H.S.

Becker
New Directions in the Sociology of Art
[Given at the ESA colloque in Paris, April 2003]
Its customary to call for new directions in the study of this or that, as though the old
directions had failed us, as though we were stuck and not getting anywhere. In this case, I
dont accept that premise. We have a number of old directions that seem very serviceable to
me, still capable of orienting people toward excellent pieces of research. Nevertheless, the
conveners of this colloque wanted New Directions and Ill do my best to please them.
So Ill propose a new direction, which is a genetic approach to the sociological study of art
works and art worlds. Such an approach encompasses two sorts of research. The first is the
study, upstream, of how some artistic phenomenon-- a work, a style, a genre, an entire art
world--comes into being, step by step; all the things that are done, in the order they are
done by the people who do them, in the course of the object of study (which Ill from now on
speak of as a work, this being understood as encompassing the variety of things I just
mentioned) coming to be what it is. I suggested, in Art Worlds, that it is interesting to think
about this part of a works history, from the point of view of the artist, as editing (in the
sense that photographers give that word and idea), looking at all the decisions, conscious
and otherwise, that the artist makes that make the work (or genre, etc., I wont repeat this
from now on) what it is. In the case of multi-artist works, where no one is quite sure, or
where it isnt agreed, who the artist is--you would naturally study the decisions of the
several people or groups involved and how disputes among them are settled. In the case of a
genre or a style, you would include all the people whose work and ideas contributed to that
development, including among them, naturally, the aestheticians and historians who gave a
collection of tendencies such a name and pedigree.
On the other hand, moving downstream from the work, you would study its continuing
history, what happened to it after whatever date you decide is appropriate to consider it
done, for which an extended version of the technique of tracing a provenance is an apt
metaphor. That is, after it is done, what happens to it?
A few preliminary remarks. First of all, I dont propose that this is a unique and original
idea. Far from it. I have made use of the ideas and researches of many others in arriving at
this position, as will become clear, and have already said many of these things myself.
But, though there is nothing new under the sun, it is often helpful to put ideas into a
provisional framework that indicates their relationships and similarities. We can then profit
from the novel juxtapositions systematic comparison confronts us with, using them to see
processes and phenomena we are ordinarily too accustomed to notice, and to learn from
them about new dimensions of the things we are interested in.
A second point. It is not obvious where upstream stops and downstream begins. The history
of any work or style or genre starts--where? Wherever we choose to begin we can always

find something that came before that is relevant to the story we are going to tell, and there
is something that came still later that could equally well be regarded as an appropriate
starting point. We can, of course, regard the present minute as the place where the
downstream stops for analytic purpose. This is not to counsel despair but simply to
recognize that the choice is arbitrary, dictated by our questions and the available data and
time, but not by anything inherent in the events we are studying. (This is like the question
of periodization in history.)
What can the outcome of this exercise reasonably be expected to be? I dont think it will
produce startling new results or a new Grand Theory of Art and Society. What I hope for,
rather, is to suggest some typical trajectories, typical stages we may find in our investigation
of a new empirical area--not a law about how genres necessarily develop from an
authentic expression of something to a commercialized version of it, for instance, but the
description of how that sort of process works when and where it occurs.
Upstream
Starting with the material to be analyzed, we can look back at the steps that produced it. A
good way to do this is to think of everything that happens to the work, and is then
incorporated into it, as a choice somebody (or somebodies) made, even though often
enough the choice is not conscious and deliberate but instead the use of a material or
technique or idea that is so conventional as to be almost unconscious (if I can use that
word without any heavy psychological overtones creeping in).
It is axiomatic, in the sociological study of work processes, that the most fruitful moments
for the sociologist are those where the participants disagree, quarrel, fight. Because at these
moments some agreement, whether it existed in fact or was only hoped for, has broken
down. When people say to each other, I expected you to do X [be able to play the notes my
score calls for or, alternatively, to write notes I can play] an underlying expectation on
which interaction had been so securely premised that it did not come up for discussion, and
which had very likely been unconscious, is revealed for our analysis.
Where do such moments of conflict typically occur? They often arise at the social margin
between two groups--for instance, in the interaction of professionals of various kinds in the
production of art works: between suppliers of materials and artists, between artists and lay
people, between artists and people who deal with the finances of the artistic enterprise.
What is characteristic here is that each such group brings to the encounter an established
set of ideas about how things are to be done, who gives the orders, how the money is
divided and distributed, and so on about all the things that participants in a joint art
enterprise expect of one another.
For each such margin, where conflict is possible and even likely, we can suppose that there
are characteristic patterns of fighting and resolution and that there will often be an
historical process by which a fight turns into a set of customary procedures that will last for
a while. So we can look for the process that will eventually produce a customary solution to
the current fights over the division of income from an art work that have been engendered
by the rise of computers and their associated practices: marketing via the internet,

