Sociology and Art: An Interview With Howard S. BeckerAuthor(s) : Wenchao Lu

Sociology and Art: An Interview with Howard S.
BeckerAuthor(s): Wenchao Lu
Source: Symbolic Interaction , Vol. 38, No. 1 (February 2015), pp. 127-150
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction
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Sociology and Art: An Interview with
Howard S. Becker
Wenchao Lu
Southeast University
This is an interview with Howard S. Becker, and the focus is sociology

and art. In this interview, Howard S. Becker talked about many interest-
ing and important topics such as his sociological lineage, his difference
with the estheticians Arthur Danto and George Dickie, traditional soci-
ologist of art such as Lukacs and Goldmann, his Tactile Art Group, the
universality of his art worlds, Richard A. Peterson and his production
of culture perspective, the sociology of “sociology of art” in America,
French sociologists of art, and his own art life, and so on.
Keywords: sociology, art, Howard S. Becker
WENCHAO LU 1
Let’s begin with your sociological lineage. In an interview with Ken Plummer (2003),
you said that your lineage was Simmel, Robert Park, and Everett Hughes. So let’s
start with Simmel. You mentioned to me in an email that “What I got from Simmel
was not so much specific ideas as a general way of looking at things.”Would you
elaborate on the “general way of looking at things” you got from Simmel?
HOWARD S. BECKER 1
No one has ever challenged me about what I meant by that before! So it’s a very good
question. And it’s one I’m thinking about right now, because I’m putting together a
book about the process of comparison—how to make comparisons in a way that is
sociologically useful. Because the answer to that has something to do with the kind
of theory you want to make, it forced me to think about that: what kind of theory do
I want?
That’s where Simmel comes in. Because I think what I mean by tracing my lineage
from Simmel is that his way of being theoretical is my way (or, at least, I hope it is).
Direct all correspondence to Wenchao Lu, School of Arts, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096,
China; e-mail: wenchaolu@yahoo.com.
Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 38, Issue 1, pp. 127–150, ISSN: 0195-6086 print/1533-8665 online.
© 2015 Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1002/SYMB.139

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128 Symbolic Interaction Volume 38, Number 1, 2015
So: what do I mean by “Simmel’s way?” Because I’m still in the process of working
out what that is, what I tell you today will be provisional, and the way I say it will
probably change many times before I find a way to say it that satisfies me.
Here is my answer for today (and probably the basic ideas here are the ones that
I will end up using, even though the way I say it may change often). I’m interested
in theories that help me ask questions, that suggest areas where we can fruitfully
spend our time looking for how things work, what kinds of social arrangements exist
and what kinds of results they produce. To put it more negatively, I’m not interested
in what people sometimes seem to mean when they use the term “theory” today: a
sort of propositional, axiomatic, logical structure from which we can deduce what
might be called “theorems” that we can then test in empirical research and so add
to some structure of scientific theory that will resemble what some people imagine is
embodied in theories in the field of physics.
For me, asking questions about how the social world works does not mean testing
hypotheses deduced from a general theory. Instead, it means finding new problems
that I hadn’t imagined, new aspects of that world I haven’t imagined, new ways of
thinking about the phenomena of everyday life wherever it occurs. We find things like
that by looking closely and intensely at things. For sociologists that means observing
social life in action, people doing things together (to use a formula that seems useful
to me), and trying to avoid and escape from the conventional ways we usually think
about whatever phenomenon we are observing at the time. When we look at social
life that way, we see all sorts of things that we ordinarily ignore, and that’s where we
start making new theory.
We take the things we see—what we ordinarily ignore but see clearly when we
take a closer and more accurate look—and make new ideas (new “theories,” we
could say) which will accept what we have seen as “interesting things that need expla-
nation.” When we do that we discover that these new things disclose new dimensions
of social life, new dimensions that now have to be taken into account in our under-
standing of social life wherever it appears. (Another way of thinking about this might
be to say that we “open up the black box” that produces the social practices we’re
interested in and see what’s going on inside of it.) We can then look for the same
dimensions in other situations, and we will take for granted (when we do that) that
that “variable,” so to speak, will take a different value than it did in the case we
observed that got us started thinking about it in the first place.
How does this relate to Simmel? I will tell the truth and admit that I have not
read any of Simmel’s essays in a very long time. But I know them well enough to
know that this is more or less what he did. When he noticed, wherever he noticed
it, that people keep secrets from one another, he went on to see that as one version
of a more general process of distributing information. Who knows what is a socially
consequential fact, and people often try to steer the process of distribution in some
ways rather than others. One kind of steering produces a secret. But knowing that
possibility alerts us to look for other possible forms of distribution (at an extreme, a
situation in which every possible fact is known to every person involved in a situation,

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Howard S. Becker 129
but also all the other in-between possibilities). And so Simmel’s famous essay is, for
me, an essay on different ways of organizing the distribution of knowledge.
Such a theory does not let us deduce theorems to be tested, but it does point us
in a direction that will discover new and interesting things when we investigate the
next case.
Another example is the Theory of Games invented by John von Neuman and
Oskar Morganstern. Sociologists, possibly overly influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s
obsession with “domination,” typically focus on what the theory calls a zero-sum
game: one in which what I win you necessarily lose, and vice versa. But being good
sociologists as well as good economists, von Neuman and Morganstern recognized
that the division of the winnings of such games logically included positive-sum
games, in which all the players can win if they agree on the appropriate strategy,
and negative-sum games, in which all the players lose no matter what strategies they
follow. We can easily find empirical examples of these phenomena. Any cooperative
venture—the example that occurs to me as a sociologist of art is a group of musicians
playing together—makes everyone happy (becomes a positive-sum game) if the
participants all agree on what to play and how to play it. (I will leave the working-out
of an example of a negative-sum game to the reader as an exercise, in the style of a
mathematics textbook.)
These are the kinds of theoretical products I want my own research to produce
and for me Simmel’s essays embody that approach.
WENCHAO LU 2
So, in a general way, you learned from Simmel that we should use facts to develop
theories, but should not use theories to reshape facts in order to make them fit the
theories. There is an old idiom in China, we should not “cut our feet to make them
fit for the shoes,” but should measure our feet to make suitable shoes. This opens
up possibilities for us to develop new theories. What you’re saying reminds me of
Blumer’s proposition, which you cited in Tricks of the Trade—How to Think about
Your Research While You’re Doing It (Becker 1998):
[T]he research scholar in the social sciences has another set of pre-established
images that he uses. These images are constituted by his theories, by the beliefs
current in his own professional circles, and by his ideas of how the empirical world
must be set up to allow him to follow his research procedure. No careful observer
can honestly deny that this is true. We see it clearly in the shaping of pictures
of the empirical world to fit one’s theories, in the organizing of such pictures in
terms of the concepts and beliefs that enjoy current acceptance among one’s set
of colleagues, and in the molding of such pictures to fit the demands of scientific
protocol. We must say in all honesty that the research scholar in the social sciences
who undertakes to study a given sphere of social life that he does not know at
first hand will fashion a picture of that sphere in terms of pre-established images.
(Blumer 1969: 36)
As a student of Blumer, did you also learn this “general way of looking at things”
from him?

