Recognition of recent art, the art of the ’60s, induces a sense of product proliferation. An example from industry is the big airplane, the DC-10, being followed by the short haul DC-9 in two different versions. Artists use their own work and each other’s in this way, rapidly, and systematically following up new ideas. In addition, the written criticism of the period has supplied visual art with instant commentary. There has been therefore a considerable increase in the number of short term orderly projections and there improvised interpretation. The effect is, to quote Henri Lefebvre, of an “enormous amount of signifiers liberated of insufficiently attached to their corresponding signifieds.” (5) In reaction to this has been wide spread discontent with the existing system of information-handling in the arts. The problem of art for the educated has taken on acute significance with the emergence of an alienated audience, for instance, the youth market and the black community. Reassessment by the artists and there role in society parallels their audience’s doubt about art’s centrality. The market or exchange value of art has been discussed since 1960, not as a source of prestige but as the taint of corruption. Art is a commodity in a part of the system but not in all of it, and at this point I am more interested in differentiation than reduction.

The art world can be viewed as “a shifting multiple goal coalition.” (6) It is, to continue regarding it as an organization, “ a ‘negotiated environment’. That is, long contracts with suppliers and customers, adherence to industry wide pricing, conventions, and support of stable ‘good business’ practice.” (7) The contracts are usually less formal in art and good business practice is pretty vague, but the parallel is there. Decisions in art galleries, museums, magazines, and publishing houses are made close to the working base of each enterprise, as in decentralization. Thus we have a network, not a hierarchic structure. As H. J. Leavitt points out, apropos of individual in a network: “It is enough, in some cases, if they are each touched by some part of a network of communication which also touches each of the others at some point.” (8) Such a pattern of partial information fits the complex movement of messages and influences in the art world. Raymond D. Cottoll has referred to “the principle of ‘simple structure’, which assumes that in an experiment involving a broad and well sampled set of variables; it is improbable that any single influence will effect all of them. In other words, it is more ‘simple’ to expect that any one variable will be accounted for by less than the full complexity of all the factors added together.” (9) This should be borne in mind for it is absolutely against my intention to reduce the art world to any single influence by describing it as an organization. On the contrary, it is only in this way that its complexity can be kept clear.

“The organization as a system has an output, a product, or an outcome, but this is not necessarily identical with the individual purposes of group members,” observe D. Katz and R. L. Kahn. (10) What is the outpost of the art world viewed as a system? It is not art because that exists prior to distribution and without the technology of information. The output is the distribution of art, both literal and in meditated form as text and reproduction. The individual reasons for distribution vary: with dealers it can be assumed to be the profit motive at one remove. Art galleries, museums, universities, publishers are all part of the knowledge industry, producing signifiers whose signifieds are works of art, artists, styles, periods.

F. E. Emery and E. L. Trist have discussed systems in relation to the various forms of environment that they occupy. The art world would seem to be more animated than a “placid clustered environment” but less momentous than a “turbulent field.” Between these two falls the “disturbed-reactive environment.”

This term refers to a situation in which there is more than one organization of the same kind; indeed, the existence of a number of similar organizations now becomes the dominant characteristic of the environmental field. Each organization does not simply have to take account of the others when they meet at random, but has also to consider that what it knows can also be known by others. The part of the environment to which it wishes to move itself in the long run is also the part to which the others seek to move. (11)

Certainly the art world meets Emery and Trist’s requirement of “the presence of similar others” in a disturbed reactive environment.

The principle of conflict of interest is fully applicable to the situation in the art world. There is, for example, the competition among artists to do a certain kind of work that is potential in the level of knowledge that a group of them shares. It applies also to the relationships among critics: these are rarely antagonistic, but it is noticeable that critics have not as a rule, reviewed one another’s books, though in the past few years Kozloff, Calas, Lippard, and Kirby have all published collections of their essays. The conflict of interest among museums is marked because topicality favors certain shows at certain times and the institutions know it and know each other knows. Thus there is considerable competition for a limited number of desirable properties. (12)