widespread ability to easily copy works, or the issue of sampling musical works to create
new ones. Just as earlier quarrels produced a set of arrangements about copyrights,
royalties, droits d'auteur, etc.
Such an area is in itself tremendously complicated and I will only refer here to the
wonderful work of Richard Caves, the economist, who has brought the full armament of
economic theory to bear fruitfully on a variety of problems that arise here, as well as to
Pierre-Michel Mengers analyses of the labor market for artists.
Downstream
We can begin with Latours well-known remark: the fate of what we say and make is in
later users hands. (Science in Action, p. 29) He is talking about scientific facts, but the
remark is equally applicable to works of art. Once we pass the point we have chosen as the
pivot between upstream and downstream--a common and good place to put that point is
when the work leaves the hands of the one conventionally identified as the creator--we can
choose a later point as the other end of the trajectory we want to study. And then we can do
an extended version of what art historians do when they construct a provenance for a
painting. They try to account for the pictures whereabouts at all times, to show an
unbroken chain of ownership and physical possession: who got it from who under what
circumstances.
I became aware of this as a possible technique for social scientists when I came across Hans
Haackes inventive use of it to show how a painting by Manet had moved through a number
of owners, including some well-to-do and scholarly Jewish families, eventually to be
purchased by the Friends of the Cologne Art Museum, whose chairman had been a highly
placed Nazi during those years. Haacke did not do this to establish the authenticity of the
painting, which is the usual aim of an art historians provenance. He used the technique as
part of his larger project of showing the morally shaky ground on which the financial wellbeing of major art world institutions rested.
We can generalize Haackes procedure a little by suggesting it as a method for studying the
financial bases of art world institutions: checking out the history of ownership of objects,
looking for the key moments at which the object changed hands, at which we might expect
shifts in valuations and aesthetic judgments will show themselves very clearly.
Another typical sequence occurs in the development of certain genres, with a shift in
audiences and in an associated moral judgment of the work. Here I refer to the kind of
research done by Richard Peterson and David Grazian on the problem of the authenticity,
in a different sense than the art-historical, of some kinds of folk musics, country and
Western music in Petersons case, and blues in Grazians . Here the music is thought to be
the authentic reflection or product of a way of life that is ethnically distinct or somehow
closely related to the life conditions of the people who play it, sing it, dance to it, listen to it.
Part of the pleasure the music produces is the audiences knowledge that it is the real
thing, unaffected by commercial pressures, a real window into another way of life. But,
because people who do not live that life want to see this real thing, it becomes possible to
sell it to them.