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HOWARD S. BECKER 2
Actually, I learned it more from watching Everett Hughes do these kinds of anal-
yses. Hughes was the main source of the things I learned. He not only made the
kind of general statements you quote from Blumer, but also (which was much more
important to me) gave concrete illustrations of how you did these things with real
information about specific events and situations. Blumer didn’t do that, he spoke in
large, general terms. But Hughes would show you what it meant to think in this way.
For instance, and this was an example that I heard very early in my contacts with him,
he said one day in class (and then said it in an article somewhere) that the number
of “ethnic groups” in a society was always n − 1, if n stood for the number of groups
of differing racial or national origins. That is, if the United States has, let’s just make
up a number, fifty different groups like that, forty-nine of them will be spoken of as
“ethnic groups” and the remaining one will be considered “normal,” that is, the ordi-
nary kind of national or racial origin an “ordinary” person would have. Everyone
else would be identified as coming from a group that was in some way not “normal,”
not the “expected” kind. So, to be an Italian American or an Irish American or a
Jewish American, etc., would mean that you belonged to an “ethnic group.” But to
be an Anglo-Saxon Protestant would be to be “normal,” and would mean that you
didn’t belong to an “ethnic group.” So the conventional image of an American (to
speak as Blumer was speaking in this quotation) is to be what’s called a WASP (white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant); to be anything else would mean that you belonged to an
ethnic group.
And this usage would be embodied in, for instance, the standard categories in a
survey questionnaire, which might ask for your ethnic or racial group. And, as Blumer
says, if you use a questionnaire like this, then you have to believe that the social world
is made up of just such groups: a “normal” one consisting of WASPs and all the other
groups consisting of nonnormal groups, such as Irish, Italian, etc.
Blumer, you could say, gave his students (like me) the general, very abstract form
of the idea, while Hughes gave you a specific example. I guess I learn more easily
from specific examples, because I learned the idea from Hughes, and then found the
general justification for it in Blumer. But for me the general idea came second and
only had life and real meaning for me because I had the examples Hughes gave us to
think with.
My fellow students and I more or less understood that Blumer could not help
you with specific research problems. He could tell you that we all work with images
“constituted by our theories,” but Hughes showed you what that meant when you
actually did sociological research, sociological work.
WENCHAO LU 3
So from Simmel and Hughes you learned this general way of looking at things, and
they both offered excellent illustrative examples to you. This can be applicable in

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fields other than sociology, but what are the specific sociological ideas or methods
you inherited from your lineage of Simmel, Robert Park, and Hughes?
HOWARD S. BECKER 3
I’m not sure how to answer this, except to say that, yes, I learned this general way
of thinking and working from them, and specific ideas from the specific things they
wrote about. I certainly learned most from Hughes, because the problems he worked
on were ones that, often, were relevant to what I was working on (which is no sur-
prise because, after all, I picked research topics that were about people at work, and
that was one of his big topics). But I could see, from things I read of his, that, for
instance, the problem of a career—how a person moves from one organization to
another in the course of their work life—was interesting to study and the way you
studied it was suggested by the examples of the use of this idea that I found in his
work but also, for example, in the work of some of his students who came before me
(for instance, Oswald Hall’s study of medical careers, which was published in several
articles in the 1940s). The ideas I learned were all like this: specific ideas that related
to someone’s research, that I could then apply to my own work, my own studies that
I was working on.
That’s the way I understand and think about sociological work: the development
of specific ideas based on studies that show us how some part of the social world
works.
I guess I should add that one specific thing I learned—and this relates to your
earlier quotation from Blumer—is that there is no better way to learn about society
than close observation. You have to see the thing you want to study in all its details
so that you can analyze it intelligibly. I suppose that is part of the tradition of my “lin-
eage.” Simmel didn’t analyze specific research situations, of course, but Park did and
Hughes certainly did. And I learned from these the way Thomas Kuhn, in his book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, says scientists always learn: from paying close
attention to how earlier researchers did things, how they solved the actual problems
of doing research.
WENCHAO LU 4
I think this is exactly what you do in Outsiders and Art Worlds. You include all the
people in your analysis, especially those conventionally neglected by scholars. While
traditional research focuses on outsiders and the great artist, you involve in your work
the people who have interactions with them. In Outsiders (Becker 1963), those who
have power are rule creators and rule enforcers; in Art Worlds (Becker 1982/2008),
there are powerful people, such as museum directors, estheticians, and critics. What,
then, are your new findings, unveiled by this approach, as compared with those who
focused only on outsiders and the great artist?

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HOWARD S. BECKER 4
Well, that’s not exactly correct. The “new people” who I include in my analysis are not
necessarily powerful people. In fact, often they are not powerful at all. The people
who repair musical instruments are not very powerful, but they obviously have an
important place in the making of music. And, similarly, the “other people” involved
in dramas of deviance are not necessarily people with great power. Many criminals
have a lot of power, as was the case with gangsters in Chicago in the 1920s, nor are the
rule enforcers always people of great power, they can just be an ordinary policeman
who has some power, but very often not as much as a lot of criminals.
But your larger question is: what are the new findings that such an approach leads
to? There are a lot of them and I suppose that, in a way, Art Worlds is sort of a catalog
of such findings. In that book, of course, it’s usually not my findings, because the book
doesn’t report on research I did, but rather summarizes and gets ideas from reading
a lot of material written by others, and also from my own much more casual and
unsystematic observations in many areas.
From another perspective, this approach does not so much create new findings as
create new questions, which I think is a very important function. Kuhn, whose book
is another source of inspiration for me, as you can see, talks a lot about how what
scientific paradigms, which is what his book is about, serve in some large part not
as a source of answers but as a source of questions, questions to which the scientists
in a field don’t know the answers. By creating these questions, the paradigm keeps
the community of scientists supplied with work to do, questions to answer, things to
find out.
If you look at your question that way, then I think it’s clear what “new” questions
this kind of approach has created for me. One major one, for Outsiders, let’s say, is
simply: Who made this rule that is now being enforced? And that of course leads
to other questions such as how did they make it? Why did they think it would be a
good idea to make a rule like that? Would it do something they thought important for
the society? Would it help some sub-group they belonged to achieve more power?
etc., etc. For the case of art, the biggest question, I suppose, is how do all these other
people who are involved in making an art work, affect the result? How do the makers
of materials or the repairers of instruments or any of the long list of people we could
make for each case affect the resulting work? How would it be different if they didn’t
do the part they now do in the making of such works? Or if they did it differently?
More generally, once you’ve located a new source of input for something you’re
interested in, you have a million questions that will be interesting to answer, and I
suppose that Art Worlds is sort of a catalog of such questions.
WENCHAO LU 5
The estheticians Danto (1964) and Dickie developed an institutional theory of esthet-
ics. They discussed an art world or art circle and you state in your article “What about

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Mozart? What about Murder?” (Becker 2014) that “the art world is, for them, a log-
ical device which helps to explain how a system of esthetic judgments might work.”
Can you elaborate on this? Is this universal to the estheticians in the general sense?
Does this result from the different questions they attempt to answer?
HOWARD S. BECKER 5
No, I didn’t intend that remark to be some kind of universal judgment, just an empir-
ical finding, you could say. In other words, I read what these people said and that’s
what I thought was true of their ideas. I thought and still think that it might be true
in some general sense of the academic field of philosophy, at least what I know of it.
All the ones I’ve read (but I haven’t read them all, for instance, Stanley Cavell writes
about movies and from the little I read about him it could be that he’s not like this )
are interested in finding out how to distinguish between art and nonart and between
good art and bad art.
In the article, I’m again making a kind of empirical remark about what seems
to have happened to philosophy in these fields that they used to have a kind of
monopoly over. In art, they were the people who made pronouncements on what was
art, etc. and now other people feel free to do that, and among them are sociologists.
Specifically, the idea of art world has many predecessors, I didn’t invent this
expression. The most common use of it has always been to refer to people who
make, buy, sell, and collect paintings (dealers, collectors, museum people, critics, and
so on). That’s just common usage, and used that way it isn’t a technical term in soci-
ology or philosophy. Dickie, Danto, and others adopted this expression and made it a
technical device they could use to explain certain ideas. They were trying to solve cer-
tain problems in philosophical esthetics (about what’s art, what’s good art, etc.) that
people have been arguing about for many centuries. Danto was by far the smartest of
these people and he wanted to have a way to explain what had happened to modern
art and how it was different from earlier versions of art (he himself was an artist, a
printmaker). So he used the apparatus of truth tables to explain what happens when
a new criterion is introduced into the critical talk surrounding an art. This was a very
inventive idea and the result was interesting. It had the consequence, philosophically,
of making judgments of artistic value dependent, in some sense, on who was making
the judgment; so it became somewhat relativistic, and that set off a lot of argument,
because philosophers usually don’t like the idea of relativistic judgments of art.
I just borrowed the term (which, after all, was not Danto’s anyway) to talk about
this empirical phenomenon I had observed, all these people who were contributing
to the artistic product. Danto wasn’t interested in that.
WENCHAO LU 6
Usually it is not only philosophers who do not like the idea of relativistic judg-
ments of art, but also traditional sociologists of art, such as Lowenthal, Lukacs, and

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Goldmann, according to Art Worlds. What is the difference between you and them, in
your view?
HOWARD S. BECKER 6
That early generation of writers—Lukacs and Goldmann were not the only ones
but they were the ones I read—were not really, in my view, sociologists at all. They
were, essentially, literary critics, who explicated and judged literary works. And they
were Marxist literary critics, for whom the relation of the literary work to the class
structure and the class struggle were key questions.
My own practice and my own interests were very different. First of all, I wasn’t so
sure about which literary works were the “great works” that were worthy of attention.
I mean, I didn’t see any sociological reason why Balzac or Dickens would be better
or worse as writers than Eugene Sue or Jane Austen. Of course, people make such
judgments all the time, which I have no objection to. Why would I object? It’s just
that I don’t think it would be easy for them to convince someone who didn’t already
agree that there was some “sociological” reason why the first two were better than
the second two.
It’s clear, of course, that the fact that people make those judgments is sociologi-
cally interesting and important, but it’s not clear at all, or not clear in the same way,
that their judgments can be shown to be true in the same way that the fact that they
make them can be shown true. I’m not sure that’s clear. It’s just to say that judg-
ments of value can’t be “proved” by observations of social facts. Once two people
agree on what kinds of principles can form the basis of a valid judgment then they
can agree, on the basis of observation, that a given work has the characteristics that
will satisfy those principles of judgment. But the principles have to be validated as
acceptable principles on the basis of some other kind of reasoning, not on the basis
of observed fact.
And I didn’t accept a priori statements by Marx, or statements that were supposed
to be deducible from things Marx had said, as being valid in some special way that
didn’t require empirical findings as justification of the argument.
And, mainly, I didn’t think making literary judgments was the business of a soci-
ologist. Nor did any of the sociologists I knew think that. Everett Hughes was always
making literary judgments (and musical judgments) but he didn’t think he was doing
sociology when he did it.
I thought that sociology meant, in the case of the arts, studying empirically how
art got made: who made it, how they made it, who participated in the activity, what
understandings of what they were doing did all these participants in the making of
art share, etc. In other words, the questions you would ask about any activity that
people did together.
Art could be a good model for how society in general worked, because it involved
a lot of people acting together and making, in spite of their differences of posi-
tion, power, ideology, etc., something that some other participants recognized and

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accepted as art. Which might be—this would have to be substantiated empirically—a

good model for how other people acted together to cure sick people, or to make
automobiles, or to make a family unit or a kinship system, etc.
That is not the kind of thing that early generation of estheticians were interested
in making discoveries and generalizations about. They wanted, mainly, to generalize
about how a work of art “reflected” the chief characteristics of the class system and
class conflicts in the society it had been made in. Not my interest at all.
WENCHAO LU 7
You said that the Marxist literary critics care about the relationship of literature to
class structure and class struggle, and that, for them, literature may reflect society.
In Telling About Society (Becker 2007), you discuss art, such as fictions, films, pho-
tographs, as a way to tell about society. Are these two kinds of relationships between
art and society similar? If not, what is the difference?
HOWARD S. BECKER 7
No, they are different. These writers did not actually investigate the making of art
works, the network of cooperative activities in which the actual work of producing
a novel or a play or a painting or a poem occurs. They analyzed the formal char-
acteristics of the work as well as the subject matter. They looked at the finished
product—the novel or the film, for instance—and tried to find out how the con-
tent and the form of that product “reflected” the society in which it was made. The
verb they used varied—they didn’t always say “reflect,” but some version of that was
always the underlying idea, that the characteristics of the work would somehow be
marked by the social structure it was produced in, and for them “social structure”
always meant “class structure,” understood in Marxist terms. So they would look to
see how a novel’s plot dealt with class relationships, etc. Some of these analyses were
very ingenious but they never dealt with the actual social interactions or organiza-
tions that produced these works. And, because of that, to be perfectly honest, I have
never looked at those books again. They had nothing in them that I could use or that
I thought it was important to react to.
So the way they looked at the relationship between art and society was not like
mine. They looked at the features of an art works and showed how those features
related to what they understood to be the characteristic features of the society they
had been made in. My idea is to look at the work as the result of the coordinated
activities of whoever was involved in making it, and to find out about those activities
through the ordinary methods of sociology and the other social sciences, by observa-
tion (direct or indirect) of those activities. A lot of people work with such methods,
not only sociologists: anthropologists, historians, literary critics and scholars, ethno-
musicologists, etc., etc. So it is not really “my way” that we are talking about. I think

