Honorary Degree Ceremony for professor Howard S. Becker
Laudatio by prof. Anton M. Bevers (promotor), Art and Culture Studies
Looking at Professor Becker’s home page on the Internet – Howie’s home page – one of the things that immediately strike you is a link to a standard reply form for all students wishing to write a paper on deviant behavior. This is the best evidence that you are most famous as the author of Outsiders (1963). But you have also written a great deal about the tricks of the trade: how to do sociological research and how to write up the results. Educational sociology is another field that held your interest, though meanwhile and right from the start you paid attention to the artist’s profession as well. Your Master-thesis dealt with the role and position of the dance musician (which you happened to be at the time also). With the publication of Art Worlds in 1982 your reputation grew stronger, notably in the widening circle of specialists in the sociology of art and culture. In the tradition of the sociology you put it into practice you find yourself among the most prominent sociologists of the second half of the twentieth century. But no one knows like you do how reputations are made, witness the final chapter ‘Reputations’ in your book Art Worlds. So I will not go more deeply into it here.
Everything is worth talking about. Talking about art, some art philosophers will say, has replaced art itself. Art has turned into talking about art. But happily art is still being created and there are other ways to talk about art than does art philosophy. Like the way sociologists talk about art. One of the core principles of your book Art Worlds is ‘the idea of art as something that a lot of people do together, and that it is a matter of convention which one gets to be called the artist.’ (interview by Ken Plummer, 2003) What an art world is and what the book is about, is best summarized as follows: Art worlds consist of all the people whose activities, based on a body of conventional understandings are necessary to the production, distribution and reception of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.
The question: What to call art and who of the people involved to call artists cannot be answered, therefore, as you argues, on the grounds of the intrinsic qualities of these works of art themselves nor on the excellence of the person of the artist, but rather rests on conventions embedded in the art world.
Those who have read Art Worlds feel no longer innocent towards all kinds of++idées reçues++ (received notions) on art and artists. Art Worlds takes for granted all modes of thinking and talking about art from a Romantic point of view. For many people, including artists and estheticians, the Romantic myth of the brilliant, creative artist lingers on, but those who have grown accustomed to your sociological view of art and artists, feel uneasy about the Romantic sentiment. I am convinced that the various parties in the art world will sure recognize themselves in the way in which you discusses the production, distribution and reception of art. And what at the time – the seventies of the past century – still needed explicit mention in the introduction to Art Worlds, namely, that this book was written from a skeptical, democratic and demystifying attitude towards arts practices, has now become – in any case among cultural scientists, but also in other circles – the predominating habitude: a demystifying attitude towards art and the artistic genius and a relativizing attitude towards art and artistic calling that shows from including in scientific attention and research not only the great, canonized artists, but rather all artists. Art Worlds is a book that for its originality continues to answer its purpose to readers outside the specialists circle even twenty-five years after publication: it is a true eye opener for those eager to learn more about art and artistic calling.
One of my favorite chapters in Art Worlds is the one that classifies four types of artists: integrated professionals, mavericks, folk artists, and naive artists. These types differ in major points – variables as sociologist would call them – discussed separately in the other ten chapters: the conventions, distribution channels, material and financial means, the role of art theory and art criticism, government involvement, public interest and type of public, the distinction between art and applied art, processes of change and renewal in art and the making of a reputation. In fact it all comes together in this one chapter. I always use it to explain to students how powerful an instrument typology construction is in sociology.
People usually discuss art in appreciating terms. That what you did not like in the literature on art was the language and tenor of art philosophical sociologists and estheticians like Adorno, Lukacs and Goldman who tended to judge the value of their study objects. Your great contribution to the sociology of art and culture, then, was that you set out to look at the world of art in a purely sociological way – in the sense of Simmel’s sociology of forms –, to the interactions (Formen der Wechselwirkungen), which naturally are always imbued with motives, sense, significance and values, but you never make value judgments yourself about the subject of your research. (Yes or no art, good and bad art, yes or no artist, high of low culture). It is the sociologist’s primary task to provide an insight in cohabitation, rather than to pass favorable or unfavorable judgements on it. The latter is hard to evade in relation to art, which is greatly built on judging and appreciating, but all the more so a sociological must therefore.
