But is it Art?

A new look at the

institutional theory of art
EDWARD SKIDELSKY

Introduction

In 1973, the philosopher George Dickie proposed an ingenious new

answer to the old question: what is art? Arthood, he suggested, is
not an intrinsic property of objects, but a status conferred upon
them by the institutions of the art world. He accordingly attached
an exemplary significance to works like Duchamp’s urinal, whose
very lack of intrinsic distinction focuses our attention upon their
institutional context. But his theory was about art in general, and
not just readymades. ‘I am not claiming that Duchamp and his
friends invented the conferring of the status of art; they simply
used an existing institutional device in an unusual way.’1
The three decades since the publication of Dickie’s essay have
seen a proliferation of Duchampian readymades. Tracy Emin’s bed
is one of the latest examples of an object whose status as art
depends entirely upon its institutional setting. Remove it from the
gallery, and it reverts to being an ordinary bed. Such works seem to
confirm Dickie’s thesis. If they are art, then art is indeed no more
than a product of institutional fiat.
I want to suggest another interpretation. The institutional
character of works like Tracy Emin’s bed is illustrative, not of the
concept of art in general, but of a peculiarly modern corruption of
that concept. Art in the proper sense is no more a product of
institutional fiat than (say) philosophy. It possesses an inherent
discipline; it draws its boundaries from within. Only when it loses
this discipline does it become plausible to interpret it as a product
of external forces. But this only means that art in the proper sense
has been replaced by something else bearing its name. Under such
circumstances, institutionalism comes to hold true, not indeed as a
philosophical thesis about art, but as a sociological thesis about
‘art’. In a similar manner, institutionalism would be false as an
1
George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: an Institutional Analysis
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 33.

doi:10.1017/S0031819107320032 ©2007 The Royal Institute of Philosophy

Philosophy 82 2007 259
Edward Skidelsky

interpretation of philosophy, yet eminently true as an interpretation

of what passed as philosophy in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s
Russia. Sociology’s hour strikes only when intrinsic meaning has
been drained from a particular field of human activity.

What is wrong with the institutional theory of art?

Dickie’s theory contains the proviso that institutional fiat, while it

can make an object a work of art, cannot make it a good work of art.
The nomination of art may be arbitrary, but its evaluation remains
a matter of judgement and taste. This proviso might save Dickie’s
theory from the charge of nihilism, but it creates further difficulties
down the line. For there seems to exist what Richard Wollheim calls
‘an interesting connection between being a work of art and being a
good work of art—a connection, in other words, over and above
that of the former being a presupposition of the latter.’2 But what
exactly is this connection, and how does it tell against institutional-
ism? It is not enough to appeal, as does Wollheim, to the fact that
‘good’ is used attributively in the phrase ‘good work of art’, for it is
also used attributively in the phrase ‘good buy’ and the concept of
‘a buy’ is without doubt institutional—anything can become a buy
simply by being offered for sale. The connection must be deeper
than this.
Wollheim’s point can be brought out more forcefully by analogy
with chess. As in the case of art, there is an ‘interesting connection’
between playing chess and playing it well. This connection is on
one level theoretical; given the rules of chess, we can in principle
work out an optimal line of play. But it also exists at the level of
intention. Someone who moved his pieces in accordance with the
rules, yet without any apparent intention of winning—someone
who, for example, moved his knight endlessly backwards and
forwards, or wove a figure of eight with his bishop—would not be
playing chess badly so much as not playing it at all. He would be
‘defeating the purpose’ of the game. Striving to win belongs, in
other words, to the essence of chess. It gives the game its structure;
it binds an otherwise arbitrary series of moves into something
resembling an argument. There is good and bad chess, but there is
no random or pointless chess.

2
Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), 163.

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 But is it Art?

