Reconsidering Intention in Dickie's Institutional Theory of Art — Epoche B2
Reconsidering Intention in Dickie's Institutional Theory of Art It is a commonplace that George Dickie's institutional theory of art has no room for the artist's intention [1] . Status is conferred from outside, by the artworld; what the maker had in mind is said to be irrelevant to whether the object is art. This note argues that the commonplace is half true, and that the half which is false is the more interesting half. Intention is absent from Dickie's formulation of 1974 [2] . It is present in his formulation of 1984, where he put it there himself. The question worth asking is therefore not whether the institutional theory can accommodate intention, but how much intention it can afford — and the answer is: very little, for a reason that goes to the heart of what the theory was for. The definition of 1974 Dickie's aim [3] , announced in 'Defining Art' (1969) and worked out in Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (1974), was to define art without appealing to any property one could see in the work. Earlier definitions had appealed to representation, or to expression, or to a capacity to produce an aesthetic experience. Each ran aground on twentieth-century practice, and most spectacularly on the readymade: a mass-produced urinal, submitted under a false name to an exhibition in 1917, has none of these properties and yet occupies a secure place in the history of art. Dickie's response was to look at the object's position in a practice rather than at the object. The 1974 definition reads: A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld). Three terms need unpacking. An artefact is something worked on by human hands, which excludes driftwood as found. Candidate for appreciation means only that the object is put forward to be looked at in a certain spirit; it does not mean that anyone actually admires it, and Dickie is emphatic that a bad work of art is still a work of art. The artworld is the loose network of people who make, show, discuss and receive art. Classificatory marks off the question at issue: Dickie is telling us what counts as art, not what is good. Notice what does not appear. Nothing in the definition mentions the maker at all, still less what the maker wanted. Conferral is described as something done to the object by someone acting on the institution's behalf. The commonplace reading has a solid textual basis. Two objections that forced a revision The definition attracted two objections, and Dickie's later work is best read as a response to them. The first is circularity. The artworld is characterised as the institution that confers art status, and art is characterised as what the artworld confers status upon. Each term is explained by the other. Dickie's own answer, in The Art Circle (1984), is not to escape the circle but to accept it and deny that it is vicious. The cluster of terms — artist, artwork, artworld public, artworld system — is defined together, and a definition of that kind is informative if the interlocking relations it states are not obvious in advance. Whether one finds this satisfying, it is his considered position, and it is a mistake to present him as still trying to break the circle. The second objection is sharper. Richard Wollheim [4] , in the supplementary essays to the second edition of Art and Its Objects (1980), pressed a dilemma about conferral. Either those who confer status have good reasons for doing so, or they do not. If they have reasons, then it is the reasons, not the act, that mark art off from non-art, and the reasons will be the very properties the institutional theory hoped to avoid. If they have no reasons, the conferral is arbitrary, and it is hard to see why anyone should respect it. Conferral was supposed to be modelled on a judge passing sentence or a registrar solemnising a marriage. But those acts are governed by explicit rules and vested authorities, and the artworld has neither. The definition of 1984 In The Art Circle Dickie abandoned the language of conferral and offered a new definition: a work of art is an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public. The change is easy to miss and important. 'Created to be presented' is a property of the making, not of the reception, and a property that cannot be characterised without reference to what the maker was up to. An object made to be presented to an artworld public is one whose maker aimed at that presentation. Intention is now inside the definition. This also answers Wollheim's dilemma, or at least dissolves its setting. There is no longer a moment of conferral to be either reasoned or arbitrary. What makes something art is a fact about the kind of thing it was made to be — and the mistake in reading Dickie as a theorist of coronation, still repeated in textbooks, is a mistake about which of his books one is reading. How thin the intention must be So intention is in. The interesting constraint is on what sort of intention it can be, and here the theory's original purpose reasserts itself. Distinguish two kinds. A presentational intention is an intention that this object be put before an artworld public as something to be regarded in the way such publics regard things. A creative intention is an intention that the object mean something, express something, or be beautiful. Only the first kind is available to Dickie. If the definition required a creative intention, it would require the object to be made with some aim — expression, significance, aesthetic effect — and the definition would then turn on that aim. That is a substantive definition of art in the old style, reintroduced through the artist's head instead of through the object's surface. The whole point of the institutional approach was to avoid such definitions, because they fail on the har