Art Words and Art Worlds: The Methodological Importance of Language Use in Howard S. Becker’s Sociology of Art and Cultural Production

Abstract

This article reviews Howard S. Becker’s work on cultural production. It suggests that Becker’s influential framework for analysing cultural production, the art world, leaves us with one important but unanswered question: the question of methodology. Exploring this question by a close reading of Becker’s writings and noting recent uses of the art world framework in combination with social psychological methods, the article explains why language use, or art words, offers us a powerful way to study the collective action of cultural production in art worlds.