(It should immediately be added that this ‘striving to win’ is

internal to the game and can very well coexist with a real desire to
lose. One might, for example, be playing a ten year old child, or a
touchy dictator. Yet one would still have to maintain the appearance
of wanting to win, or else one could be accused of not ‘playing the
game’.)
We are now in a position to see the force of Wollheim’s claim that
there is ‘an interesting connection between being a work of art and
being a good work of art’. Art, like chess, is an inherently
disciplined activity, an activity admitting of success and failure.3
This fact determines its limits. Not every object in an art gallery is
art, just as not every sequence of chess moves is chess, but only
those intelligible as a response to a problem, as an attempt to ‘get it
right’. Objects of which it makes no sense to say that they have
either succeeded or failed, objects which are not shadowed, as it
were, by the image of what they might have been, are not art, even
though they wear the insignia of art. Art, in short, is not a product
of institutional fiat.
Conceptions of artistic success have not, it should be added,
remained static, but have evolved together with art itself. (This is a
significant disanalogy between art and chess, to which we shall
return later in the essay.) In the Renaissance, artistic success was
conceived in terms of skill. The artist was the servant of his art; his
goal was its perfection. Vasari praises ‘the liveliness, the ease, order,
and proportion of Giotto’s painting, qualities which were given him
by nature but which he greatly improved by study and expressed
clearly in all he did.’4 Vasari does not deny that artistic skill is often
innate, indeed a divine gift, or that it varies in character from artist
to artist. Raphael is supreme in grace, Michelangelo in grandeur.
But such peculiarities do not add up to a unified artistic personality,
a ‘genius’ to which its possessor must be faithful. The artist simply
applies his particular gifts to the common tasks of art, much as a
scientist applies his to the common tasks of science. Thus Vasari

3
The terms ‘disciplined’ and ‘rigorous’ are used in this essay to
connote not stiffness or exactitude but simply the quality of being guided
by a certain ideal, of being potentially ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. A Matisse is, in
this sense, no less disciplined than a Van Eyck. I use these slightly
awkward terms rather than the more usual ‘norm-governed’ because I
want to leave open the question of whether there are indeed such things as
norms or rules of art.
4
Giogio Vasari, Artists of the Renaissance (London: Allen Lane,
1978), 34.

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Edward Skidelsky

envisages the history of art rather as we envisage the history of

science, as a progressive enterprise, culminating in the ‘absolute
perfection’ of Michelangelo.5
The romantic era broadened the notion of artistic achievement to
encompass such qualities as integrity and authenticity. ‘It is most
wonderful’, said Goethe, looking at some etchings of sheep by
Roos, ‘how Roos has been able to think and feel himself into the
very soul of these creatures, so as to make the internal character
peer with such force through the external covering. Here you see
what a great talent can do when it keeps steady to subjects which
are congenial with its nature.’6 Success in art is no longer just a
matter of skill, in other words, but of fidelity to one’s unique vision
of the world, to one’s genius. But this does not imply any loosening
of standards. An artist may, through laziness or timidity, fail to
realise his genius, or his genius may be of an inherently limited
sort. The minor artist, sovereign of his small field, is a typical
invention of the romantic era.
In the twentieth century, the idea of artistic achievement was
divorced entirely from that of skill. Jackson Pollock’s greatness lay
not in any traditional ‘mastery’, but in his sheer originality, his
refusal to conform his vision to that of others. Failure in this kind
of art is by the same token a failure of originality, a surrender to the
‘anxiety of influence’. Consider Arthur Danto’s verdict on Lee
Krasner, Pollock’s wife and fellow Abstract Expressionist. ‘A great
artist is fully present in each of his or her works, however various
the styles. No one went through more styles than Picasso, but every
Picasso is unmistakably his. There is no recurrent touch, or
whatever may be the pictorial equivalent of voice, in Krasner’s
canvasses. There are only the shadow of other selves, the echo of
other voices.’7 Abstract Expressionism possessed a rigour of its
own, but that rigour was existential, not technical.
Art has, as this brief overview shows, always possessed a rigour
of one sort or another, which has put constraints on what can and
cannot be included within its sphere. Even if a Jackson Pollock
could be transported back to fifteenth century Florence, it would
not be accepted as art, because its peculiar rigour would not be
visible to anyone living at that time. Nor would a mere ‘conferral of

5
Op. cit. note 3, 233.
6
Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann (London: J. M. Dent,
1930), 46–7.
7
Arthur C. Danto, The State of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall
Press, 1987), 36.

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status’ do the trick, if reasons for such a conferral were lacking.

