5
Misrecognizing Misrecognition:
The Capacity to Influence in the Milieux of
Comics and Fine Art
Simon Grennan
Abstract
This article considers some of the relationships between subjects, social institutions, media, and ideas that characterize differences between the environments in which both comics and fine art are produced, used, and become comprehensible. It outlines a specific theoretical framework encompassing these differences, describ-ing the discursive co-dependency between forms of media, the uses to which they are put, and the habits of thought and expectation engendered by these uses. The article describes the institutional realization of relative capacities to influence, in the creation of value (both as social status and economic status), and asks if is it possible to consider the general structures that finally manifest in the specific differences between conceptions of artworks and comics.
Keywords
Crossing boundaries of language and culture, the international contemporary fine art market is a large-ly monolithic, cohesive social environment built upon the post-War, four-way participation of commercial fine art dealers, private collectors, trade journals, and publicly maintained cultural institutions (McAndrew). It is into this environment that contemporary fine artists both inveigle themselves and deliver new works of art as raw material, if they are interested in acquiring status and making money in this particular marketplace. The practices that constitute this market transform these works, and to some extent an image of the artist, into branded status commodities that can be traded or laid up, in a continual process of validation and disavowal amongst the market’s four types of participants, that ultimately produces both historically inviolable commod-ities (or “masterpieces”) and the putative narrative of their creation (or contemporary art history).
The identification of this market as the semiotic engine generating the relative significance of fine art objects, encompassing and superseding an older paradigm of the adjudication of their value, which was based on the concept of the unique properties of these objects, largely derives from Arthur Danto’s attempts to theorize a hermeneutics of art in the mid 1960s. Danto claims that explanations of both the past and possible functions of art, broadly produced as contemporary art history, are only comprehensible given an expertise in art as a topic (or a profession), and that this expertise derives from a dynamic of consensus and attrition, or differences in expert opinion, which validates or disavows the different levels of shared expertise that this creates.
Danto’s idea of the hermeneutic power of consensus was extrapolated and placed on a comprehensive sociological footing by both George Dickie and Howard Becker although, as this article will indicate, their general approaches to theorizing the relationship between value and types of consensus/attrition remains rela-tively shallow, in that they both approach Danto’s “artworld” somewhat as a special case, rather than placing it within a wider conception of the function of this relationship itself. However, in extrapolating Danto’s her-meneutic theory, Dickie arrives at the notion of the art world as an institution, or a self-correcting system in which the status of the artwork derives from the degree to which individual iterations either confirm or deny the functions of the institution. Further, Becker places this idea in the context of the wider creation of institu-tions socially, as a network of confirmatory or inimical relainstitu-tionships between iteration and consensus, writing:
Art worlds typically have intimate and extensive relations with the worlds from which they try to distinguish themselves. They share sources of supply with those other worlds, recruit personnel from them, adopt ideas that originate in them, and compete with them for audiences and financial support. (36)
More recently, Vera Zolberg has pursued this idea in detail, analyzing the way in which cultural prod-ucts are continually re-categorized according to changes in types of social consensus brought about by de-velopments in technology, for example. She maps some of the ways in which the status of experiences of the products of the entertainment industry is changing relative to experiences of artworks validated by the inter-national fine art market.
Alternatively, the markets for comic strips are historically differentiated along language lines, into a handful of distinct production and consumption cultures that are still only peripherally integrated, with a
7 couple of anomalous exceptions (Berthou and Martin)1. A major absence of a history of translation of
Fran-cophone works into the languages of other markets demarcates the existence of FranFran-cophone brands––that is, reader expectations—overriding potential market synergies between European cultures, for example. Al-ternatively, and quite distinctly, the consumption of translated manga in America in the last 10 years is a case study in the rapid creation of a market for more than a brand, but rather an entire genre, as Casey Brienza points out. Although the practices of this new market have had an impact on the practices of older, as it were, “home” markets, they have as yet not consolidated them. In English, Bart Beaty provides a masterful analysis of the history and mechanisms of the Anglophone American market, again utterly distinct, in his 2012 Comics Versus Art.
