Graeber’s sense of the art world as something open to transformation follows, so I’ll suggest, from some of his basic theoretical conceptions and commitments. His first and really only major theoretical statement is his book Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams from 2001, and evidently bearing the marks of a re-written doctoral dissertation. Graeber’s general appreciation for the work of his doctoral supervisor, the eminent anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, is well-known, but the book reveals more specific intellectual indebtedness to the work of two great but perhaps less widely known anthropologists, Nancy Munn and Terence Turner. Explicitly following Munn, Graeber writes that “Value emerges in action; it is the process by which a person’s invisible “potency”—their capacity to act—is transformed into concrete, visible forms . . . Value, then, is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves”, and that value “is the way people who could do almost anything (including, in the right circumstances, creating entirely new sorts of social relation) assess the importance of what they do, in fact, do, as they are doing it” (Graeber (2001), pp. 45 and 47). One immediately notes how Graeber’s characterization of the artworld, especially characteristic (b) [the social process of evaluation] and (d) [the inherent possibility of transformation] are foreshadowed in Munn’s thought. From Turner Graeber adopts the methodological insistence that alienation and hierarchy be seen not as natural facts or inevitable aspects of the human condition, but rather as historical phenomena always subject to modification (see, for example, p. 75), again foreshadowing the art world’s characteristic (d)). Generalizing from the work of all three of his anthropological guides, he asserts that human societies cannot be approached as ahistorical things, but rather as a total social processes (p. 76), which, as systems of actions, are constitutively historical in the sense that action always involves some sense of an alternative: things could be done this way, but also that way. And, as noted above, for Graeber this is just another way of saying that human societies are historical phenomena: “Insofar as any system of actions is also historical, it is in a permanent condition of transformation, or, at the very least, potential transformation.” (p. 249)
For Graeber, this historical sense of society as a total social process of actions immediately introduces the sense of freedom, in the sense that for a choice of action to be an actual choice (and not, say, a kind of unrecognized compulsion) agents must in some sense be ‘free’ to act one way rather than another. Graeber derives two final methodological points from this: First, there must always be the possibility of resistance to whatever dominant kinds of meaning a society proffers (p. 89; many readers will note the closeness of Graeber’s conception here to that given in the later work of Michel Foucault). Second, while a human society may rightly be thought of as a total social process, there is no one aspect, no field, no institution, no social sphere, which can impose its particular kind of meaningfulness upon a society as a whole, at least not ever without the possibility of external contestation from other aspects, nor of internal contestation from its own members. So the fourth characteristic of the art world, its possibility of transformation, issues directly and almost of necessity from Graeber’s theoretical commitments.
All other accounts of the art world known to me are silent on this transformative possibility. In the philosopher George Dickie’s initial formulation in 1974, the art world was an institution whose distinctive activity is conferring artistic status upon a subset of the world’s artifacts. Dickie’s proposal received fierce criticism from quite a few philosophers of art, many of which criticisms Dickie accepted. In his heavily revised conception in 1984, he took over the philosopher Monroe Beardsley’s distinction between ‘institution-types’ (“such as tool-making, storytelling, marriage, or the like”) and ‘institution-tokens’ (“the University of Illinois, the United States government, and the like”), and asserted that in the philosophically relevant sense the art world is an institution-type. Accordingly, he writes that “what I now mean by the institutional approach is the view that a work of art is art because of the position it occupies within a cultural practice, which is of course in Beardsley’s terminology an institution-type”. Dickie adds a further distinction from the philosophy Jeffrey Wieand between ‘Action-institutions’ (“promising and the like”) and Person-institutions (“organizations which behave as quasi-persons or agents, as, for example, the Catholic Church and General Motors do”), with the art world now conceived as an Action-institution (Dickie (1984), pp. 52-3). So on his revised conception, the art world understood as a set of persons does not confer artistic status. His formal statement of the theory is twofold: “An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an art world public” (p. 82); and “The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems” (p. 81). This seems to be a case where the initial formulation of a philosophical thesis is interesting, exciting, and false, and the revised formulation is uninteresting, trivial, and true, or at least plausible. In any case the distinctive features of the contemporary art world disappear from view in the service of academic paper-churning.
On this topic one might well expect more from sociologists than from philosophy professors. I cannot here so much as summarize Pierre Bourdieu’s relevant account, but I note that Bourdieu primarily addresses what he calls the field of artistic production, and the foci of his extended analyses are mid-to-late literary and artistic production in France, especially with regard to Flaubert and Manet. The standard account of the art world surely comes from the sociologist Howard Becker, who explicitly rejects Bourdieu’s account of the artistic field “as if it were a field of forces in physics rather than a lot of people doing something together”, with the members of the art world caricatured as having relations with each other that are “exclusively relations of domination, based in competition and conflict” (Becker (2008), p. 374). For Becker, the art world is rather not a closed unit, but rather “contains people, all sorts of people, who are in the middle of doing something that requires them to pay attention to each other, to take account consciously of the existence of others and to shape what they do in the light of what others do” (p. 375). Against the first version of Dickie’s institutional theory, Becker notes that it exaggerated the sense in which an art world allegedly confers art status; such ‘conferrals’ are regularly disputed from within the art world, and likewise attributions of quality and meaning to particular artworks. Further, Dickie (and Danto in his original essay) seem unclear as to whether there is a single art world, or multiple ones. In his positive account, Becker makes a great many observations that seem at least broadly consistent with Graeber’s account. He stresses the open-endedness of art worlds and the centrality of the phenomena of artistic careers and trajectories. Becker explicitly addresses the fact that “Art worlds change continuously—sometimes gradually, sometimes quite dramatically” (p. 300), and considers a number of historical examples of emergent art worlds (especially jazz). There have been, Becker asserts, many attempts to create new art worlds, with very occasional success. The success of an attempt to create a new art world needs a new kind of art, a new audience for that art, networks of people sufficiently devoted to that art to develop media for critical discussion, and finally a legitimizing history of that new kind of art that places it among exiting art forms (p. 339).
Does Graeber’s account add anything to Becker’s careful and illuminating discussion? Perhaps. If it does, it concerns Graeber’s employment of a richer conception of reflective freedom, and this is highlighted in his fourth characteristic of art worlds. One way of putting the contrast would be to note that Becker is an academic American sociologist of institutions, while Graeber is an Anarchist anthropologist and philosopher of freedom. As an anthropologist, Graeber focuses on the (alleged) tight connection between art markets and scarcity of artistic goods, and then the deployment of scarcity as a legitimating element of hierarchies internal and external to art worlds. Becker also is unconcerned with the sense of history in art worlds outside of the empirical phenomena of emergence, decay, and the creation of histories as it were internal to art forms. Graeber by contrast treats broad-scale historical learning from art worlds’ successes and failures, and is particularly concerned with the ‘revolutionary’ moment of Soviet arts in the late1910s-early 1920s. Malevich’s vision of a revolutionary art may have ‘failed’ in the sense that it did not by itself create a sustainable artistic style or a new art world, but it did, along with other elements of the Russian avant-gardes, give a range of hitherto non-artistic agents—workers, suburbanites, the rural poor—something of the tools they needed to join in collective artistic activities (Graeber (2024), p. 298).