(One might as well ‘confer’ validity upon an argument, or justice
upon a legal ruling.) Something’s being a work of art is, as Danto
has said, ‘dependent upon some set of reasons, and nothing really is
a work of art outside the system of reasons which give it that
status.’8 This ‘system of reasons’ has, to be sure, an institutional
dimension. There are authorities on art, as there are on science,
many of them decorated with titles and honours. But these
authorities are authorities precisely because they have mastered the
system of reasons which constitutes art. Their power is not
arbitrary, but subservient to the intrinsic discipline of art itself.
But if Dickie’s institutional theory of art is so patently false,
what could explain its wide appeal? Could it be that it expresses, in
a misleadingly idealised fashion, some peculiarly modern predica-
ment? Should it be interpreted not as an analytical thesis about art’s
essence, but as an empirical thesis about its current state of
degeneration? This, it may be recalled, is how Alasdair MacIntyre
has interpreted the closely related theory of ethical emotivism, as
an account not of moral language as such, but of moral language in
the Cambridge of G. E. Moore.9 Might a similar interpretation be
true in the case of art?

The collapse of discipline and the rise of the institution

Let us imagine a strange development in the world of chess. Over a

period of a few decades, more and more players start playing in the
capricious fashion described above. Some move their pieces
randomly around the board, others in a manner which is orderly yet
unconnected to the goal of winning. One player specialises in
moving his pieces only to the right, another in preserving perfect
symmetry. A small number of players, known as ‘traditionalists’,
continue trying to win, although this goal no longer has any special
significance, and is viewed with contempt by their more ‘radical’
colleagues.
Let us imagine, furthermore, that the institutions of the chess
world persist unchanged throughout this whole bizarre develop-
ment. Tournaments continue to be staged, masters and grandmas-
ters created. Chess reports still appear regularly in newspapers and
8
Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 39.
9
See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981),
14.

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magazines. Only the language of these reports undergoes a

profound change. Instead of praising good moves and criticising
bad ones, critics now devote themselves to making intellectual sense
of whatever it is that players happen to be doing. A player who
loses all his pieces as quickly as possible is said to be in thrall to the
Heideggerian void; a player who mirrors her opponent’s moves is
seen as offering a sly critique of Lacan.
What would an impartial observer make of this development? He
would say that chess in the true sense of the word was no longer
being played, even though activity of some sort continued under
that name. He would add, moreover, that chess critics had
abandoned their proper function, namely that of criticising or
passing judgement, and become mere propagandists for their
favourite players. He would account for the nomination of masters
and grandmasters in terms not of ability (a concept now without
application), but rather of political allegiance, patronage or some
other such notion. He would develop, in short, an institutional
theory of the activity called chess.
It is my contention that the art world has undergone a
transformation similar to the one pictured here. But how can I
prove this? To offer my own thoughts on modern art would be
futile, for these could simply be taken as evidence that I had missed
the point. So I will instead appeal to the witness of contemporary
art criticism. Ever since Vasari, critics have undertaken to articulate
the standards implicit in art. They have told us what artists were
trying to do, and what they were trying to avoid. We should
therefore expect any collapse of art to be reflected in a parallel
collapse of the language used to talk about art. What do we in fact
find?
Below are two specimens of contemporary art criticism, both
taken from notes to recent retrospectives. Those familiar with this
kind of literature will recognise them immediately as typical of the
genre. Here is Homi K. Bhabha on Anish Kapoor:
In voicing the void, Kapoor returns us to the discourse of the
diagonal. How does the transitional nature of true making—
spatially out of balance, temporally in between—relate to the
myth of ‘originality’? I have argued that the shape of the void
and the sign of emptiness must be conceived of in a logic of
doubling; like the transitional object, they are unified at the point
in space and time of their separation and differentiation... . The
‘delay’ in the presence of the work discloses faces, aspects,

