Creating Art

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 painte

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f person who participates in the making of art works, then, has a specific bundle of tasks to do; every form of art rests on an extensive division of labor (Becker, 1982, p. 11). The artist sits, rather like a spider in a web, at the center of these activities. The fact that we tend to see the artist and not the support personnel (just as we see the spider and not her web) does not mean that the less visible elements of the system are not there or are not important. Becker notes that both participants in the creation of art and members of a society at large believe that an artist "requires special talents, gifts, or abilities, which few have" (Becker, 1982, p. 14). We think is important to know who has that [artistic] gift and who does not because we accord people who have it special rights and privileges. At an extreme, the romantic myth of the artist suggests that people with such gifts cannot be subjected to the constraints imposed on other members of society; we must allow them to violate the rules of decorum, propriety, and common sense everyone must follow or risk being punished. The myth suggests that in return society receives work of unique character and invaluable quality (Becker, 1982, pp. 14-5). Given that e

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