional ease and
success and unconventional trouble and lack
of recognition, looking for the experiences
and situational and stmctural elements that
di^ose artists in one direction or the othrar.
Interdependent ^tems of conventions and
structures of cooperative' Unks appear very
stable and difficult to change. In fact, thou^
arts sometimes experience periods of stasis,
that does not mean that no changie or
innovation occurs (Meyer, 1967). Small
innovations occur constantly, as conventional
means of creating expectations and delaying
their satisfaction become so well-knovm as to
become conventional expectations in their
own ri^t. Meyer (1956) an^yzes this process
and gives a nice example in the use of vibrato
by string instrument players. At one time,
string players used no vibrato, introducing it
on rare occasions as a deviation from
convention wbich heightened tension and
created emotional response by virtue of its
rarity. String players who widied to excite
such an emotional response began using
vibrato more and more often until the way to
excite the emotional response it had once
produced was to play without vibrato, a
device that Bartok and other composers
exploited. Meyer describes the process by
which deviations from convention become
accepted conventions in their own right as a
common one.
Such changes are a kind of gradualist
reform in a persisting artistic tradition.
Broader, more disruptive changes also occur,
bearing a marked resemblance to political and
scientific revolutions (Kuhn, 1962). Any
major change necessarily attacks some of the
existing conventions of the art directly, as
when the Impressionists or Cubists chan^d
tbe existing visual language of painting, the
way one read paint on canvas as a
representation of something. An attack on
convention does not merely mean an attack
on the particular item to be changed. Every
convention carries with it an aesthetic,
according to which what is conventional
becomes the standard by which artistic beauty
and effectiveness is judged. A play w^ch
violates the classical unities is not merely
different, it is distasteful, barbaric and u^y to
those for whom the classical imities represent
a fixed criterion of dramatic worth. An att^^
on a convention becomes an attack on tlw
aesthetic related to it. But people do not
experience their arathetic beliefs as narely
arbitrary and convenUraial; they feel that ^ y
are natural, proper and moral. An att^k on a
convention and an aesthetic is also aa att^k
774 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL RE^TEW
<m a morality. Itie tegularity with vduch
audiences greet major changes in dramatic,
musical and visual conventions with vituperative
hostility indicates ^ e close relation
between aestiietic and moral belief (Kubler,
1962).
An attack on sacred aesthetic beliefs as
embodied in particular conventions is, finally,
an attack on an existing arrangement of
ranked statuses, a stratification system.^
Remember that the conventional way of
doing things in any art utilizes an existing
cooperative network, an organized art world
\^ch rewards those who manipulate the
existing conventions appropriately in light of
the associated sacred aesthetic. Suppose that a
dance worid is organized around the conventions
and skills embodied in classical ballet. If
I then leam those conventions and skills, I
become eligible for positions in the best ballet
companies; the finest choreographers will
create ballets for me that are just the kind I
know how to dance and wBl look good in; the
best composers wHl write scores for me;
theaters will be available; I will eam as good a
living as a dancer can eam; audiences will love
me and I will be famous. Anyone vAo
successfully promotes a new convention in
which he is skilled and I am not attacks not
only my aesthetic but also my high position in
the world of dance. So the resistance to the
new expresses the anger of those who will lose
materiaby by the change, in the form of
aesthetic outrage.
Others than the artist have something
invested in the status quo which a change in
accepted conventions will lose them. Consider
earthworks made, for instance, by a bulldozer
in a square m0e of pasture. Such a sculpture
carmot be collected (though a patron can pay
for its construction and receive signed plans or
photographs as a document of his patronage),
or put in museums (though the mementos the
collector receives can be displayed). If
earthworks become an important art form,
the museum personnel ^^ose evaluations of
museum-collectable art have had important
consequences for the careers of artists and art
'I tun indebted to an unpublished paper by
Everett C. Hughes (n.d.) for the argument that an
attack on the mores is an attack on social structure.
He develops the argument by combining two points
in Sumner's Folkways, that 1) the folkways create
status, and 2) sects (wbether religious, political, or
artistic) are at war with the mores.
movements lose the power to choose
works w0] be Splayed, for thsr museurns are
unnecessary for di^laying those works.
Everyone involved in the museum-collectable
kind of art (collector, museum curators,
galleries, dealers, artists) loses something. We
ml^t say that every cooperative network that
constitutes an art worid creates value by the
agreement of its members as to what is
valuable (Levine, 1972; Christopherson,
1974). When new people successfully create a
new world which defines other conventions as
embodying artistic value, all the participants
in the old world who cannot make a place in
the new one lose out.