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elements or media that do not metonymically signify some

immanent whole, or some complete, though repressed, narra-
tive.10
And here is Bruce W. Ferguson on Gary Hill:
Through the integrity of video and sound technology, Hill
interrogates language and images concomitantly, using each to
purchase a fleeting hold on the other (the ‘Other’ that always
casts doubt on the ‘Belief’ in the title). The complex audio-visual
systems at work are teased by their own electrical flows to pulsate
each discourse with its own breath of temporality. To make
mouth images rustle like paper and chairs turn in a feat of
appearing and disappearing like a page’s novel memory. To steal
the torment from both (the torment of an infinite relation in
which, as Michel Foucault says, there are always more things
than words for them) and to return to each its restorative
power.11
One striking feature of these two passages is the total absence in
them of the vigorous and precise evaluative language common to
Vasari, Goethe, Danto and indeed almost all art critics prior to
about 1960. They do not view the works under discussion as the
product of some fraught and difficult undertaking; they do not
draw attention to problems overcome or dangers avoided. Their
stance is rather that of the pious casuist, whose aim is simply to
discern the wisdom in whatever should happen to happen. If the
modern artist is an archer shooting arrows randomly into a barn
door, his critic is an umpire who paints a target around each and
proclaims a bull’s-eye.12 Failure is abolished, but so, by the same
token, is success. It is tempting to accuse critics like Bhabha and
Ferguson of collusion, only one should in all fairness add that
‘collusion’ is unavoidable where there exists no independent
standard of judgement. The problem, as Marxists used to say, is
structural, not personal.
Evaluative terms have not vanished entirely from the lexicon of
art criticism. However, those that remain tend, if anything, to
10
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness’, Anish
Kapoor (London: Hayward Gallery, 1998), 36.
11
Bruce W. Ferguson, ‘I believe (that) it is an image (in light) of the
other’, Gary Hill: In Light of the Other (Liverpool: Tate Gallery, 1993),
21.
12
I owe this ingenious metaphor to Simon Blackburn. See Simon
Blackburn, Truth (London: Allan Lane, 2005), 37–8.

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Edward Skidelsky

support my argument. Contemporary critics typically signal their

approval of a work by calling it ‘important’, ‘influential’, ‘major’ or
‘seminal’. The oddity of these terms is that they become applicable
simply in virtue of being widely regarded as applicable. If a large
number of artists name Bruce Naumann as an influence, it follows
logically that he is influential. (Whereas if they call him good, it
remains a possibility that he is bad.) Tributes such as ‘influential’
and ‘seminal’ are most naturally at home in the world of fashion,
where there exists no gap between the perception of success and its
reality. Their use by art critics is a sure sign that the norms of
fashion have come to prevail here as well.
What are the implications of this linguistic collapse for art itself?
It is of course possible that Bhabha and Ferguson have simply
overlooked or ignored the element of discipline in the particular
works they examine. (Kapoor, for instance, is a skilled illusionist,
whose work deserves better than Bhabha’s vaporising.) But the
general disorientation of art criticism which they exemplify cannot
but reflect, and indeed promote, an equally general disorientation
of art. It is telling that the language of Bhabha and Ferguson is
ubiquitous not just in art criticism but also in art education, where
it smothers at birth that critical awareness, that sense of perpetually
falling short, which is the mainspring all higher achievement.
Young artists are left with nothing but their native gift, which
usually soon dissipates itself in playful but haphazard experimenta-
tion. In such a climate, art appears as a happy surprise.
This dim view of the contemporary art scene receives unwitting
corroboration from one of its best known champions. The TV
critic Matthew Collins cheerfully admits that artists have aban-
doned the pursuit of excellence in favour of profile and celebrity:
Individualism is not bad in itself but we don’t want to be
individual in a corny way like the Abstract Expressionists... . We
want to be individual but within a new climate, a climate where
basically we have signed up to advertising. We simply don’t
challenge its assumptions. It expresses us... . Advertising
expresses a new world of oceanic oneness where no one is alone
and that’s good... . Geniuses are out, along with crying clowns
and Montparnasse and smoking pipes. Picasso is one of those

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artists where genius is a natural word because of the culture of

