Part IV: Who Decides What Remains?
In the first part of this series, we stood before Filippo Lippi in Spoleto and asked a fairly simple question: how can an artist who was famous in his own day, much sought after and occupied with major commissions be almost unknown to many people five hundred years later? By now, the question has become more difficult. If art does not simply keep getting better, if novelty alone is not a reliable measure of quality, and if, following Danto, a wide variety of artistic forms can legitimately exist at the same time—who, then, actually decides which of them will become significant?
The romantically pleasing answer would be: quality. Great art simply prevails. Sooner or later, humanity recognises genius, retrieves the misunderstood work from the cellar, blows off the dust and places it where it should have been all along. History offers enough examples to make this idea attractive. Van Gogh sold hardly anything during his lifetime and later became the very embodiment of the modern artist. Vermeer largely disappeared from broader public awareness for a long time and was rediscovered in the nineteenth century. Artists can be forgotten and subsequently reassessed.
There is only one catch to this beautiful idea: for a work to be “rediscovered” at all, it must first have survived. Someone must have collected, preserved, described or attributed it—or at least refrained from throwing it away. Then someone else must notice it, write about it, exhibit it, reproduce it, research it and explain to others why it might be interesting. Even the unrecognised genius requires a surprising amount of organisational support. Art history is therefore not merely a history of great works. It is also a history of who saw them, who preserved them, who spoke about them and who possessed enough influence to make others look as well.
Which brings us to a man capable of spoiling the romantic notion of the solitary genius rather thoroughly.
Pierre Bourdieu: Welcome to the Field
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French sociologist who devoted considerable attention to the ways in which social power, education, taste and social distinctions arise and are passed on. For our purposes, his concept of the field is particularly relevant. A social field can be imagined as a space in which different actors compete for positions, recognition and influence. Art, too, constitutes such a field.
It contains far more than artists. Gallery owners, museum directors, curators, critics, collectors, art historians, academies, juries, publishers, fairs, foundations and numerous other participants all contribute to determining what becomes visible and what acquires significance. They possess different means and pursue different interests. A museum may be looking for something quite different from a commercial gallery; a university evaluates differently from a collector; and an artist, in turn, has different aims from an art dealer.
This does not mean that twelve powerful people meet every morning in a windowless room and decide over coffee: “We shall make this artist important now, and forget the other one.” Social systems are regrettably seldom so conveniently straightforward. Rather, countless individual decisions influence one another. A gallery takes on an artist. A curator encounters his work there. An exhibition follows. A critic writes about it. A museum acquires a piece. An art historian includes it in a publication. Other collectors take notice. Suddenly, the artist has visibility, which in turn generates further visibility. Success has an unpleasant tendency to improve the conditions for further success—and failure can, accordingly, remain astonishingly invisible.
Capital Is Not Only Money
Bourdieu distinguishes between several forms of capital. Economic capital is the simplest: money, property and material resources. Its relevance in the art field is obvious. Those who can buy works, finance galleries, build collections or support institutions possess means of influence that an enthusiastic museum visitor with an annual pass does not automatically share.
Things become more interesting with cultural capital. This includes knowledge, education, skills and familiarity with particular cultural forms. Someone who knows art history, has experience of exhibitions and has learnt to read certain codes can move through the art field differently from someone standing before a work for the first time. In itself, this is neither good nor bad. Knowledge expands the possibilities of perception. Someone familiar with the story of Judith sees more in a painting of Judith than a woman holding a head. Someone who knows Drtikol will read certain forms of light and body differently from someone who has never encountered him.
Cultural capital becomes problematic when knowledge turns into social distinction. Art can then become a space in which people do not merely discuss images, but also quietly determine who knows the right names, uses the right language and does not nervously search for the exit at the word “discourse”. It is entirely possible to visit an exhibition and, at the same time, look at art and tend to one’s social rank. Human beings are versatile creatures.
Then there is social capital: relationships, networks and contacts. Who knows whom, who recommends someone and who has access to which circles can matter enormously within a field. This is not automatically corruption either. Relationships are part of almost every sphere of society. A curator must know artists, a gallery owner must know collectors, and a photographer must know editors or exhibition organisers. Without connections, cultural life would be extraordinarily quiet. The crucial question is how strongly such networks help to determine who is given the opportunity to be seen in the first place.
