Why is there the amount of art that there is?’—the title of Malcolm Bull’s stimulating article—is an original, odd, question-provoking question.footnote1 Not least: how much art is there? We can perhaps imagine a time when one could have totted up all the finished paintings and sculptures coming out of artists’ workshops. In our era, however, matters are more ontologically complex. To work out how many works of art exist—and to hazard explanations about why just that many do—we need to agree on what counts as one. This is an issue that acquired a vexatious salience in the twentieth century, after Duchamp signed a urinal ‘R. Mutt’, titled it Fountain and attempted to exhibit it in New York in 1917. Readymades and other avant-garde innovations, Bull argues, have thrown the category of art wide open. Now, he contends, ‘anything can be art’, including a banana duct-taped to a wall—otherwise known as the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s 2019 piece Comedian, which sold at Sotheby’s for $6.2 million last November.
Before the twentieth century, artworks were largely confined to established mediums, and to a circumscribed range of specific materials—oil paint on canvas and so on—and tended to be prized in part because they were visibly the results of skilled craftsmanship. Contemporary art, by contrast, can be made out of virtually anything, even nothing much at all: a balloon of the artist’s breath. The advent of conceptualism, Hal Foster notes, ‘especially as it prompted the “post-studio” and “post-medium” practices of the 1970s and 1980s’, permitted ‘almost anything—a statement, a snapshot, the slightest gesture—to qualify’.footnote2 Less the product of virtuosity than choice—or chutzpah—such art can be cheap, even free, to make (or is the right word ‘install’ or ‘think up’?): Cattelan’s $6.2 million banana cost him 35 cents.footnote3
Given this seeming free-for-all, why isn’t there ‘a lot more’ art? Bull presents this as a mystery:
If the artworld is able to make art out of anything, then there would appear to be clear incentives, whatever the criteria invoked, to maximize the quantity of art. Not only is art often considered, especially by those involved in the artworld, to be an intrinsic good, but having more art would mean that the artworld could expand as well, and, given that art objects are often worth more than their non-art equivalents, that there was an economic basis for this growth. The artworld has indeed expanded enormously, and there are now museums of contemporary art in many cities of the world, but it has, nevertheless, not expanded as much as it might have done, given the theoretically limitless potential for growth.footnote4
Bull is not after empirical, sociological explanations—hypotheses about why more people don’t become artists, and why those who do aren’t more prolific—but the abstract laws governing the dynamics of the artworld. The latter was the conceptual linchpin of the institutional theories of art developed by the American philosophers Arthur Danto and George Dickie in the 1960s, when conceptual art was reaching ‘both its apogee and crisis’, as Tony Godfrey observes.footnote5 Danto was attempting to explain, Bull notes, ‘how it was that something could be art while being identical to something which was not’: how it was, to take Danto’s example, that Warhol’s replica Brillo boxes are artworks while ‘real’ Brillo cartons in a stockroom are not.
Danto and Dickie both argued that it was the ‘artworld’ that could turn an everyday object into an artwork, though they meant different things by the term. Danto claimed that ‘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.’ He goes so far as to insist that theories ‘make artworks possible’.footnote6 Dickie brought Danto’s rather nebulous artworld down to earth: an artwork is an ‘artefact’ on which ‘some society or some sub-group of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation’. An artwork is an artwork because someone ‘vested with authority’ ‘christens’ it so. Such authority, Dickie writes, is ‘nowhere codified’ but exists ‘at the level of customary practice’ which ‘defines a social institution’. Thus ‘it all depends on the institutional setting’.footnote7 A banana is a banana; the bananas selected by Maurizio Cattelan (Comedian was released in an edition of three), promoted by his dealer, sold at Art Basel Miami Beach and Sotheby’s, or donated to the Guggenheim, are artworks.
What does Bull himself mean by ‘artworld’? He seems to adopt Dickie’s ‘emphasis on the actual social networks—artists, gallerists, curators, critics, auction houses, museums, academic institutions—that collectively make something into art’. Yet Bull’s use of the term suggests a narrower application. The artworld has ‘clear incentives . . . to maximize the quantity of art’, he writes, because ‘having more art would mean that the artworld could expand as well’, yet he does not explicitly say what is driving that expansion. The most obvious incentive—the dominant force of expansion in the contemporary world—is the accumulation of capital. In that case, it’s not simply that there is an ‘economic basis’ for the growth of the artworld, as Bull’s slightly euphemistic formulation has it, but that the raison d’être—the prime mover—of such growth is economic: the acquisition of—and potentially profitable trade in—valuable assets. An artworld set on expanding for the sake of it is not ‘an atmosphere of artistic theory’ but a capitalist market for art.footnote8