The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed.

Michael Kelly, Oxford University Press, 1998

The Institutional Theory of Art

ROBERT J. YANAL

T
he first institutional theory of art is outlined in a 1964 essay by Arthur Danto,
“The Artworld,” which ruminates on the paradox that Andy Warhol’s Brillo
Boxes is art though any of its perceptually indistinguishable twins—any stack of
Brillo boxes in a grocery store—is not. Danto’s offers this solution to the paradox: “To
see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic
theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” Ultimately, though, it is “art the-
ory” that makes Warhol’s stack of silk screened plywood boxes into art.
How does this “making” occur? Danto unpacks “art theory” in terms of what he
calls “artrelevant predicates,” which are predicates that apply uniquely to artworks. Let it
be that predicates P, Q, and R are, at a certain point in history, the only artrelevant predi-
cates in critical use. It will follow that any artwork is some or all of P, Q, or R. “But sup-
pose,” Danto continues, “an artist determines that H shall henceforth be artistically rele-
vant for his paintings.” Then objects to which H applies can now and in the future stand
as artworks. How does H become an artrelevant predicate? Danto tells us only an artist
“determines” that it be so. However, his theory leaves unexplained why someone’s deci-
sion can render a certain predicate to be artrelevant. In fact, at this point we wonder what
work the artrelevant predicates are doing, if in the end making something art comes down
to someone’s decision. Why not, for example, allow decisions to make a thing art di-
rectly, unmediated by artrelevant predicates?
In later works Danto turned away from an institutional view, and towards a theory
which defined art in terms of “aboutness” (or “semantic character”). In The Transfigura-
tion of the Commonplace he explicitly abjured the institutional theory of George Dickie
that was motivated by his “Artworld” essay. However, the influence of that essay is con-
siderable. It was the death knell for aesthetic definitions of art, and this because Danto
forced into philosophical attention the paradox (which I’ll refer to as “Danto’s paradox”)
of two materially identical objects, only one of which is a work of art. If two objects al-
pha and beta are materially identical, then alpha and beta share all material properties.
Alpha and beta are then perceptually, hence aesthetically, equivalent. Each, that is, is
equally beautiful (or ugly), equally serene (or garish), equally balanced (or unbalanced),
and so on. Further, if alpha but not beta is a work of art, then the arthood of alpha cannot
lie in its aesthetic features, for it shares these features exactly with beta which is not art.
Danto’s essay also spawned other institutional theories by pointing to one way of solving
his paradox, namely the possibility that something is art not by virtue of any properties of
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it but rather by virtue of a relation it bears to some larger context. Danto, and after him,
Dickie, call this larger context “the artworld.”
The best know institutional theorist is George Dickie, who has taken Danto’s
paradox seriously, and has drawn out in detail the view that Danto, perhaps inadvertently,
fell into at the end of his artworld essay, namely that it is the decisions of persons, para-
digmatically though not exclusively artists, that make objects into art. Dickie’s first ver-
sion of the institutional theory of art appeared in a 1969 essay, “Defining Art,” which was
slightly modified into the more familiar version that appears in his 1974 book, Art and
the Aesthetic: “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).” We
shall set aside both the artifactuality condition, since this isn’t specific to the institutional
theory, and Dickie’s claim that it is “a set of aspects” of something that gets arthood
status, since this introduces a complication that also has little to do with the institutional
theory (it means, for example, that the status of candidate for appreciation is typically
conferred on the painted sides of paintings—that “set of their aspects”—and not on their
unpainted backs).
Two features of Dickie’s institutional theory embrace a value neutrality. The clas-
sificatory sense of art is supposed to be a nonevaluative use of the term “art” that picks
out a thing of a certain kind without thereby attributing to it any value (or disvalue). The
classificatory sense of “art” is thus like “bicycle” or “water” and unlike “durable” or
“brackish.” “Appreciation,” Dickie tells us, means “in experiencing the qualities of a
thing one finds them worthy or valuable.” To be a candidate for appreciation is, then, to
be an object for evaluation, not an already evaluated object.
The most prominent institutional aspect of the definition is the conferral of status
by someone on behalf of the artworld. Dickie likened the conferring of the status of can-
didate for appreciation on objects to such things as a university’s bestowing a Ph.D. de-
gree on a person, Congress’s making a piece of geography a national park, and the like.
He acknowledged that the artworld has no codified procedures, lines of authority, or con-
ditions for membership. Although there are “core personnel” in the artworld, such as art-