Finally, symbolic capital is particularly important: recognition, prestige, reputation and legitimacy. A prize may involve only a modest sum of money and still generate considerable symbolic capital. An exhibition at a respected institution changes how an artist is perceived. An important publication, a renowned gallery owner, participation in a biennale or inclusion in a major collection can have the same effect. Symbolic capital has a peculiar quality: it initially looks like recognition and may eventually turn back into very real money.
When Symbolic Capital Sits Directly on the Picture
A particularly beautiful, almost literal illustration of this idea can be found in Chinese art. Old Chinese paintings, and handscrolls in particular, frequently bear numerous red seals. Some belong to the artist; others to later owners, collectors and connoisseurs. Such seals could document that a work had passed through a particular collection, had been appreciated by an important connoisseur or preserved by a prominent owner. In the case of famous works, a visible biography thus developed directly on the artwork over the course of centuries.
Naturally, not every seal carried equal weight. The mark of an unknown owner held a different status from that of a famous collector, let alone an emperor. The work accumulated not only traces of its passage from owner to owner, but also, in a sense, layers of recognition. Provenance, connoisseurship and esteem were not recorded exclusively in an archive; they were, in part, written on the picture itself.
For our discussion, this is almost too perfect. What Bourdieu describes as symbolic capital can here, in places, actually be seen in red pigment on the work. A respected collector leaves his seal; his own authority thereby becomes part of the work’s history. If another famous owner is added later, that history continues to grow. And such provenance can, of course, substantially affect the work’s economic value today.
In the Western art world, something similar usually occurs outside the actual picture. The information appears in the catalogue raisonné: formerly in Collection X, exhibited at Museum Y, auctioned at Z, published in this or that catalogue. Today, we are generally reluctant to stamp the front of a Rembrandt simply because an important collector has acquired it. Yet the basic principle is related: those who have owned, shown, collected or recognised a work can influence how later generations perceive it.
In the Chinese tradition, symbolic capital is sometimes quite literally stamped. Here, it is more likely to take the form of a provenance list.
And with that, we approach the art market.
The Price of a Work and Its Value Are Not the Same Thing
In the previous part, we asked why a urinal in a plumbing-supply shop has a different price from an art-historically significant readymade. By this point, it is clear that the material value of an artwork may play a remarkably minor role. Canvas, pigment and wood do not automatically cost millions merely because they have been assembled in a particular order. What is being paid for is a complicated mixture of the work, the artist’s name, rarity, provenance, art-historical significance, demand, institutional recognition and expectation.
The art market does not produce this significance on its own. But it amplifies it. A gallery does not operate merely as a shop that hangs pictures on walls and waits for someone to walk in with a credit card. A serious gallery invests in artists, organises exhibitions, presents them at fairs, facilitates contacts, works with collectors and institutions, and builds reputation over the long term. At its best, it mediates between artistic work and the public. At its less favourable end, it still mediates—just with better canapés.
Nor do collectors buy exclusively what is objectively “best”. How could they? No such objective ranking exists. They buy out of enthusiasm, taste, conviction, social positioning, speculation, or some mixture of them all. Some collections later become extraordinarily important to art history. Others chiefly demonstrate that having a great deal of money and having sound judgement are two different talents.
A high price therefore does not automatically prove great art. Conversely, a low price does not prove insignificance. The art market and art history overlap, but they are not identical. Some artists command enormous prices during their lifetimes and later disappear from the canon. Others acquire economic value only after their deaths. The market is neither irrelevant nor omnipotent. It is one of several mechanisms by which attention is concentrated—and in a field containing more artworks than any one person could ever see, attention is a rather precious resource.
Perhaps the Real Problem Is Not Quality at All, but Visibility
As an artist, this thought naturally concerns me directly. I can develop a photographic series, plan it carefully, execute it well, create an intellectual coherence and prepare a presentation. Yet at first, only one thing is certain: the series exists. Whether anyone sees it is an entirely different question.
A website may be publicly accessible and still develop a remarkably private character on certain days. A good image that nobody knows does not thereby lose its quality. But it has almost no chance of becoming part of a larger artistic conversation. It must find its way into exhibitions, be published, discussed and shown, or be discovered by people who will, in turn, show it to others.
That is why, for example, I apply to open calls. Not because a jury, by selecting it, suddenly decides whether my photography is art. That would be a remarkable amount of power to grant an application form. A selection initially determines only whether a work becomes visible within a particular context. But precisely such decisions may have consequences. One exhibition leads to another encounter; a curator notices something; a publication emerges; a collector becomes interested—or nothing happens at all. That happens too.