Picasso but that’s not our culture, like bullfights aren’t part of
our culture.13
What is disturbing about this passage is its blithe disavowal of any
critical, higher-order perspective on the development it so frankly
outlines. But then it is characteristic of a climate ‘where basically
we have signed up to advertising’ that no such perspective is
available. Those who question the spirit of the age are simply ‘out’,
like geniuses and crying clowns. Further arguments are neither
offered nor required. The attitude of mind revealed here is horribly
familiar. It is the attitude of those sophisticated Communist and
Nazi fellow-travellers who bowed to dictatorship as a historical
inevitability and ridiculed as idealistic any attempt at resistance.
They too enjoyed the blessing of ‘oceanic oneness’ as recompense
for their sacrifice of intellectual independence. ‘Flaubert and
Baudelaire, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, but also existentialist
philosophy, with its anxiety about its “self”—all that was now
happily irrelevant. One no longer needed to worry about one’s
individual “soul” now that a new “type”, an eidos, was coming to
dominance as a form of life.’14
It is ironic that the development sketched above should so often
be praised as liberating, when its effect has been to destroy
whatever art possessed in the way of autonomy. An activity which
loses its intrinsic discipline inevitably opens itself up to interpreta-
tion as an expression of extrinsic interests; it invites the kind of
critique which I have called ‘institutional’. Just as law in the Third
Reich was defined in terms of the will of the Führer, so art in
Britain might be defined in terms of the will of Charles Saatchi,
Nicholas Serota, and a handful of other curators, collectors and
administrators. These people are now, in the words of Brian Sewell,
‘the absolute arbiters of taste and patronage, the experts who
decide what shall be seen and subsidised and sent abroad to wave
the flag for Britain.’15 Only I would add that the problem lies not in
13
Matthew Collins, This is Modern Art (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1999), 35.
14
Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 47. Löwith is describing the ‘inverted
awakening’ of his friend Dr. B, a cultivated intellectual who joined the
Nazis.
15
Brian Sewell, An Alphabet of Villains (London: Bloomsbury, 1995).
From the preface. The growing power of patronage was noted as early as
1969 by Clement Greenberg. ‘The representative art figure of the 1960s’,

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Edward Skidelsky

this particular set of individuals and institutions, nor might it be

solved by a purely administrative reform. Shape them as one will,
the institutions of the artworld cannot but play the autocratic role
indicated by Sewell, for there exists no principle within art itself to
constrain them. Power, whether of the state, market or individuals,
is what fills the space vacated by authority.
The situation of art a century ago sheds an illuminating light on
our current predicament. There existed then, as now, powerful
institutions of teaching and patronage. But because these institu-
tions based their authority upon an explicit aesthetic doctrine,
which could be and indeed was questioned, they were never
regarded as defining art. It remained possible for artists to pursue
their vision beyond established frontiers. Our modern institutions
are in a much stronger position. They have no doctrine to promote,
no standards to uphold. Their dictates are groundless, and hence
unanswerable. The gap between what art officially is and what it
ideally might be—the gap within which the avant-garde once made
its home—has finally closed.
If this state of affairs seems intolerably gloomy, there is at least
some consolation in the thought that it is not sustainable. The
‘institutional’ form of art is essentially parasitic; it lives off the
respect paid to its normal counterpart. Most people enter an art
gallery in an attitude of reverence. If they come away bemused,
they assume that the fault lies with them, or that this was the effect
intended. Particularly prone to this excess of trust is the educated
middle-class, with its ingrained respect for all things cultural.
Among this class, it is considered the height of philistinism to voice
the suspicion that ‘a five-year-old could have done it’ yet extremely
sophisticated to feel ‘disturbed’ or ‘challenged’ by a work which one
doesn’t like or hasn’t understood. But this reservoir of indulgence
must eventually run dry. Despite the fanfares accompanying the
opening of the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim Bilbao, art’s

he wrote, ‘is not the artist, critic, or collector, but the curator of modern
art. He “swings”, and he “swings” the most.’ Clement Greenberg, The
Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 311. See also Robert
Hughes, The Shock of the New (London: British Broadcasting Company,
1980), 392: ‘The museum was so eager to help propagate the new that it
became the artist’s accomplice, a near equal partner, providing a set of
permissions that earlier art had never had—or, indeed, bothered to ask
for.’

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ultimate destiny is the alexandrian irrelevance already attained by

poetry and modern classical music.

