Position

Institutional Theory of Art

Something is a work of art when a practice with the authority to do so confers that status on it, not because of any property it displays.

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Classification

Position level
specific
Domains
Aesthetics

Overview

The institutional account answers a difficulty that defeated every attempt to name a visible feature common to all art: a urinal placed in a gallery and an identical one in a plumbing supply differ in no perceptible respect, yet only one is a work. What separates them is a relation to a practice — its history, its makers, its audiences — rather than anything in the object.

This locates art in a social fact and accepts the consequence, which its critics press hardest: on this view the artworld can confer the status on anything at all, and the theory says nothing about whether it was right to.

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References

  • Arthur Danto, 'The Artworld', Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964)
  • George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (1974)
  • George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (1974), ch. 1, defining a work of art as an artefact on which the artworld has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation