Art is not, as we have so often been told, in the eye of the beholder. Or rather it may be in the eyes of certain beholders acting in concert with each other. The premise of Howard Becker=s Art Worlds is simply this -- that art, like all other human activities, involves the joint activity of a number of people (Becker, 1982, p. 1). That humans work together to create a whole greater than each could produce individually should not come as a terribly remarkable surprise. The fact that we can accomplish more in groups than as isolated individuals is one of the most important (if not the most important) reason that humans gather together in societies to begin with. None of us would be surprised to learn that farming or textile production or the rail system is the result of a number of people working together, each providing a piece of the required labor and enabled to work jointly by conventions and other kinds of agreements held in common.
However, some people might be surprised that art is created in the same way, that art is as much a product of history and society and culture as are Beanie Babies or McDonald=s Happy Meals. This is because art-making is often looked at as a different kind of activity (at least in the West) from other activities, akin to scholarship or meditation rather than the production of other commodities. Much of Becker=s work is aimed at exploding what might in loose terms be called the starving-attic-in-the-garret syndrome, the idea of a painter or sculpture or writer or composer almost entirely isolated from human contact, going from one day to the next without seeing a soul except perhaps a landlord demanding rent or a shop=s clerk delivering a bundle of food scraps. This idea of the artist as a lone genius who can never be understood in his (or much more rarely her) own time and unable to create art if he must grapple with the kind of ordinary daily chores and trials that the rest of us must face up ...