The roots of the crisis

If the situation is indeed as I have described, the question arises:

how could it have happened? How could a practice have changed its
character so fundamentally yet at the same time so inconspicu-
ously? It is inconceivable (hence the facetious nature of the scenario
outlined above) that chess should suffer a similar collapse; if it did,
it would arouse immediate public outcry. Why has this not
happened in the case of art?
Here we return to the disanalogy between art and chess
mentioned in earlier in this essay. The goal of chess can be stated
clearly in advance: it is to capture your opponent’s king. The goal of
art, by contrast, has shifted from epoch to epoch, and in recent
times from artist to artist. It is always possible to mistake as failure
according to an old standard what is in fact success according to
some new, hitherto unforeseen standard. And it is easy to see how
the accumulation of such mistakes could finally lead to new artistic
experiments simply being granted the benefit of the doubt, or—to
put it in other words—how the increasing relativisation of artistic
standards could lead to the obsolescence of the very idea of an
artistic standard. I believe that precisely this has happened over the
last hundred years.
It was, as we have seen, the romantic movement which first
propounded the idea that every nation, epoch, or indeed artist has a
unique ‘genius’, an excellence sui generis. But because it preserved
the connection between art and nature, romanticism did not lead to
a complete relativisation of standards. Roos may have ‘felt himself’
into sheep, Stubbs into horses, but both artists nonetheless
inhabited the same shared reality, and could thus be subjected to a
common forum of judgement. It was only in the twentieth century,
with the advent of modernism, that the artist became free to
fashion his own reality, his own ‘artificial paradise’ of colours and
forms. The relativisation of standards was now total. No longer was
the artist confronted by nature with a common, predetermined
task; he was a Nietzschean superman, posing his own questions,
setting his own tasks. If you trace the careers of the great pioneers
of abstraction—Klee, Rothko, Pollock—you will see in each case a
gradual extrusion of external influence, a sharpening consciousness

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of some uniquely personal quest. And it is only in relation to this

quest that we can speak of any particular work of these artists as
better or worse than any other.
It was no part of the intention of the first generation of
modernists to abolish or relax aesthetic standards. On the contrary,
their purpose was to restore to art the formal rigour which it had, in
their view, forfeited over the course of the previous century. In that
sense, they were classicists. But because their idea of rigour was so
inalienably personal, they were unable to secure its transmission to
succeeding generations. They were unable to establish a tradition.
Of all the modernists, Paul Klee tried hardest to create a teaching
programme equal in stringency to the old academic syllabus. Yet
when one reads the textbooks he wrote for his Bauhaus pupils, one
sees why he had to fail. Klee’s exercises are so whimsical, so
quintessentially his own, that they could not but have struck
independent minded students as arbitrary and dictatorial. And the
same would be true of exercises by Picasso or Matisse or any of the
leading modernists. When the classical curriculum of life-drawing
and copying was finally abolished, it was replaced not by an equally
rigorous modernist equivalent, but by nothing at all.
One critic who perceived clearly the logic of this development
was Clement Greenberg. Greenberg always insisted that the
so-called ‘experiments’ of Abstract Expressionism had no other
purpose than to preserve the standards of the old masters. But
because its rigour was discernible only to a cultivated few, it was
popularly misinterpreted as ‘a kind of art that had at last managed
to make value discriminations irrelevant.’16 And that in turn
encouraged a new generation of critics and artists in the belief that
they could transcend altogether the issue of quality. ‘A lot of banal
art which ought to be called that gets garlanded instead with
phrases about the pure act, action, the absolute, prayer, rites, the
subconscious, gestures, and so on. Amid this palaver the
degeneration of Informel and Abstract Expressionist art at the
hands of its practitioners of the second generation has gone largely
unnoticed. Some of the emptiest art ever created has been treated
with the blindest respect.’17
It might be thought that the solution to our current predicament
lies in a return to realism. But that is to forget why realism was
abandoned in the first place. What originally justified realism—
what made it an undertaking of aesthetic as distinct from
16
Clement Greenberg, op. cit., 292.
17
Clement Greenberg, op. cit., 178.

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documentary or didactic value—was the conviction that nature

itself, rather than the mind of the artist, is the ultimate source of
harmony and order. That conviction, which underwrites all
classical and neo-classical aesthetics, and is still active in a modified
form in Kant’s third critique, was abandoned over the course of the
nineteenth century—a process famously designated by Weber ‘the
disenchantment of the natural world’. Stripped of any properly
aesthetic rationale, realism was reduced to a vehicle of social
commentary, often of a noxiously sentimental kind. (Think of all
those scenes of impoverished children and fallen women.) To
restore autonomy to art, the modernists had to enthrone the mind
of the artist as the sole source of order, and to relegate nature to the
status of mere aperçu. Living in our disenchanted world, what else
could they do?