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that what I have done in studying art is just what any reasonably well-trained and
experienced social scientist would do if they thought about it.
I have to confess that it’s really not interesting to me to worry about the rela-
tionships between what they did and what empirical social science does. These guys
were philosophers and estheticians and didn’t do any kind of serious research of a
kind we would recognize today! This is my prejudice, which I’ve had ever since I
read them.
WENCHAO LU 8
When you started thinking and writing about art from a sociological point of view,
you created the Tactile Art Group to investigate how “new” art forms develop. This
is very interesting. Can you tell me more about this? Do you think this is a fruitful
way to understand art sociologically?
HOWARD S. BECKER 8
I created—I should really say that I asked the students if they wanted to try this
experiment and they said yes—the Tactile Art Group as a teaching device. I thought
it would be an interesting way to get them to see what a well-functioning art form
required: what kinds of equipment and understandings, etc., and to see how much
work it would take to create the infrastructure that conventional arts already have
available. I also thought it would be a good way to learn something about those ques-
tions myself. And it did do both of those things. The students were very inventive and
even wrote a “manifesto” for their new art form! And it made teaching less boring,
because the class didn’t consist of me telling them things I knew and they didn’t, but
rather would consist of some mutual exploration of unknown territory. Because I
really had no idea what would happen!
Yes, I do think it’s a good way to understand art sociologically. Someone once
said to me that I didn’t think I really understood something until I’d done it myself,
and that might be true. It’s hard to imagine everything that’s involved in creating
art without doing it yourself and understanding all the “small things” that are really
important. Trying to make or do some kind of art that’s never been done creates
many more problems than doing art for which so much already exists “readymade,”
which makes it perfect for learning.
WENCHAO LU 9
This teaching device really brings the student in to take part in the “process” of how
new art forms are created. And, actually, the idea of process is very important in Art
Worlds. While many other scholars research art as object, you treat it as process. Can
you talk about the difference?

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HOWARD S. BECKER 9
Research that looks at objects differs from research that looks at processes in several
important ways. First of all, if you look at objects alone, you don’t see how they
got to be the kind of objects they are. Since you don’t see it you imagine it. But of
course, for scientists it is always better to see something happen than to imagine
how it happened.
The immediate consequence of that difference is that, since you don’t look for how
the object came to be what it is, you don’t see the work that a great variety of people
do, work that is necessary for the object to be what it is. You don’t see the people who
make the materials the object is composed of, you don’t see the activities that give the
object its shape and character, etc. If you don’t, for instance, “see” the architect who
designed the concert hall and the workers who built it, you can’t understand why the
music Beethoven wrote sounds different in two different concert halls. In real life, of
course, knowledgeable listeners know these things, but social theory is not real life
and it can’t be accurate if it doesn’t see what is there to see.
Research that looks at process proceeds by asking about all the people and things
that participate in the making of the object or event that’s to be explained. And then
it asks how they are connected: how, for instance, event B will not happen unless
event A has a specific result, and how, if A has a different result, event C or D will
happen instead, and then how each of those will produce other possibilities, etc. So
the appropriate graphical model, the appropriate drawing, of a process is not as a
series of “causally related” events and more like a branching tree model of increasing
numbers of possible outcomes.
WENCHAO LU 10
At the end of Art Worlds (Becker 1982/2008), you wrote: “What I have said about
art worlds can be said about any kind of social world, when put more generally;
ways of talking about art, generalized, are ways of talking about society and social
process generally.” Do you mean that the idea of “world” is universal and can apply
to other areas?
HOWARD S. BECKER 10
The easiest way to answer this question would be to just say: “Yes,” that is, yes,
the idea of “world” is universal. But that isn’t as clear as it should be, so I’ll say a
little more.
“World,” the way I’ve used it in Art Worlds, is not a thing, an entity. It’s a way of
thinking about social life. The basic idea is that everything that happens is the result
of what a large number of people do. Nothing happens as the result of one person’s
act, because that person’s act depends on the acts of many other people, and all these
people are paying attention to each other, seeing what other people are doing, and
thinking of how what all those other people are doing will affect what “I” want to do,

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and then changing what you’re doing in order to take account of what those other
people are doing.
Some of these people are right there in the situation with the actor, others are far
away and their activities appear in the form of objects they have made, etc., things
that are the embodiment of their action, and all those things are conditions under
which “I” have to act.
That sounds complicated and “theoretical,” so I’ll try to make it clearer with a
simple example everyone is familiar with. We are standing at a street corner, and
there is a traffic light regulating traffic. When it is green, most people understand,
you can cross the street, and the cars going in the other direction, who have a red
light, have to stop. Almost everyone at the corner understands that this is what
other people will do, and that tells them what they can do. If I see that the light
which I am conventionally supposed to pay attention to is green, I suppose (and will
almost always be right) that I can cross the street safely, because cars that might hit
me if I am in the street have a red light and will stop. And almost all of the time
they will.
But there’s another complication. There are people crossing the street who are
going in the same direction I am. But others are going in the opposite direction,
coming straight toward me, and if no one changes what they are doing, some peo-
ple will bump into each other. This almost never happens. Why not? Because the
people who might run into each other engage in a kind of conversation of postures
and movements that indicate to others what action they will take to avoid colliding,
and everyone does this and continually readjusts their course according to the signals
they are getting, and most of the time they do successfully avoid bumping into each
other.
That’s much simpler than the coordination that goes on in a conventional orga-
nized art world, but the mechanisms are the same. Let’s say that I want to paint a
picture and have it bought by someone who will hang it on the wall of their home, or
on the wall of a museum. Just like the person crossing the street at the light, I indicate
to others my intentions to do that, by using conventional (i.e., more or less mutually
understood) language and actions that I know, more or less, will be understood by
others as I intend to be understood. I make a picture of the size that people ordinar-
ily buy for those purposes, and make it using subject matter and styles that are more
or less ordinarily used to make pictures that people for those purposes. And in that
way, I know, there is a good chance that some people will be interested in my pictures.
Similarly, people who want to hang pictures in these ways will know that artists like
me can be counted on to make just those kinds of pictures. Not everyone does this
in exactly the same way, of course, just as not everyone will chart their way across an
intersection in the same way. But probably most people will do something like what
is expected, and there is a good chance that the differences can be negotiated and
some sort of agreement reached, though that result is not guaranteed. Occasionally
people do bump into each other in the street. Makers and buyers of paintings quite
often don’t agree and no picture is sold.

