Howard S. Becker

"That accounts for a truly crazy cycle in which students repeat the worst stylistic excesses the journals contain, learn that those very excesses are what makes their work different from what every dam…"

"consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art."

"The point is professionalization. Academics-in-training worry about whether they are yet, can ever be, or even want to be professional intellectuals of the kind they are changing themselves into. Seco…"

"Every part of the photographic image carries some information that contributes to its total statement; the viewer's responsibility is to see, in the most literal way, everything that is there and resp…"

"work done by ordinary people in the course of their lives, work seldom thought of by those who make or use it as art at all."

"The prototype of the rule creator, but not the only variety as we shall see, is the crusading reformer. He is interested in the content of rules. The existing rules do not satisfy him because there is…"

"Maybe the years I spent playing the piano in taverns in Chicago and elsewhere led me to believe that the people who did that mundane work were as important to an understanding of art as the better-kno…"

"All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number of people. Through their cooperation, the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and c…"