Like artists in every art form have learned the craft from others and thus sustain a tradition, you as a sociologist also owe to your forerunners. Your work directly springs from that of your distinguished foregoers of the Chicago School: Everett Hughes, your master, who learned the craft from Robert Park, and Robert Park who in his turn was a student of the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.
All that you investigated and described has its origins in your fascination for ‘work’ and ‘doing things together.’ In an interview from 2003, published in Sociological Perspectives, you quote your master Everett Hughes who started one of his lectures saying “Everything that happens in society is somebody’s work”. Next in this interview you go on saying: ‘So you could always study what’s going on someplace by looking at it as somebody’s work. That’s probably the most basic thing about everything I do.’ Directly related to this is your sociological core question: ‘how do people manage to act together. How do people act together so as to get anything done without a great deal of trouble, without missteps and conflict?’ You have most markedly phrased this predilection for a to pragmatism-like sociological view on reality in the introduction to your book Doing Things Together (1986), putting it as: ‘Seeing things as the product of people doing things together makes a lot of other views less plausible and less interesting’.
I also like your definition of culture, one that I think may well serve to replace the over 150 definitions of culture collected in Alfred Kroeber en Clyde Kluckhohn’ s famous compendium (1963). Culture in your definition is ‘the shared understandings that people use to coordinate their activities’. However, you add that these shared understandings should be arranged, confirmed or revised continuously, as in none of the everyday situations they offer perfect solutions for every movement of the persons involved. This is how culture is changing by the constant invasion of more or less small variations.
But actually I more prefer your own variation on your definition of culture that says: ‘culture is, hey, this is the way we do it and I know it, I know that you know it and I know that you know that I know it.’ The less there are shared understandings between people and groups of people, the less there is shared culture, more risk of misunderstanding or even worse. But on the work floor we can usually observe a ‘shared understanding’ is in the making as soon as people get involved with one another. The work demands it and dedication will lead to it: the creation of conventions. That is culture. Art Worlds was written from this conception as well.
You have written about many different worlds, but basically seen the same things time and again and reported these in the best tradition of the Chicago School. I still remember having attended a workshop of yours when I came to see you in Seattle in 1993. You sent your students into the streets with the mission to find out what strategies the homeless develop to survive, where they get their information from, how they got to know the city, the street plan, what conventions they stick to amongst themselves, seeing that also the world of the homeless exists thanks to a minimum of ‘shared understandings’. The students had to employ creative methods to uncover what conventions people in this world use. They were forced to watch and think sociologically and were not allowed to bring back theoretical papers, but concrete logbooks rather. First watching and then arriving at generalizations at their own doing. From all your writings it appears that you strongly object to abstract sociological theorizing. This is at best as a necessary evil, you feel, an instrument that easily may turn into a purpose in itself, keeping sociologists from ‘the day-to-day digging into social life’ that is the essence of sociology.
No way this sociological method, which brought the sociologists of the Chicago School such fame, is obsolete and outdated.
Somewhere at the beginning I said: everything is worth talking about. But the real point of course is, how perfectly one can talk about something, and in case of a scholarly approach, how masterly one can write about one’s subject. I’m not talking about finewriting here (what the Germans call Schöngeisterei), but rather the stylistic skills which will for ever fascinate one’s readers – be they peers or outsiders.
Art Worlds and other works of yours have been claimed to be readily penned-down, trivial sociology. It’s true, readers in retrospect tend to say ‘but I knew this already’, not recognizing that it was through the very reading that they came to realize this. This arises because ‘the main points’ were there, though phrased in a style suggesting that the reader himself might have put it like this. Everyone struggling to write as clearly as possible about everyday interactions is bound to experience that inflexibility and inadequacy of their stylistic powers will prevent them from coming even a little way towards your level.
Good writing is one thing, good sociological writing is another. Professor Becker is a virtuoso in both. He does not only stand out in the sociology of art, but is also extremely expert in the art of sociology. And this is not a personal opinion of mine as ‘honorary promotor’, but one that belongs to ‘shared understandings’ of the circle of sociologists. ‘Art Worlds’ is the embodiment of a virtuoso sociological mode of watching and thinking about artists, art mediators and art lovers. Your approach has become a convention in the sociology of art and culture. You, the very one who has written so fascinatingly about conventions in the art world – perhaps the key word of your sociological vocabulary and sociological body of work – you have become convention yourself. That is worth an honorary degree.
