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Dickie develops institutional theory more explicitly: an artwork is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public, where the artworld is the set of practices and participants (artists, museums, critics, audiences) that recognize and sustain art. Rather than beauty, expression, or form, arthood depends on institutional recognition and placement. This theory accommodates conceptual, found-object, and non-traditional art while grounding definition in social practices rather than timeless essences.
From your study of Arthur Danto's concept of the artworld, you already understand the key insight that made institutional theory possible: what makes something art cannot be determined by looking at the object alone. Danto showed this through cases like Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes — visually identical to ordinary shipping cartons, yet accepted as art because of an atmosphere of theory and art-historical knowledge that surrounded them. George Dickie took this insight and tried to give it a more precise, procedural form. Where Danto gestured toward a diffuse intellectual context, Dickie asked: what exactly are the social mechanisms that confer art status?
Dickie's answer centers on institutional conferral. In his early formulation, an artwork is (1) an artifact (2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of the artworld have conferred the status of candidate for appreciation. Think of it as analogous to how a piece of paper becomes legal currency — not because of its physical properties, but because an institution (the government, the banking system) says it counts as money and people act accordingly. Similarly, a urinal becomes art not because of anything about porcelain, but because Marcel Duchamp, acting within the conventions of the art institution, presented it as a candidate for aesthetic consideration, and the artworld (eventually) accepted that presentation.
The strength of this theory is its inclusiveness. Traditional definitions of art — art as imitation, art as expression, art as significant form — all fail when confronted with works that deliberately reject those qualities. Conceptual art may have no physical form worth contemplating. Found-object art involves no craftsmanship. Minimalist sculpture may express nothing beyond its own materiality. The institutional theory handles all of these cases without strain, because it does not require any particular aesthetic property. It only requires that the work be situated within the network of practices — galleries, exhibitions, criticism, art education, collecting — that constitute the artworld.
Critics have raised important objections. The theory appears circular: art is what the artworld says is art, and the artworld is the institution that deals with art. Dickie acknowledged this circularity in his later work but argued it is not vicious — it reflects the genuinely interdependent nature of social institutions, where roles and practices define each other simultaneously. A more pointed objection is that the theory is too permissive: if anything can be art as long as the right people say so, then the concept of art seems to lose any evaluative force. Dickie would respond that the theory defines art classification, not art quality — the institution can confer art status, but that says nothing about whether the work is good art. Despite these tensions, the institutional theory remains one of the most influential frameworks for understanding how art functions as a social category rather than a natural kind.
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