This is the less romantic side of artistic work. A work requires not only creation, but circulation. And therein lies a certain injustice that can hardly be eliminated completely. Visibility requires time, knowledge, contacts, frequently money and, not least, the willingness to attend to it at all. The perfectly pure artist who lives only for the work and rejects every form of public exposure as corrupting may indeed create great art. He should merely not be surprised if the public eventually complies with his desire for absence.
Howard Becker: Artists, Surprisingly, Do Not Work Alone
Here, the American sociologist Howard S. Becker (1928–2023) complements Bourdieu’s perspective in an interesting way. In his 1982 book Art Worlds, he describes art not as the product of a single brilliant individual, but as the result of cooperative networks. An artwork often requires a multitude of people whose activities seem self-evident and are therefore easily rendered invisible.
A painter needs canvas, paints and perhaps framemakers. A musician needs instrument makers, organisers, technicians and performance venues. A film requires so many people that the end credits alone test the audience’s patience. Nor is my own photography made in the perfect solitude so beloved by the romantic image of the artist. Models contribute to the images. Manufacturers build the camera, lenses and lighting equipment. Software developers make digital processing possible. A laboratory or printing service may produce the print. Exhibition venues, curators and technical staff ensure that it eventually hangs on a wall.
This does not diminish authorship. It merely makes visible the fact that art is also a social practice. Becker speaks of “art worlds” as networks of people who cooperate on the basis of particular conventions. These conventions facilitate production. A photographer, for instance, need not explain afresh at every shoot what a focal length is; a musician need not reinvent musical notation before every concert; and a gallery owner generally expects a picture to possess some means of being attached to a wall. Artists may break conventions—but even the break works only because a convention existed beforehand.
This fits surprisingly well with our entire series. In the first part, Gombrich showed us that artists do not begin making images from zero. In the second, it became clear that originality always emerges within existing traditions. In the third, Danto and Belting demonstrated that art is comprehensible only within historical and cultural contexts. And now it turns out that not even production is entirely the solitary heroic act that artists’ biographies occasionally make it out to be. The genius is still there. It merely requires a surprising number of telephone numbers.
Who, Exactly, Is a Gatekeeper?
In this context, the term gatekeeper is frequently used. It refers to people or institutions able to decide who gains access to particular spaces of visibility. A gallery decides which artists it represents. A jury selects from applications. An editorial board decides which works are published. A museum decides what to acquire and exhibit. A curator determines which artists are included in a thematic exhibition.
The term can quickly sound suspicious. Gatekeepers seem like people standing before a marvellous garden and, for reasons of inexplicable malice, refusing to let anyone enter. In reality, selection is unavoidable. An exhibition featuring ten positions cannot show five thousand artists. A magazine has only a certain number of pages. A museum cannot collect everything. The problem, therefore, is not that selections are made. The more interesting questions are according to which criteria they are made, and who is allowed to make them.
Every selection creates visibility, and repeated visibility can build symbolic capital. If the same artists are shown repeatedly in respected institutions, they become more attractive to other institutions. Their importance appears to confirm itself. Naturally, this may be because the work really is excellent. But it may equally mean that recognition once acquired makes further recognition easier.
The sociologist Robert K. Merton called a similar mechanism in science the Matthew effect: those who already possess recognition find it easier to acquire more. A comparable mechanism can at least be observed in the art field. Fame produces attention; attention produces exhibitions; exhibitions, in turn, produce fame. For an unknown artist, therefore, the most difficult task is sometimes not convincing someone that the work is good. First, the artist must convince someone to look at it at all.
And Then There Is the Institution
Alongside Bourdieu and Becker, the so-called institutional theory of art, particularly associated with the American philosopher George Dickie (1926–2020), is relevant to our question. Put simply, Dickie emphasised the role of those social practices and institutions within which something acquires the status of an artwork. In a different form, he thus takes up the questions Danto had raised with his “artworld”.
Here, too, the theory should not be reduced to the caricature: “Art is whatever a museum director calls art.” The point is more interesting. Art does not simply exist as a scientifically measurable property of an object. A stone contains no chemical element called “art” that could be detected in a laboratory. A work’s status emerges within cultural practices: artists create works, exhibitions present them, critics discuss them, viewers encounter them and institutions place them within a context.