Every art world develops standardized
modes of support and artists who support
their work through those conventional means
develop an aesthetic which accepts the
constraints embedded in those forms of
cooperation. Rosenbium (1973) has diown
that the aesthetic of photographers varies with
the economic channels through which their
work is distributed in the same way that their
customary work styles do, and Lyon (1974)
has analyW the interdependence of aesthetic
decisions and the means by which resources
are gathered in a semi-professional theater
group. One example will illustrate the nature
of the dependence. The group depended on
volunteer help to get necessary work done.
But people volunteered for non-artistic kinds
of work largely because they hoped eventually
to get a part in a play and gain some acting
experience. The people who ran the company
soon accumulated many such debts and were
constrained to choose plays with relatively
large casts to pay them off.'
CONCLUSION
If we focus on a specific art work, it proves
useful to think of social organization as a
network of people who cooperate to produce
that work. We see that the same people often
cooperate repeatedly, even routinely, in
simUar ways to produce similar works. They
organize their cooperation by referring to the
conventions current among those who partici^Tha
problem of financial and other resources
and the institutions which have grown up to provide
them for artists deserves much more extended
consideration than I give it here, and some
socioipgical and sodal-historical literature is available
(see, for instance. White and White, 1965; Hirsch,
1972; Grana, 1964;Coser, 1965; Haskell, 1963).
ART AS COLLECTIVE ACTION 775
pate in the production and consumption of
such works. If the same people do not
actually act together in every case, their
replacements are also famfliar with and
proficient in the use of the same conventions,
so that the cooperation can go on without
diffictUty. Conventions make collective action
simpler and less costly in time, energy and
other resources; but they do not make
unconventional work impossible, only more
costly and more difficult. Change can occur,
as it often does, whenever someone devises a
way to gather the greater resources required.
Thus, the conventional modes of cooperation
and collective action need not recur because
people constantly devise new modes of action
and discover the resources necessary to put
them into practice.
To say all this goes beyond the assertion
that art is social and beyond demonstrations
of the congruence between forms of social
organization and artistic styles or subjects. It
shows that art is social in the sense that it is
created by networks of people acting
together, and proposes a framework in which
differing modes of collective action, mediated
by accepted or newly developed conventions,
can be studied. It places a number of
traditional questions in the field in a context
in which their similarity to other forms of
collectiye action can be used for comparative
theoretical work.
The discussion of art as collective action
suggests a general approach to the analysis of
social organization. We can focus on any event
(the more general term which encompasses
the production of an art work as a special
case) and look for the network of people,
however large or extended, whose collective
activity made it possible for the event to
occur as it did. We can look for networks
whose cooperative activity recurs or has
become routine and specify the conventions by
which their constituent members coordinate
their separate lines of action.
We might want to use such terms as social
organization or social structure as a metaphorical
way of referring to those recurring
networks and their activities. In doing so,
however, we should not forget their metaphorical
character and inadvertently assert as
a fact implied in the metaphor what can only
be discovered throu^ research. When sociologists
speak of social structure or social
systems, the metaphor implies (thou^ its user
neither proves nor argues the point^ that the
collective action involved occurs "r^iulariy"
or "often" (the quantifier, being implicit, is
non-specific) and, further, that the people
involved act together to produce a large
variety of events. But we should recognize
generally, as the empirical materials require tis
to do in the study of the arts, that irfiether a
mode of collective action is recurrent or
routine enough to warrant such description
must be decided by investigation, not by
definition. Some forms of collective action
recur often, others occasionally, some very
seldom. Similarly, people who p^idpate in
the network that produces one event or kind
of event may not act together in art works
producing other events. That question, too,
must be decided by investigation.
Collective actions and the events they
produce are the basic unit of sociological
investigation. Social organization consists of
the special case in which the same people act
together to produce a variety of diHerent
events in a recurring way. Social organization
(and its cognates) are not only concepts, then,
but also empirical findings. Whether we speak
of the collective acts of a few people—a family
or a friendship-or of a much larger number—a
profession or a class system—we need always
to ask exactly who is joining together to
produce what events. To pursue the generalization
from the theory developed for artistic
activities, we can study social organizations of
all kinds by looking for the networks
responsible for producing specific events, the
overlaps among such cooperative networks,
the way participants use conventions to
coordinate their activities, how existing
conventions simultaneously make coordinated
action possible and limit the forms it can take,
and how the development of new forms of
acquiring resources makes change possible. (I
should point out that, while this point of view
is not exactly commonplace, neither is it
novel. It can be found in the writings of,
among others, Simmel [1898], Park [1950,
1952, 1955 passim], Blumer [1966] and
Hughes [1971,esp. pp 5-13 and 52-64]).
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