ists, museum curators, art critics, and the like, ultimately, “every person who sees himself
as a member of the artworld is thereby a member.” The institutional theory, if correct,
neatly solves Danto’s paradox. For it accepts that there is no material difference between
Duchamp’s notorious urinal-artwork Fountain and any of its plumbing store twins; and
accordingly that the arthood of Fountain must come from some institutional status it has
come to have. And institutional status is not a material but a relational property. Accord-
ingly, is art, upon analysis, is revealed to be not a one-place predicate but a multi-place
relation.
While Dickie was influenced positively by Danto’s essay, we should note that he
was also reacting against the view that art is an open concept, a view rooted in the later
Wittgenstein that was most famously expressed by Morris Weitz in his 1956 essay, “The
Role of Theory in Aesthetics.” Dickie took that essay to deny the possibility of defining
“art,” and in advancing his definition took himself to have refuted the open concept theo-
rists. However, we should note that there is an ambiguity in the claim that art is an open
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concept. It may mean (i) that there is no true statement of the form “For any x, x is art if
and only if x meets finitely statable conditions thus-and-such.” But it may also mean (ii)
that for all things that are art, x, y, z … there need be no property they all share. The open
concept theorists took (i) and (ii) to entail each other, hence to be equivalent. Dickie may
have followed suit. Now, Dickie’s definition, at least if true, shows (i) false. But this did
not entail that (ii) is thereby false. Indeed on the institutional theory there can be two
works of art—perhaps Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Duchamp’s Fountain are exam-
ples—which share no single property, where “property” is understood as nonrelational.
Thus the institutional theory still admits a sense, namely (ii), in which art is an open con-
cept, but it nonetheless provides a definition.
The institutional theory has been the object of much philosophical target practice.
Here are five objections. (1) Ted Cohen (1973) points out that something can be appreci-
ated only if it is appreciable; and that some things—he offers as examples “ordinary
thumbtacks, cheap white envelopes, the plastic forks given at some drive-in restaurants,”
and possibly even Marcel Duchamp’s infamous urinal-sculpture Fountain—are unappre-
ciable, hence cannot be candidates for appreciation, hence cannot be art. (2) Monroe
Beardsley (1976) claims that it is incoherent to say that an artwork is made by a certain
practice (conferring the status of candidate for appreciation) on behalf of a certain insti-
tution (the artworld) when neither the rules of the practice nor the limits of the institution
can be further specified. (3) Danto (1981) objects to Dickie’s concept of “appreciation.”
In spite of Dickie’s denial that he intends “a special kind of aesthetic appreciation,”
Danto thinks Dickie nonetheless implies aesthetic appreciation, given that an appreciation
of “the qualities of a thing” suggests perceptible aspects of the object in front of us rather
than the artist’s act or the ideas the thing conveys. He criticizes Dickie’s brief art critical
appreciation of Fountain, which praised that work for “its gleaming white surface … its
pleasing oval shape,” as inappropriately aesthetic, and this because the appeal of
Duchamp’s witty work lies, Danto would have it, in its expression of an idea, not in its
curves and color. (4) Richard Wollheim (1987) tries to saddle the institutionalist with this
dilemma. Either the representatives of the artworld have reasons for making a certain
object a work of art or they do not. If they do, then their reasons for conferring the status
ought to have been part of the theory. And if they do not have reasons for making that
object art, then the institutional theory embraces an unconvincing irrationality. (5) Noël
Carroll (1994) objects that the institutional theory does not meet the challenge set by the
open concept theorists, for it does not tell us at all what a work of art is, only that a work
of art, whatever it is, fits into a certain social context.
Meeting Cohen’s objection would mean giving up on the value-neutrality—the
classificatory thrust—of the institutional theory. For Cohen in effect calls for a kind of
minimal or ground-floor “appreciability” condition that an object would have to meet to
be qualified as an artwork. Dickie wants to keep open the possibility that literally any-
thing could be a work of art; hence he cannot search for such a minimal condition without
becoming apostate to his own theory. If we had such a ground-floor condition—we dis-
cover (decide?) that something o is art only if it has quality G—then it becomes uncertain
what relevance the further decisions of persons has in determining the arthood of o. And
in any event Cohen has himself not supplied us with any such ground-floor condition.
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Both Wollheim and Carroll, in different ways, wish to resurrect the challenge
thrown down by the open concept theorists in the 1950s, namely that a definition of art
must say something about the qualities of the art object in virtue of which it is art. But