Duchamp’s urinal from Part III, in particular, shows why such theories became necessary at all. Once outward features no longer reliably reveal whether something is art, we must ask about social and historical conditions. This does, however, lead to an uncomfortable consequence: institutions do not merely describe art; they participate in producing its meaning. A museum acquiring a work does not simply declare, neutrally: “This object was already entirely significant; we merely happened to notice.” The acquisition itself changes its status. A retrospective at a major institution affects an artist’s art-historical standing. A substantial catalogue creates research and documentation. Archives preserve material for later generations. Institutions do not merely hold on to art. They shape the history that can later be told about it.
This gives them considerable responsibility.
The Canon: The List That Pretends Not to Be a List
Over time, all these decisions produce the canon. By this we mean those artists and works considered particularly important to a period. They appear in survey books, are taught at universities, hang in major museums and are reproduced again and again. Eventually, they seem so self-evident that it is easy to forget that this selection had to come into being in the first place.
Michelangelo belongs to the Renaissance, Rembrandt to the Baroque, Picasso to Modernism. It appears almost geological, as though these artists had been deposited in their respective strata by a law of nature. Yet the canon changes. Artists are rediscovered, assessments shift, previously marginalised groups receive greater attention and geographical perspectives broaden. The art history of recent decades, in particular, has asked intensely why women, non-European artists and certain social groups appeared so rarely in traditional narratives. The answer is not simply that no such artists existed. Access to education, commissions, institutions and collections—and later to the writing of history—was often distributed unequally.
The canon is therefore neither entirely arbitrary nor entirely objective. It rests on works that people consider significant for good reasons. But those reasons arise within historical societies, with their respective power structures, interests and blind spots. This does not mean that we must remove Michelangelo from the museum because he has been canonised. It merely means there may still be room beside Michelangelo.
Perhaps the Canon Is More a Memory Than a Ranking
I therefore find another conception more useful. Perhaps the canon is less an eternal ranking of the best artworks than a cultural memory. And like every memory, it remembers some things particularly well, others indistinctly, and an astonishing number of things not at all.
This brings us back to Filippo Lippi. When I stand with participants in my Umbria seminars before his frescoes in Spoleto and hear, “Never heard of him,” this does not mean that Lippi has disappeared from art history. To art historians, he is naturally an important figure. But in general cultural memory, he does not occupy the rank of Leonardo, Michelangelo or Botticelli. Other artists of his time have disappeared far more thoroughly.
Perhaps something similar will happen to today’s stars. Some names that currently dominate major fairs, magazines and auctions may interest only specialists five hundred years from now. Other positions that are barely visible today may be rediscovered. This is not a prophecy. We simply do not know. And that is precisely what makes the present so difficult to assess: we stand amid the unfiltered material from which later generations will construct their history.
We do not know what will remain.
This Does Not Mean, However, That Quality Is Entirely Irrelevant
By now, a rather depressing picture may have emerged: that art is made by galleries, museums, collectors, networks and capital, while the work itself plays a decorative supporting role somewhere in the background. That would be just as false as the opposing romantic notion that quality automatically prevails, entirely independently of social conditions.
An artwork must offer something capable of sustaining interest. Institutions can generate attention, but they cannot indefinitely keep every work artificially significant across generations. Judgements are re-examined, art historians disagree, collectors’ fashions pass, archives are read anew and works may later be seen in entirely different ways. The art world has power, but it does not have complete control over the future.
Perhaps, then, we must accept two things at once, even though at first they appear contradictory: quality matters. But quality alone does not guarantee visibility. Anyone who accepts only the first sentence romanticises the art world. Anyone who accepts only the second ends up believing that everything is merely power, market and connections, and that art itself is entirely irrelevant. Reality is probably more complicated. Regrettably, it has that habit.
What Does This Mean for an Artist?
First, something artists may not particularly wish to hear: the work does not necessarily end when the artwork is finished. Anyone who wants art to exist beyond the confines of the studio must find ways to put it into circulation. Exhibitions, applications, contacts with galleries, publications, websites, conversations, competitions and personal encounters are not necessarily an unpleasant commercial contamination of pure art. They are simply ways of allowing art to reach other people at all.
This does not mean that one should attend every opening, pursue every curator or adapt one’s work to the presumed taste of a jury. It becomes problematic when the strategy for visibility begins to determine the work itself. Yet the opposite idea is equally naïve: that one can simply put a work online and art history, sooner or later, will come knocking because of its inherent sense of justice. To the best of my knowledge, art history has no automatic notification service.
