Critics & Aestheticians

The first famous Abstract Expressionist painter was Jackson Pollock. Sociologically, his enormous success reveals the crucial importance of social relationships in artistic success. His friendships with, for example, the art theorist-critic-aesthetician Clement Greenberg and the hugely wealthy and influential Betty Parsons helped to guarantee his success, despite little consensus about his talent. That is, those within the art world (Le Monde, as Tom Wolfe calls it) charged with the right and authority to evaluate artists' talent could not agree about Pollock. Some liked him; many thought he was awful. The models presented below can be used to assess the pathways to artistic success.

I. 3 basic models of artistic success

          a. the model of aesthetic appraisal -
                1. established criteria precede new works
                2. those works are evaluated according to those standards
                3. for Pollock, then, we would expect to find fairly consistent evaluation of his works

          b. the model of social influence
                1. success happens independently of evaluation according
                      to fairly standardized criteria
                2. the artist becomes accepted as "major," despite the absence of
                        any widespread agreement about his or her work

          c.  the model of cultural persuasion
                1. leaders of an art movement create a new aesthetic that fits the new work
                2. success comes as a result of people's adoption of these new criteria as legitimate

As discussed in class, Pollock's success is best understood as a combination of both "b" & "c" -- i.e., as the result of sociological factors.

Return to Main Page