this is something the institutional theory does not do. Hence the institutional theory is in-
complete or irrational (Wollheim) or not really a definition at all (Carroll). It is, of course,
true that if the representatives of the artworld conferred the status of candidate for appre-
ciation on objects, say, in virtue of their being beautiful—they had beauty as their reason
for conferring arthood—then we should expect that beauty ought to be part of a complete
theory of art. Indeed, we should wonder (as we did with Danto’s theory) what the deci-
sions of anyone have to do with artmaking, if the criterion on which they decide to make
art is the beauty of the object. In that case we should promote a beauty theory, and any
institutionalism would become irrelevant. However, in response, we should keep in mind
that Dickie embraces the open concept view to this extent: he agrees that there is no set of
properties that all artworks—past, present, and future—must share. Hence there exists no
closed set of reasons that representatives of the artworld must, as a matter of definition,
always present to justify their decision to let something be art. Wollheim himself em-
braces a meaning theory of art; but it is clearly not the case that every artwork is endowed
with meaning—think of a Bach fugue or a visual arabesque. Carroll is correct to the ex-
tent that the institutional theory has not told us what a work of art is in terms of the quali-
ties or functions such works have. These are serious and interesting issues. Yet it does not
follow that if a theory does not mention qualities or functions of artworks it has not
thereby given a definition. For a definition of F can be, minimally, a finite and statable
set of conditions that something must meet in order to qualify as F. If “art” can only be
defined in terms of its role in social practice, then this may just be a brute fact about the
concept of art, not an objection to the institutional theory. It may be that being art is more
like being enclosed than like being bumpy.
It was primarily to meet Beardsley’s reservations about the unfounded legalisms
of the 1969/74 theory and Danto’s objections to its concept of appreciation that Dickie
produced another version. In his 1984 book, The Art Circle, “A work of art is an artifact
of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.” “An artist is a person who par-
ticipates with understanding in the making of a work of art.” The artist’s understanding
must include the belief that there is an artworld and that the artworld contains op-
tions—Dickie calls them “frameworks”—for the presentation of artworks. “The artworld
is the totality of all artworld systems,” and “An artworld system is a framework for the
presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public.” The Art Circle theory
abandons the quasi-legalisms of the earlier version. It no longer makes reference to a
status conferred by people acting on behalf of an institution. Thus Beardsley’s reservation
would seem to be met. And it exchanges the near-aesthetic notion of “appreciation” for
the more neutral one of “presentation.” Thus Danto’s objection is met.
The circularity of the definition, about which Dickie has been entirely open, may
appear a crippling defect. Dickie defends himself by pointing out that some circles are
informative, and his is one. In fact, there are families of concepts which seem impossible
to define except in terms of each other. Dickie thinks “art,” “artist,” and “artworld” to be
one such family. For another, consider the concepts “premise,” “conclusion,” and “argu-
ment.” It seems one is forced into saying that an argument is by definition composed of at
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least one premise and at least one conclusion; and a premise is that part of the argument
which is intended to provide evidence for the conclusion, which is that part for which
evidence in the form of the premise is provided. (Some honest logician should title his or
her introductory text, The Logic Circle.) It is possible to provide a noncircular definition
of “art”—for example, defining art as the expression of emotion—but it is doubtful
whether we can have a noncircular institutional definition of art.
What, ultimately, is an institutional theory? To qualify as an institutional theory of
F-hood, such a theory must do three things. First, it must acknowl edge that there are a
relatively small number of statable conditions for determining whether any object o is or
is not F. Thus F-hood is not an “open concept,” if being an open concept denies the ex-
istence of such statable and determining conditions. Second, an theory institutional in
structure must deny that the F-hood of any o is grounded in or limited by any constella-
tion of material properties of o. In this sense, anything could be F, and in this sense an
institutional theory accepts half of an open concept view. Third, an institutional theory
must posit as a necessary condition for the truth of “o is F” some institutionality: perhaps
certain practices or certain intentions of individuals as grounded in some social or cul-
tural circumstance. In sum, an institutional theory of F-hood treats F-hood as an objec-
tively determinable and socially determined multi-place concept, with some social insti-
tution as one of the relata. “Something is a painting if and only if it is hung in a gallery”