For my own work, this means negotiating a somewhat uncomfortable balancing act. I want to develop series that arise from my own engagement with art history, the body, shadow and photographic language. At the same time, I must ensure that these works are seen at all. Applications, exhibitions, conversations with galleries and publications are therefore part of the process. Not because a successful application makes a picture better, but because a picture nobody sees has little opportunity to exert an effect. For me, the boundary lies at the point where I would begin making pictures solely because they supposedly have better prospects within the art world.
Then the field would have won.
One should allow oneself at least a little resistance to Bourdieu.
So Who Really Decides?
After four essays, it would be exceedingly rude to answer this question merely with “It is complicated.” Let us therefore try to be somewhat more precise. The artist first decides what to create. The public decides what moves, interests or repels it. Galleries decide to whom they will provide sustained access to the public and the market. Curators and museums decide what is exhibited, collected and institutionally legitimised. Critics and writers help determine what is discussed and which meanings are proposed. Collectors decide where money, attention and long-term preservation flow. Universities and art historians help decide what is researched, taught and incorporated into historical narratives. And later generations take all these decisions apart once more and make new ones.
None of these groups possesses power alone, and none is entirely insignificant. The canon emerges from their interplay—their conflicts, errors, fashions, interests, insights and occasional corrections. It is therefore neither a pure selection by quality nor merely an instrument of power. It is the provisional outcome of a very long social negotiation over which images we consider worthy of remembrance.
And Thus Our Little Art History Ends Where It Actually Began
In the first part, the question was: Does art get better? Vasari would have liked to say yes. Hegel turned it into a question of history and our relation to the world; Wölfflin, into one of historical forms of seeing; and Gombrich, into one of inherited schemes and their transformation.
In the second part, we asked: Why must art be new? Kant led us to originality, Baudelaire to modernity, the avant-garde to radical rupture, Greenberg to the idea of a directed modernisation and Rosalind Krauss to the suspicion that absolute originality might itself be a myth. Perhaps independence consists less in having no predecessors than in doing something of one’s own with them.
In the third part, matters became thoroughly confusing. Duchamp placed a urinal in an art context; Beuys made fat philosophical and surprisingly expensive; Bertozzi & Casoni transformed ceramics into deceptively realistic rubbish; Warhol produced packaging; and Danto finally asked why one thing can be art and the other cannot. The answer led to the end of a single binding history of art and to a present in which very different forms are possible at the same time.
And now, in the fourth part, we discover that this freedom does not exist in a vacuum. Art needs a public. Public attention is organised. Visibility is distributed. Institutions participate in creating meaning. Markets assess, collectors select, museums preserve, critics interpret, and art historians eventually turn all this into history. In Chinese art, this history of recognition can sometimes be read quite literally in the seals of former owners and connoisseurs on the works themselves. Other cultures simply record the same history in catalogues, provenance lists and museum archives.
So what remains in the end? Perhaps only a rather modest conclusion: art is neither a linear history of progress nor a wholly arbitrary game in which everything is of equal value. It arises between work, artist, history, viewer and society. It has ancestors, needs a present, requires people who see it, and other people who will remember it later.
Whether one of my photographs will be among those things, I do not know.
That will be decided only when I will probably no longer have a say in the matter.
Perhaps that is just as well.
Literature and Further Reading
Pierre Bourdieu: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, French original published in 1979. A foundational work for Bourdieu’s analysis of taste, cultural capital and social distinction.
Pierre Bourdieu: The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, French original published in 1992. Particularly important for Bourdieu’s conception of cultural production as a field with its own positions, power relations and forms of capital.
Howard S. Becker: Art Worlds, 1982. Becker describes artistic production as a cooperative activity within social networks, thereby qualifying the notion of the completely isolated artistic genius.
George Dickie: Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, 1974. A central text of the institutional theory of art and of the role played by social practices in conferring the status of art.
Robert K. Merton: “The Matthew Effect in Science”, 1968. Although originally concerned with science, Merton’s Matthew effect describes a mechanism of cumulative recognition that is also illuminating for reflections on cultural visibility.
Pierre Bourdieu: The Field of Cultural Production, 1993. A collection of key texts on cultural fields, symbolic capital and the social conditions of artistic production.