Conclusion

My story has a broader philosophical moral. Dickie’s institutional

theory of art is one of a family of theories, sometimes called ‘social
constructivist’, which define a given discourse not in terms of an
inherent goal, but in relation to the activities of certain arbitrarily
designated individuals and institutions. Law is what is issued by
legislators; science is what is done in university laboratories and
journals. Such theories are often advanced in the name of
metaphysical parsimony, as a way of eliminating such supposedly
‘queer’ properties as justice or truth, but they readily lend
themselves to the broader goal of discrediting some unpopular
establishment. The institutional theory of art has its origins in the
purely analytical claim that ‘arthood’ is not an intrinsic property of
objects, but has gone on, in the hands of the French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu, to provide ammunition for a thoroughgoing
debunking of the cultural elite.18
Opponents of this line of reasoning often attack the inference
from anti-realism about a given discourse to a sceptical, debunking
attitude to that discourse. Simon Blackburn, in particular, has
argued that an emotivist analysis of ethical language need not

18
See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1996), 287 and 289. Bourdieau invokes Danto as a (naïve) precursor of his
own doctrine of the ‘aesthetic field’. But he would have done better to
invoke Dickie, for Danto is not, as I have indicated above, a sociological
reductionist.

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undermine our actual practices of ethical argument and delibera-

tion, for with a smidgen of ingenuity these practices can themselves
be reconstructed in purely emotivist terms. We can accept the
metaethics of an A. J. Ayer without thereby embracing the ethics of
‘a French gangster’.19 Blackburn has recently extended a similar
line of argument to intellectual practices such as science and
history. Here, too, anti-realism on the level of theory is consistent
with the utmost commitment and rigour on the level of practice.
Blackburn’s general point is that our everyday practices of judging,
criticising and experimenting constitute a firm, self-sufficient
bedrock; they do not require the support of a second-order
metaphysical theory, nor will they collapse in its absence. ‘Our
words may sound insecure, but our practice is as robust as may
be.’20 Philosophy’s only task is to safeguard the inherent robustness
of practice against the ‘après-truth chitchat’ of ‘coffee-house
intellectuals’.
But if there is any conclusion to be drawn for the foregoing
discussion, it is that our practice is not ‘as robust as it may be’. Not
just art, but law, philosophy, history and even natural science have
at various times over the last century suffered the kind of collapse
outlined above, as witnessed by the sad history of German and
Russian totalitarianism. Nor can all this be blamed on ‘coffee-house
intellectuals’, although such types have undoubtedly played their
part. Deep social, cultural and political forces were in each case at
work. And if my hunch about art—namely that its collapse can
ultimately be traced to the positivistic disenchantment of nature—
holds true elsewhere, then practice may indeed have a metaphysical
foundation. Only the fortuitous continuity of British history could
conceal this foundation, endowing practice with an illusory aura of
self-sufficiency. ‘For the English’, wrote Nietzsche, ‘morality is not
yet a problem’.21
Such reflections suggest that we treat social constructivist
theories rather differently than does Blackburn. They are not
simply sophistries, menacing from without the inherent integrity of
practice, but reflections of a collapse within practice itself.
Although false on their own terms, as general theories of the

19
Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), 197: ‘Books and sermons alike pronounce that the projectivist
should, if consistent, end up with the morals of a French gangster.’
20
Simon Blackburn, Truth, op. cit., 198.
21
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 46.

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 But is it Art?

discourse in question, they are nonetheless of great symptomatic

interest; they hold up a mirror to the anomie of our times. And this
in turn suggests a broader task for any philosophy concerned with
the health of our ethical, aesthetic and intellectual norms. What is
needed is not just an a priori refutation of social constructivism, but
a convincing historical explanation of its genesis and continuing
appeal. This essay suggests how such an explanation might
proceed.22

Seaford, E. Sussex

22
I wish to thank Marco Hasse, Ben Hooper and Joseph Altham, all
of whom read and commented on this essay. In particular, I wish to thank
Patrick Mackey, a conversation with whom provided me with my original
inspiration, and who has offered useful suggestions throughout.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.