artworld

English

Alternative forms

• art world

Etymology

art +‎ world, popularized by art critic Arthur Danto (1924–2013), see quotations.

Noun

artworld (plural artworlds)

1. A group or network of people involved in the production, commission, preservation, promotion, criticism, and sale of art.
   • 1964 October 15, Arthur Danto, “The Artworld”, in The Journal of Philosophy, volume 61, number 19, page 584:

     Fashion, as it happens, favors certain rows of the style matrix: museums, connoisseurs, and others are makeweights in the Artworld. […] Brillo boxes enter the artworld with that same tonic incongruity the commedia dell'arte characters bring into Ariadne auf Naxos.

   • 2003 October 14, Alan Riding, “The Colors of Paradise As Imagined by Gauguin”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     Yet while Gauguin went native, taking teenage mistresses, wearing local costumes and building his own wooden hut, his ultimate purpose was to impress the art world back home.

   • 2007, Stephen Davies, Philosophical perspectives on art, page 67:

     Probably he would maintain that at least some of the regards intended for artworks are common to all the artworlds there are and that it is this feature that unifies these artworlds as of a single type.

   • 2010, Hazel Gardiner, Charlie Gere, Art Practice in a Digital Culture, page 19:

     Rather than being in conflict, it is more accurate to suggest that these institutions lack a clear understanding of how they relate to each other under the emergence of an academy artworld.