counts as a little institutional theory of arthood. However, we can easily see that institu-
tional theories can be offered of concepts other than art. “A being is a person if and only
if that being is given rights in the U.S. Constitution” would be an institutional theory of
personhood.
There are other institutional theories by other philosophers. I’ll mention three. As
will be seen, Dickie’s still seems the most viable of the institutional theories.
T. J. Diffey in “The Republic of Art,” published in the same year as Dickie’s first
institutional theory (though Dickie wrote in Art and the Aesthetic that he did not know of
the piece at that time) speaks of art as a “status” which is “conferred” on things by a
group he refers to as the “republic of art.” However, Diffey’s is an evaluative institutional
definition. “To say that something is a work of art is to imply that it is a thing of interest
and of worth.” However, it is not the purely private taste of a single individual which
“honors” something sufficiently to make it art. Neither is it the decision of the general
public, but rather the joint verdict of the republic of art, which has as “first-stage” mem-
bers creators, performers, spectators, and critics; and ultimately includes “anyone in-
volved with the arts.” In Diffey’s example, this republic confers the status of art on Jane
Austen’s novels, because it sees value in them, and withholds the status from Mrs. Rad-
cliffe’s, because it deems them inferior. And of course the republic may change its mind
and expel things from the status of art; it may also be inconsistent, and even irrational.
Diffey’s theory is remarkably like Dickie’s, except of course that Dickie wants to keep
evaluation out of the definition of art. The main problem with Diffey’s theory is that it
makes bad art, contrary to the facts, a definitional impossibility.
Timothy Binkley (1977) has perhaps the most minimal institutional theory of art:
“To be a piece of art, an item need only be indexed as an artwork by an artist. … To
make art is, basically, to isolate something (an object, an idea …) and say of it, ‘This is a
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work of art,’ thereby cataloguing it under ‘Artworks.’ ” Art is what artists index as art;
and artists, presumably, are those who index objects as art. Binkley embraces a theory
somewhat like that in Dickie’s Art Circle, but Binkley’s exhibits a very tight and there-
fore uncomfortable circularity.
Marcia Eaton (1983) maintains that “x is a work of art if and only if (1) x is an
artifact and (2) x is discussed in such a way that information concerning the history of
production of x directs the viewer’s attention to properties which are worth attending to.”
Eaton’s view invites one of the criticisms directed at Dickie’s, for she tells us that by
“property” she means something perceivable, and by “discussion” something aesthetic,
which makes her definition unable to accommodate such conceptual works as Duchamp’s
Fountain. Eaton also swallows whole one implication of her definition, namely that a
Coke bottle can be a work of art if its perceivable qualities are discussed aesthetically.
But this also admits many automobiles, garments, hair styles, and plates of food as works
of art, since these are discussed aesthetically in such publications as Car and Driver,
Vogue, and Gourmet. (It would beg the question for Eaton to stipulate that these are not
art forums, and the discussants not art critics.) It would appear, then, that Eaton’s defini-
tion is both too narrow and too broad.
The institutional theory may be in decline among aestheticians. Historical theories
(e.g., Carroll 1994) and meaning theories (Danto 1981 and Wollheim 1987) seem to be in
the ascendance. Perhaps people have simply tired of discussing the theory. However, no
one has in any way refuted the institutional theory, and Stephen Davies in his fine book
(1991) has recently defended it.

Robert J. Yanal
Wayne State University

WORKS REFERRED TO

Beardsley, Monroe C. 1976. “Is Art Essentially Institutional?” In Lars Aagaard-

Mogensen, ed., Culture and Art. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Binkley, Timothy. 1977. “Piece: Contra Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 35: 265–277.
Carroll, Noël. 1994. “The Historical Definition of Art.” In Robert Yanal, ed., Institutions
of Art. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Cohen, Ted. 1973. “The Possibility of Art: Remarks on a Proposal by Dickie,” Philoso-
phical Review 82: 69–82.
Danto, Arthur. 1964. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61: 571–584.
_____. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Davies, Stephen. 1991. Definitions of Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
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Dickie, George. 1969. “Defining Art.” American Philosophical Quarterly 6: 253–256.

_____. 1974. Art and the Aesthetic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Diffey, T. J. 1969. “The Republic of Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 19: 145–156.
Eaton, Marcia. 1983. Art and Nonart. East Brunswick: Associated University Presses,
Inc.
Weitz, Morris. 1956. “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 14: 27–35.
Wollheim, Richard. 1987. Painting as an Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press for
the Bollingen Foundation.