Producers: Artists and Designers

Abstract

This chapter is about the different ways in which artists and designers have thought about and described the nature of their activities and the different ways they have organised themselves into groups or institu-tions. It is also about the relative status accorded artists and designers and the activities of art and design and how that status is related to the groups and institutions they are members of. In investigating these topics, this chapter begins what might be called the historical sociology of visual culture. It is claimed that the nature of the groups that artists and designers form is part of the analysis and explanation of their work; it is part of the explanation of visual experience and visual culture. This chapter and the following chapter will largely adopt the categories of groups and institutions proposed by Williams in his (1981) book Culture as they offer a clear and concise method of selecting and organising this complex and difficult material. This chapter will also, however, provide Williams’s usually empty cate-gories with historical and contemporary content. Some of this com-plexity and difficulty is a product of the fact that these groups in which artists and designers exist are closely bound up with the ways in which these artists and designers relate to their markets.