And so a process begins in which musicians, singers, and composers begin to create
versions of the originally authentic music for an audience which only knows of it through
recordings. In the paradoxical case studied by Grazian, people come from all over the world
to hear authentic Chicago blues. They know what that is because they have the recordings
they bought. And they come to Chicago in search of what is on their records, played by real
blues musicians in real blues clubs, in which all the other customers are the real people of
whose lives this music was the authentic expression. As you can imagine, this leads to the
clubs being filled with such seekers from all over the world, driving the people who formerly
went there out, and boring the musicians by insisting that they play exactly what is on the
recordings that brought them there. And the club is thus no longer authentic and no longer
of interest to the people who have thus destroyed it. A similar process has occurred with
respect to authentic African art, authentic pre-Columbian art, and with respect to many
other kinds of art.
A third typical downstream moment occurs when an object is disposed of. Lasting is often
a criterion of great art but, more prosaically, lasting in a physical sense is a contingency that
affects all works. Whether something lasts physically, and therefore aesthetically as well,
depends on a great number of choices made by a wide variety of people. First of all, art work
is often destroyed. Perhaps as a result of political decisions: examples abound, such as the
destruction of churches and their associated art works in England or Spain at various times,
or in Afghanistan not long ago. Ray Bradbury made the problem vivid in Fahrenheit
451with the burning of books and their salvation through people who memorized them
Beyond that, there is the unavoidable process of storage. All of us have faced the moment
when it became necessary to get rid of things, to make choices of which books or recordings
to keep when we move, for instance. Its a problem that confronts museums and libraries.
Either they keep growing forever to accommodate the endless number of new things or they
deaccession some things to make room for the new. This is a place where there are surely
moments when the established ways of doing that become uncomfortable and cause
trouble, as when museums are discovered to have gotten rid of things that were given to
them to be held in trust forever, but which are no longer thought to be as good as they once
were thought. Worse yet when, as so often happens, fifty or a hundred years later, tastes
and judgments having shifted again, what had been gotten rid of is now just what is wanted.
A key role can be played here, as Gladys and Kurt Lang showed, by key players who become
entrepreneurs devoted to keeping the work, the memory, and the reputation of an artist
alive. In their case, it was the wives of a generation of English etchers who did the job,
preserving the work, persuading repositories to accept it, and publicizing it when possible.
Similarly, revivals of the reputation of a work or artist or genre are usually the result of
someone deciding to revive the item in question. It is not a matter of quality finally showing
through, but rather of an enterprising conductor or player or publisher or director or critic
or curator deciding to revive something, for whatever reasons seem pertinent.
More generally, the movement of reputations goes on relentlessly, down, back up again,
back down,, as Natalie Heinich has shown in the case of van Gogh and Barbara Herrnstein

Smith has described for Shakespeares sonnets (we can also mention Francis Haskells
Rediscoveries in Art).
Finally . . . .
What I have suggested here is not really a new direction. But what might be new about it
is that I mean to employ relentlessly, and without exception, an analytic perspective that is
processual and that takes into account all the players in the drama of art.
By processual, I mean, first, that everything in the social world, and art is no exception,
changes constantly. Material things change physically: they deteriorate, are destroyed, are
redone. Works that are performed are subject to multiple interpretations, occur in different
venues, are rewritten by their authors or others. So we cant talk about a work of art as a
stable thing. There is a written score, perhaps, that we can call Ravels Tombeau de
Couperin--though even there we have to specify whether we mean the six piano pieces or
the four he scored for orchestra--but it will not be the same piece performed by different
pianists, and will not sound the same in different concert halls nor on recordings played on
different equipment. We nevertheless can and do talk about this work as though it were a
stable thing. But only because we agree, more or less implicitly, to ignore these differences.
Otherwise we would have to specify which performance of the work by which pianist on
which piano recorded how . . . .
Another way to put this is to recognize, as suggested earlier, that the choice of the point
from which we reckon upstream and downstream is arbitrary.
Processual also refers us, as I suggested earlier, to the idea of choice, as expressed in the
term editing which I have borrowed from photographic practice--the choices made, in the
case of a musical work, for instance, of versions, tempi, interpretation of expressive marks,
and so on. But that is only the beginning of a very long list, whose contents have, in every
case, to be discovered empirically.
Thinking about editing leads to the second point, the large number and variety of people
involved in a works history. This is a point I have argued at length in Art Worlds. Ill only
remind you here of the list of credits at the end of a film. That list is conventional in film,
but similar lists are not conventional in other arts, though they could of course be made.
The choice of who, among all the people who might be included in such a list, should be
included is somewhat arbitrary. somewhat because clearly some of the actors are more
influential than others. But, on the other hand, its important to recognize that this is a
multiplicative kind of function. Everyone is important as can be recognized when any one of
the actors does not do their job as expected. Then everyone has to adjust to that absence
and the work will be different than it would have been had everyone done the expected.
These are things that I think most sociologists of art would say Of course! to. But there is
a difference between Of course and strictly following the guidelines that issue from this
position. Following them strictly might be, finally, a New Direction.