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Where else does that kind of imagery apply, so that we can expect that we would
discover something interesting if we entered those situations looking for that kind
of activity? This is, I think, another way of asking the question you asked here. I
think the answer is: anywhere where people are doing something that involves other
people. And then I would add that everything anyone does involves other people,
so that this way of thinking applies to all kinds of social activity. “World” is just a
convenient one-word way of indicating that many of these forms of collective activity
are more or less organized, so that people have some idea of what to expect of the
other actors in the situation. Artists know that there are usually people who make
the materials they need. Scientists know that there are other people who will read the
articles they write in scientific journals. Family members know that people who have
certain conventionally recognized relations to each other will expect to be treated in
certain ways and will treat them in certain expectable ways.
I mean, when I speak of a “world,” to point to people who are related to each
other by knowing how to do things in ways that mesh as they do in these examples,
and who do them, relying on those expectations, regularly enough that it’s useful
to speak of that as an “organization” or something like that. I speak of “worlds” to
make room for a large variety of people whose actions are relevant to each other
and who thus depend on each other for certain regularities in activity, because
many of the people whose actions are necessary to some common form of col-
lective action aren’t known to the others or aren’t recognized as doing something
important to that form of activity, although what they do is important. To go back
to the street corner and the traffic light: if the people who make the traffic lights
produce lights that are defective and unreliable, so that we can’t depend on the
lights when we try to cross the streets (or can’t depend on people to understand
that red means “stop” and green means “go”) then the activity of crossing the
street will be much more difficult to accomplish, and everything that depends on
crossing streets to be simple and unproblematic will become an area of trouble and
difficulty.
WENCHAO LU 11
Your four modes of being oriented to an art world are also very universal. I remember
in the culture and society workshop, directed by Wendy Griswold (1986), one North-
western graduate student reported that the “lived religion” refused to abide by the
rules of the “official” religious authorities. They knew the rules, but they intention-
ally broke them. This reminded me of the mavericks in Art Worlds. But this is not
my question. My question arises from a class of Wendy Espeland’s which I attended.
In the class, Professor Espeland had us read the article “Postmodernism and Con-
sumer Society” by Fredric Jameson (1998), and in this article, Jameson writes that
John Cage belongs to postmodernism. But in Art Worlds, John Cage is representa-
tive of the mavericks. What is the difference between these two kinds of classification,
in your eyes? How do you think about postmodernism?

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HOWARD S. BECKER 11
I think I will have to disappoint you now. I have never read anything by Fredric
Jameson. It was clear to me from the first time I heard anything about him that he
and I were not in the same business, not interested in the same questions, not doing
the same kind of work. Since I have not read anything of his, I can’t responsibly
comment on his position on any question of substance.
John Cage is a figure who excites a lot of comment from a lot of people in a lot
of fields. What he did was so different from what musicians, composers, and artists
usually did that philosophers, literary critics, and others felt it necessary to “explain”
what his work meant. I always thought that Cage’s work meant to push people into
paying attention to the world around them, in the same way that Zen Buddhism
pushed people to pay attention to ongoing life and not be distracted by words. For
me, his work had exactly that effect.
Cage also presented a classic case of what I meant by a “maverick,” that is, some-
one who knew the conventions of the world of one of the established arts (in his
case, music) but didn’t, for whatever reason, find it interesting to do the kind of work
those conventions produce. So he did something different, knowing very well that
his work did not fit into the way things were done in the field of classical music. His
work positioned itself in relation to that world, however, so that his way of compos-
ing was understood by more conventional composers and participants in the world
of classical music as a challenge to what they did and the methods and rules that
governed their works. That’s more or less what a “maverick” is and does. And, of
course, that way of positioning yourself and your work in relation to an already exist-
ing more-or-less established way of working can be found in all sorts of other areas
of collective activity.
It’s always been my way of thinking to assume that what you find in one place
can also be found in other places, usually in a different form but nevertheless more
or less similar. That’s a working principle, a guide to how do research, but it isn’t a
guarantee that you will find what you are looking for. You could say that last year’s
research tells me where to look and what to look for this year, but that doesn’t mean
that you will find what you expect to find, only that this is a useful and productive
way to began research.
WENCHAO LU 12
A very famous sociologist of art, who was also a good friend of yours, Richard Peter-
son, raised the production of culture perspective which has had a large influence in
this field. In your view, what is the relationship between the production of culture
perspective and your “art world” perspective?
HOWARD S. BECKER 12
I think that Pete and I had very similar ideas about studying art, and that this is
clearest in his book on American “country and western” music, Creating Country

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Music. This book was on a kind of music he loved very much. He lived in Nashville,
Tennessee for most of his adult life, and Nashville was and still is the central place in
the world for this kind of music. So he was able to observe the activities associated
with it very closely and he did that for a long time and so knew more about it than
any other sociologist. In fact, he knew more about it than most sociologists do about
whatever they write about. When he wrote about the production of culture as that
occurred in that world he wrote much as I might have if I had known as much as
he did. At least, that’s how it seems to me. Others might think our approaches were
not that similar, but I think they were, even though we used different language to
describe what we were thinking.
Now I want to make two qualifications to that statement. The first is that Pete also
did another kind of research and this kind is quite different from anything I would
have done. This kind of research was done with surveys of audience members, in
which they were asked about how often they listened or went to or otherwise involved
themselves with different kinds of music and, beyond that, about different kinds of
leisure activities. How often did they watch television? How often they did go to a
concert of classical music? How often did they go to a concert of popular music?
Or go to an art museum? Or to see a play in a theater? From this he constructed a
typology of the kinds of relations people had to all these forms of entertainment, and
invented a concept that many found very useful, the idea of a cultural “omnivore,”
that is, someone who engaged in all these forms of art, classical and erudite or popular
and simpler. The major finding from this research was a long-term change. In the
past, people had involved themselves with one or the other but not both: they had
been “snobs” who only consumed the products of high culture (classical music, for
instance) or low culture (television and pop music). But the surveys showed that
more and more people were “omnivores,” who consumed art products of both kinds
without discriminating against either one. I thought this mildly interesting, but it was
not a problem which was very interesting to me. That’s not Pete’s fault, it’s mine, for
having too narrow an approach. (It’s also, by the way, very “un-Cagean,” because
John Cage always insisted that everything was interesting if you know how to find
the interest in it.)
The second qualification is that there were some differences in emphasis between
our two approaches. I think that looking at the world of all the people who con-
tributed anything to the production of an art work went beyond what Pete thought
was reasonable or interesting, though he never said that. And some people might
think that’s a real “theoretical” difference. I don’t think it is. Instead, I think it’s a
perfectly reasonable and understandable difference in where we thought it useful
and convenient to draw the line between what we would include in a research study
and what we would leave out. No one can study everything that contributes to the
production of art work, there is too much stuff that fits that description and the choice
of where to draw the line and say that you aren’t going to study that activity (which
seems very far removed from the work you are explaining) is really arbitrary and

