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Institutional theory (Danto, Dickie) argues that what makes something art is its relation to the artworld—a network of artists, critics, curators, galleries, museums, and audiences—not its intrinsic formal or representational properties. A readymade urinal becomes art when presented as art in a gallery; identical non-art objects differ only in this social context and interpretive frame.
From your introduction to aesthetics, you know that one of the field's oldest questions is: what is art? Traditional answers pointed to properties intrinsic to the object — beauty, skilled craftsmanship, expressive content, or formal excellence. The institutional theory of art breaks decisively with all of these by arguing that art status is not a property of the object at all but a status conferred by a social institution.
The theory crystallized around a problem that traditional definitions could not solve: Marcel Duchamp's readymades. In 1917, Duchamp submitted a mass-produced porcelain urinal, signed "R. Mutt," to an art exhibition. The object had no special beauty, required no artistic skill to produce, and expressed nothing beyond its mundane function. Yet it became one of the most discussed artworks of the twentieth century. How? Not because of any property the urinal possessed, but because Duchamp, acting as an artist within the artworld, presented it as a candidate for appreciation. The artworld — critics, galleries, art historians — received it as such, debated it, and ultimately canonized it. The urinal's art status was conferred, not discovered.
George Dickie formalized this insight into an explicit definition. In his version, 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. Each element matters. The artifact requirement means that sunsets and natural landscapes are not art (though photographs of them can be). The artworld requirement means that art is not a private act — it depends on a social framework of practices, institutions, and recognized roles. And "candidate for appreciation" is deliberately broad: the work need not actually be appreciated or even be good; it just needs to be put forward within the right institutional context as something to be considered as art.
The institutional theory explains phenomena that intrinsic-property theories cannot. It explains why identical objects can differ in art status — a snow shovel in a hardware store is not art, but Duchamp's *In Advance of the Broken Arm* (a snow shovel displayed in a gallery) is. It explains why art's boundaries keep expanding: as the artworld evolves, new kinds of objects and practices become eligible for the conferral of art status. And it explains why cross-cultural disagreements about what counts as art often reduce to disagreements about institutional authority — who gets to do the conferring, and within what framework.
Critics of the theory charge that it is circular: art is what the artworld says is art, and the artworld is defined as the institution that deals with art. Dickie acknowledged this circularity but argued it is not vicious — it simply reflects the fact that art is a socially constructed category, like money or law, whose definition is irreducibly bound up with the practices that sustain it. Whether or not you find this fully satisfying, the institutional theory permanently shifted the conversation in aesthetics from "what properties make something art?" to "what social practices and contexts make something art?" — a reframing whose influence extends well beyond philosophy into curatorial practice, art criticism, and art law.
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