H.S. ベッカーの芸術世界論

前衛はいかに約定へとすり変わるか^①

抄録

　From his virgin paper about professional dance musicians, H. S. Becker was constantly interested in professional artists. These twenty years, he developed theories of "Art Worlds" finally shaped into a book (1982). He argued that art worlds are the organizations of cooperative activities by many participants. The processes going on there are coordinated by ever-changing artistic conventions.
　In this framework, we considered the case of the Israeli abstract art world described by L. Greenfeld (1984. 1988.). Greenfeld researched the definition of art held by the gatekeepers. In the philosophy of artistic avantgarde, all the possibilities of artistic expressions must be permitted. So there mustn't be any artistic conventions. But the gatekeepers generally agreed about the standards of the works worth calling art. They called them the contextual definition of art. Such a difinition is impossible as their philosophy goes. How should it exist?
　We explained them by considering about two levels of conventions; that is, 'conventions as folkways' for the production of art works and 'conventions as standard of taste' for appreciating them. They correspond to folkways and mores by Sumner (1906). The philosophy of avantgarde belongs to the latter. People may negate the existence of folkways in the name of mores, but mores is always based on falkways. So the idea of avantgarde as mores cannot terminate conventions as folkways.
　And we explored these two levels of norms in Becker's other writings. Then we followed the lines of the development of his idea about the correlation of these two levels into A. Strauss' "social worlds" perspective (1978. 1982. 1984.).