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usually dictated by practical considerations of time and accessibility and financing,

rather than by any theoretical logic.
WENCHAO LU 13
In an interview with Richard Peterson, he expressed similar opinions to yours: “by
the late 1970s we both had come to see his emerging ‘art world’ perspective as com-
plementary to, not as competing with, the production of culture perspective. It is
possible to see these rival schemes as usefully linked but distinct levels of analysis
(Santoro 2008).” When you researched dance musicians, or when Richard Peterson
(1976) researched country music, you both could closely observe what happened.
But for art produced in the past, sociologists can’t go back in history and observe
what happened there themselves. Even so, they have written many important works
in the field of sociology of art, such as Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in
the French Painting World by Harrison White and Cynthia White (1965), and Renais-
sance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theater, 1576–1980
by Wendy Griswold. Though Michael Baxandall (1972) is an art historian instead
of a sociologist, his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy is also very
sociological for many sociologists. How can we do research on “art in history” in a
sociological way? Can you give some suggestions?
HOWARD S. BECKER 13
I don’t think this is a serious problem, at least not conceptually. It can, of course, be
difficult in practice for the reasons you suggest: we can’t go back and interview or
observe the things we’re interested in. But what that really means is that we can’t do
those things in the ways we’re used to doing them. We can’t, for instance, do surveys
(of the kind that Peterson used when he developed the idea of “omnivore”). We can’t
do participant observation of the kind Faulkner and I relied on when we wrote about
jazz in Do You Know . . . ? We’re occasionally lucky enough to have a census that
someone did but those are relatively recent inventions, so for most of history we don’t
have that kind of data.
But historians (and sociologists such as Griswold and the Whites, and certainly his-
torians of art and literature such as Baxandall and Sutherland, and many others) have
found acceptable substitutes for the first hand data we’re so used to having. Written
documents and artifacts such as tools and sculptures and paintings and orchestral
scores and ancient musical instruments all give us clues to what kinds of interac-
tions and social activities were taking place as those works created before we were
alive were being made. And, in fact, we often use such data today, either because we
can’t get access to anything else, or because we are willing to accept the limitations
involved in order to have more “cases” for our analysis.
Of course, when we do that we increase the possibility that we will be
wrong, that is, that we will make an interpretation—a guess, really—about

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something we would have interpreted differently if we had been able to see it for
ourselves.
(By the way, historians might raise the same kind of question about archeolo-
gists, who write a kind of history even though they have no documents, just skeletal
remains and artifacts which mainly reflect patterns of domestic life, warfare, and per-
sonal decoration.)
WENCHAO LU 14
You started doing the sociology of art in 1949. Since then, more than 60 years have
passed, and you have witnessed the development of this field in America. Can you
tell me something about the sociology of “sociology of art” in America? How has it
emerged?
HOWARD S. BECKER 14
This is an interesting question and I’m not sure I can answer it, certainly not very
adequately in a short time. It would really take a serious article, and more research
than I have done. Here are some brief thoughts.
Before World War II, which is a convenient place to start, there were very few
empirical studies of the arts. I can think of John Mueller’s study of symphony orches-
tra programs, for instance, which analyzed the incorporation of music from different
countries. And I guess we could say that Pitirim Sorokin occasionally wrote about art,
but that was more in the style, as I remember (and my memory may not be accurate
here) of the Europeans (such as Goldmann, Lukacs, and others) who in my think-
ing were really more like philosophers than sociologists. They did talk, quite a lot,
about social class, but they seemed to me to be concerned, really, with questions of
esthetic judgment. (An exception is some of the work of Leo Lowenthal, who did
empirical studies of the content of popular magazines, informed by ideas like these
current among members of the “Frankfurt School,” of which he was a member.)
After the war, a number of strands of research and writing came to focus, in one
way or another, on the arts or related matters. The sociology of occupations, espe-
cially in the form taught by Everett Hughes, led me to study musicians and was the
germ of the work that became Art Worlds. Studies of mass communication, of the
kind done at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, usually by
means of public opinion surveys, furnished another development. A good example of
this is the book Mass Persuasion, Robert Merton’s study of a broadcast by a popular
singer named Kate Smith. Studies of audiences became a common form of research
on the arts, particularly after the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) began to
provide financial support for that kind of work. William McPhee represents a third
kind of research, a sophisticated use of mathematical models to investigate things
like orchestral repertoires. There were other, isolated cases of research, often gener-
ated by very specific circumstances. Harrison White, who was one of the first users of

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mathematical models in sociology, happened to be married to an art historian, Cyn-

thia White, with whom he collaborated on a richly detailed and analytically ingenious
study of French painters, Canvases and Careers.
After the war ended, universities began to expand in size and in the amount of
research they supported. So small tendencies, like the studies I’ve just mentioned,
became large tendencies, because there were many more research oriented depart-
ments and many more graduate students looking for subjects to study. Students came
from a great variety of backgrounds and I was not the only one who followed a path
based on my own artistic activities. Many people wrote dissertations on topics in the
arts, the way I had done in my M.A. thesis (e.g., Robert Faulkner’s dissertation at
UCLA, which became his wonderful book Hollywood Studio Musicians).
Professors with interests like these were happy to have students follow that path.
So I had a large number of students at Northwestern who studied topics in the arts
(Chandra Mukerji wrote a thesis on film students; Barbara Rosenblum wrote one on
photographers; Ed Kealy wrote one on recording engineers; Stith Bennett wrote on
how kids learned to play rock music; Eleanor Lyon wrote on a small theater in the San
Francisco Bay Area; etc.). Other people elsewhere in the country did the same thing
so that, finally, there were many people doing work that was more or less related to
the arts, and doing it from a great variety of perspectives, theoretical approaches, and
using all kinds of methods (surveys, observation, historical documents, etc.). “Art”
became a topic that furnished legitimate research problems and people wrote disser-
tations on art even in departments where no faculty member was really interested
in this topic (e.g., Vera Zolberg’s dissertation on the social organization of the Art
Institute of Chicago). Richard Peterson sponsored work at Vanderbilt. And so on.
From there on it’s a long, complex story that someone might well write a book about
(but not me!).
WENCHAO LU 15
Art Worlds is not only highly influential in America, but also has a big influence
in France. In an interview by Alain Pessin, you clarified the difference between
Bourdieu’s “field” and your “world,” so we can move past this. You have also said
that, compared with Bourdieu, you were more interested in the work of Raymonde
Moulin. Can you tell us something about the work of Raymonde Moulin and other
similar sociologists of art in France? Also, I know you often go to France, recently
every year. What then, in your eyes, is the difference between the French and
American “sociology of art”?
HOWARD S. BECKER 15
I’ll answer this not by talking about sociological “theories” of art, but rather by taking
about research. And here I’d say that there really aren’t great “national” differences
in the kind of research done. Researchers in France, just as in the U.S., use a great

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variety of theoretical approaches and a great variety of methods of data gathering and
analysis. My greatest concern is that American researchers, and people influenced
by them (and especially those sociologists who unfortunately do not read languages
other than English), are depriving themselves of a great store of wonderful research
findings, of great studies that they could use to think with, to develop and test their
ideas and theories.
I’ll interpret your question, then, to mean “What kind of work do sociologists of
art do in France?” and not try to find differences between what is done there and
here in the U.S.
To start with, Raymonde Moulin’s book on the French art market was published in
1967 (a shorter version was published in English in 1987). It’s a large comprehensive
study of the art market and all the people who are part of it: painters, art dealers,
collectors, museum curators, critics, etc. In each case, she interviewed large numbers
of people in each category and the interviews were long, probing ones, more like long
conversations (you can tell this from the quotations she makes from them). She did
not have a standardized list of questions that she asked everyone, instead she talked
to them, often more than once, sometimes many times, about things that she wanted
to know about. This is just the way any student of Everett Hughes would have done
it, certainly the way I would have done it. She focused on the economic part of the
art world activities and made, among many other important findings, the wonderful
generalization that in an active art market, no one can distinguish esthetic value from
economic value (that statement, of course, has to be explained to be intelligible but
this isn’t the place to do that, I’ve done it elsewhere).
Moulin became the head of a research center for the sociology of art and a number
of active and important researchers began their careers there. Pierre-Michel Menger
(1983), who has just become professor of sociology at the College de France, the
most important academic position in French sociology, wrote his first book, a study
of IRCAM, the center for experimental music headed by Pierre Boulez and paid for
by the French government, The Paradox of the Musician. Dominique Pasquier and
Sabine Chalvon-Demersay (1990) collaborated on Drôles de stars, a study of tele-
vision announcers. All three have continued to produce and publish important and
interesting studies of television, music, and other arts. They all work with a combi-
nation of methods: archival, fieldwork, surveys, etc. But I would say that the work
they do is in the spirit of the Hughes approach to studying social organization and
that it fits very well into a “worlds” approach, which is the same thing. Other active
researchers from this generation include Jean-Lous Fabiani and Emanuel Pedler.
The next generation—people now in their forties, let’s say—include people who
have published books on the world of the guitar (Florent Bousson), the role of
women in jazz (Marie Buscatto), the social organization of “ordinary musicians,”
people who play, as I did, in bars, for parties, etc. (Marc Perrenoud), computer art
(Jean-Paul Fourmentraux), and rap music in France (Karim Hammou). These are
just the books for which I have written prefaces (the French often ask people to write
a short preface for their books). Basile Zimmerman (he is French-Swiss) is finishing

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a book on hip-hop music in Shanghai (he did this by participant observation).

Another Swiss, Alain Mueller, did a dissertation on “hard-core straight-edge” music
(a sort of offshoot of hip-hop) in Switzerland. Olivier Alexandre, the guy who was at
Northwestern last year, just finished his dissertation on French film directors and the
people who provide the money to make the films. Hyacinthe Ravet, a combination
sociologist/musician (she plays the clarinet) published a big book on women in
professional music in France, based partly on statistics, partly on observation and
interviews.
There has also been, for almost fifteen years, a GDR (Groupe de Recherche, which
is a sort of network that the government funds to have meetings and publish things)
on the sociology of art, which has big conferences two or three times a year, publishes
a journal, and publishes the papers given at the conferences. I don’t know how many
people are part of this, but there are enough to have all those conferences and give
all those papers and fill all those journals and books with articles!
WENCHAO LU 16
When you use a sociological method to research art, you provide us with a very new
understanding of art. We can say the new sociological method (new for research in
art) leads to a new understanding of art. This is the significance of “sociology of art”
to art. On the other hand, art is also new for the sociological method, therefore I
want to know what new things art contributes to the sociological method? Or, what
is the significance of a “sociology of art” to sociology?
HOWARD S. BECKER 16
This is a question that applies to every specialized field of sociological research, and
I think the answer is the same for all of them.
First of all, I don’t think any particular area of social life gives us “special” knowl-
edge about any specific theoretical or abstract problem. That is, we shouldn’t expect
that studying, let’s say, industrial work will tell us something about conflict while
studying art will tell us something about cooperation (I’m just inventing this compar-
ison to make the point clear). It was always a theme of Everett Hughes’ work that
whatever you found in one area of social life would point to a dimension of social life
that could be found everywhere. It might be that industrial work would show conflict
more openly than artistic work, but that would mean that conflict took another form
or was less intense in the case of art, not that it didn’t exist.
If that’s true, then we should expect that every area we do empirical work in will
tell us something that will be true in all other areas of cooperative human activity.
And, therefore, research in a “new” field, in a field where little empirical research
has been done, will not give us some new knowledge that we could not have found
in some other place, even though it might be easier to see in this place than in some
other place.

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But, having said this, I’m not sure I can tell you—in fact, I’m sure that I can’t tell
you—some special thing that the study of the arts makes visible. Particular studies
make different things visible.
Here’s an example from something I just read. Fernando Rubio has written a
long paper (not yet published) on the problems that art museums have when they
purchase for their collections art works that use (this is one kind of problem with
contemporary art) materials that will decay and fall apart in a relatively short time.
How do you conserve an art work that includes, as part of its composition, pieces
of machinery such as television receivers and disc drives which wear out and don’t
work any more? Well, you might say, you buy a new part to replace the old broken
one. But what if this is an old model of the machine and the manufacturer no longer
makes parts to replace the ones that wear out? This is a major problem with any con-
temporary art work that uses computers to display itself. An artist makes a piece that
requires a computer that uses a specific operating system to run a specific piece of
software. The operating system is no longer “current,” and is no longer supported by
the company that produced it. The newer models of computers cannot use this sys-
tem and so the software used to display the piece no longer will run on this machine.
You can see the problem. (An avant-garde artist like Nam June Paik creates exactly
this problem for the museums that purchased his work, as Rubio makes clear.)
This example teaches us that social activity in general has a problem of how long
the life of any of its material components is. It teaches this not because art creates
this problem in some unique way, but because this piece (and pieces like it) create
this problem for art museums that collect such work and therefore we now know, in a
way that makes us understand that we must pay attention to this aspect of collective
activity, that the life of any component on which that collective activity is based is
an important “variable” (to use that language) of any analysis we make of any kind
of activity. The length and complexity of that last sentence is an indication of the
problems we create for ourselves when we try to generalize the findings of a specific
study; but this is a necessary part of our work.
So any specific research teaches us something when we realize that its results show
us a part of reality we hadn’t been thinking about before. Studies of art do that, but
so do studies in other areas of collective activity (the family, for instance). So what
research in art tells us, in a general way, is not something unique to art, but rather
something that we will expect to find, in some altered form perhaps, everywhere.
I fear that this isn’t very clear.
WENCHAO LU 17
I know you are not only a sociologist, but also a pianist and a photographer and you
love art very much. You have also said that you like reading Italo Calvino’s novals
and Bernard Shaw’s plays. You often use your own experience of art in Art Worlds.
In Telling About Society, you argued that the plays or the novels can be used to tell
about society. In my view, the use of these forms of art in your work is all sociological.

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You mentioned your mentor “Everett Hughes was always making literary judgments
(and musical judgments) but he didn’t think he was doing sociology when he did
that.” When you are not doing sociology, what is the role of art in your life?
HOWARD S. BECKER 17
Art has always been part of my life, since I was a child. My father used to take us
to the Art Institute (in Chicago) very often on Sunday mornings to see the pictures
there and especially Seurat’s Grand Jatte. I became very familiar with the collection
there, which is pretty wonderful, and came to know, especially, French painting from
the Impressionists on, Picasso, Braque and the modern developments from that. I
started playing the piano when I was twelve, teaching myself to play boogie-woogie
(a variant of the blues) and then taking lessons and learning to play popular songs
and to improvise on them. That gave me a basic knowledge of keyboard harmony,
so that I could learn songs and play them, and also (something I did later) write
arrangements of songs for larger jazz groupings. My first wife’s sister was an actress,
and one of the original members of Second City, an improvisatory theater com-
pany in Chicago, and I became a steady theater goer from that time on. Also, like
most jazz musicians of the time, I learned to like classical music through becoming
interested in composers such as Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky, and from there
learned to like earlier and more conventional forms of symphonic and chamber
music. I’ve watched movies regularly since I was a child and still do. I read a lot
of fiction.
So art has just always been part of my life. I still listen to a lot of music, mostly on
records now. We go to the theater more or less regularly, to a variety of things from
Shakespeare to very experimental modern theater, on the one hand, and to revivals
of old Broadway musicals (from the 1920s and 1930s, mostly). We belong to the main
art museums here in San Francisco and go to see their exhibitions regularly.
So all of this means that art in all its forms has been and still is a regular part of my
life. I don’t know what its role in my life is—I’m not sure I know what that phrase
means!—but I know that I’m always looking at something, reading something, going
to some art event, listening to music.
I’ve left out photography because I came to that very differently. It’s a story I’ve
told many times. I can’t draw. I’ve never been able to draw well or, really, at all. When
I was starting to work on a sociology of art I realized that I had some kind of per-
sonal experience with many other forms of art, but not visual art. So I took a course
in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, which at the time I lived across the
street from, and as a result of that got very involved in the world of serious art pho-
tography, partly as someone who made photographs but also as someone who taught
classes in photography, wrote about photography, and even organized photographic
exhibits. I wasn’t in that world as a sociologist, but as an actor in that art world (just
as I had been a participant in the music world as a musician, not as a sociologist who
was studying the arts).

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But my work as a sociologist and these artistic interests have often intersected
or merged in ways that are hard to separate. The photographic work I did was very
sociological, in the sense of being intended to embody and display sociological under-
standings of things. Some years ago, I collaborated with two other sociologists to
write and perform two theater pieces based on our sociological studies of theatrical
worlds in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Chicago (these two pieces were published
in sociological journals!).
My wife is a photographer who produces artistic work in that medium, which has
been another involvement in art for me. And we both have continued to be involved
in artistic activities. Most recently, we were both “exhibitors” in Formes de vie, a
conceptual art project organized by Franck Leibovici in Paris which has a very socio-
logical aspect to it, because the idea was that one hundred artists and “others” (I was
one of the others) should make something (Franck didn’t tell us what) that showed
the “form of life” that made the work we did possible. Dianne made a video piece, a
collage of thirty-two very short video clips, and I pasted together all the emails that
Rob Faulkner and I had exchanged while we were writing. The results of Franck’s
efforts is a book called Formes de vie and a series of exhibits in Paris. The whole
project is too complicated to explain here but I can give you the web site where he
has explained it. (http://www.desformesdevie.org/en/page/presentation)
So I guess that means that there is some sense in which I am, after all, a kind of
artist, whether I mean to be or not. I think too that my approach to sociology is very
“artisanal,” that is to say, I do it with a sense of trying to be workmanlike, to do a good
job as someone who does handwork would define that, to see sociology as having a
lot in common with artistic work of other kinds.
I don’t know if this will make sense to you or to anyone else who reads this, but
for me it’s all part of one big enterprise, and I’m not really very interested in deciding
when what I’m doing is sociology or when it’s art or what the difference between the
two is.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
My special thanks for Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott, who helped me edit the interview
when it was finished.
REFERENCES
Baxandall, Michael. 1972. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press.
1982/2008. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA; Los Angels, CA; London: University of California
Press.
1998. Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing It. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press
2007. Telling About Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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. 2014. What About Mozart? What About Murder?: Reasoning from Cases. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Chalvon-Demersay, Sabine and Dominique Pasquier. 1990. Drôles de Stars: La Télévision des Ani-
mateurs. Paris: Aubier.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61:571–84.
Griswold, Wendy. 1986. Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London
Theater, 1576–1980. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1998. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. Lon-
don; New York: Verso.
Menger, Pierre-Michel. 1983. Le Paradoxe du Musicien: le Compositeur, le Mêlomane et l’etat Dans
la Societé Contemporaine. Paris: Flammarion.
Moulin, Raymonde. 1967. Le Marché de la Peinture en France. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
. 1987. The French Art Market: A Sociological View. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Peterson, Richard A. 1976. “The Production of Culture: A Prolegomenon.” Pp. 7–22 in The Pro-
duction of Culture, edited by Richard A. Peterson. London: Sage.
Plummer, Ken. 2003. “Continuity and Change in Howard S. Becker’s Work: An Interview with
Howard S. Becker.” Sociological Perspectives 46(1):21–39.
Santoro, Marco. 2008. “Producing Cultural Sociology: An Interview with Richard A. Peterson.”
Cultural Sociology 2:33.
White, Harrison and Cynthia White. 1965. Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French
Painting World. New York: John Wiley.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR(S)

Wenchao Lu has a position as a faculty member in School of Arts, Southeast University, in Nanjing,
China. His main interests are sociology of art, cultural sociology, and esthetics. His PhD dissertation
is “Art Activity As Social Interaction: Howard S. Becker In Comparison And Debate”(2014),and
several of his papers has been published in Literature and Art Studies, Theoretical Studies In Litera-
ture and Art, China Scholarship, and Chinese Journal of Sociology in Chinese. In 2014, his translation
of Howard S. Becker’s Art Worlds has been published by Yilin Press. Besides, he has finished the
translation of Richard A. Peterson’s Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, and is now
translating Gary Alan Fine’s Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity.

38.124.64.204 on Sat, 12 Mar 2022 02:37:16 UTC

Sociology and Art: An Interview With Howard S. BeckerAuthor(s) : Wenchao Lu

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Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/symbinte.38.1.127

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This is an interview with Howard S. Becker, and the focus is sociology

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accepted as art. Which might be—this would have to be substantiated empirically—a

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usually dictated by practical considerations of time and accessibility and financing,

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mathematical models in sociology, happened to be married to an art historian, Cyn-

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a book on hip-hop music in Shanghai (he did this by participant observation).

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR(S)

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