These differences, very lightly touched upon here, constitute definitions of each market according to differences in practices between them––that is, differences in the ways in which the contemporary fine art mar-ket and comics marmar-kets are imagined, historicized, produced, distributed, promoted, and consumed, as well as differences in their formal trends relative to the histories and expectations of their readers and consumers. As Dickie, Becker, Zolberg, and subsequently Beaty, discuss, it is the differences and similarities in practices of these social environments (the contemporary fine art market and the markets for comics) that are significant, rather than any formal differences between art objects and comics. Formal definitions of both comics and art are aspects of profound, systemic sets of conventions encompassing attitudes, histories, and practices, beyond which they are flotsam––not meaningless, of course, but significantly set adrift.
However, despite recognizing that value is produced not by the reification of sets of formal, that is, phenomenal, properties of media, but by interactions of power relationships founding and overriding both habits of use of comics and artworks, and expectations of them, Danto, Dickie, Becker, Zolberg and Beaty re-main largely concerned with the conditions and effects of the historical reception of these two types of cultural product, rather than attempting to theorize or explain the ways in which value is itself produced across both milieux and, plausibly, in all milieux. A problem exists with this approach, in that it limits all potential expla-nations to analysis of historic instantiations and the “post hoc” relationships between them. This limitation results in Danto’s claim that the relationships that constitute the milieu of fine art are socially and culturally unique: he is not able to explain the creation of value within the closed hermeneutic system that he describes in any other way.
Rather than adopt this approach, on the basis of the brief description of the institutional realization of power relationships or relative capacities to influence that constitute the practices of both comic and fine art in the production of value (both as social status and economic status), is it possible to consider the general 1 In “La lecture de bande dessinées: quelle étude?” which introduces critical analysis of the data produced in a large 2015 survey of French comics readers, Berthou and Martin say, “‘art’ et ‘divertissement’ ne sont en rien opposés mais vont de pair quant aux données que nous avons récoltées. La bande dessinée semble dès lors nous proposer de penser un nouveau régime artistique […]. Celui-ci ne relève en tout cas nullement du schéma de la ‘distinction’ hérité de Pierre Bourdieu […] et nous pouvons plus largement nous demander si nous ne faisons pas face à une forme de culture existant hors de ses traditionnels modes de hiérarchisation” [“‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ are not opposed, but go together, according to the data we gathered. Therefore, the comic seems to propose a new artistic regime […]. In any case, this is not Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘distinction’ model […], more broadly, we should consider wheth-er or not we are facing a cultural form outside traditional cultural hiwheth-erarchies”] (27, my translation). Furthwheth-er, “la bande dessinée relève peut-être en ce sens d’une forme de fétichisme que permettent d’analyser dans notre questionnaire les données portant sur l’achat, l’emprunt et la collection de bandes dessinées” [“The comics register acknowledges a form of fetishism that makes possible an analysis of our survey data in terms of the purchase, loan and collection of comics”] (30, my translation).
structures that finally manifest in the specific differences between conceptions of artworks and comics? An approach to answering this question (and thus arriving at an explanation for the functions of value creation that can be generalized across milieux) can be made by interrogating possible ways in which concepts mod-ulate and guide percepts, identifying and characterizing a relationship between phenomena and ideas. Taking such an approach is sanctioned by Danto’s, Dickie’s, Becker’s, Zolberg’s and Beaty’s insight that the relative significance of phenomenal effects, or media forms, are solely the product of power relationships. The notion is that the relative significance of forms reveals the relative significance of practices and practitioners. Rath-er than make that an end of an explanation, according to analysis of historic instantiations, thRath-ere is anothRath-er possible theoretical step to take: the relative significance of practices and practitioners reveals the functional relationships between the experience of things and ideas held about those experiences. We shall see, on this basis, that an adequate general explanation of the relationship between ideas and phenomena enrichens (and indeed, can underwrite) an analysis of historic instantiations such as those produced by Danto, Dickie, Becker, Zolberg and Beaty.
Explaining such a relationship requires briefly stepping back from analysis of the reception histories of both comics and fine art and considering the question in general: is it possible to consider the general struc-tures that finally manifest in the specific differences between conceptions of artworks and comics? Fortunate-ly, a description of a simple situation can exemplify this relationship. As an example, this situation benefits from belonging to neither the milieux of comics or fine art but will enable us to return to those milieux with a general explanatory function intact. Here it is: if I stand in front of a building, I see the building, but I do not also see inside it or around it. However, I believe that it has both an interior and other sides. In fact, I perceive it as having the properties of “an interior” and “other sides.” Perceiving a building and also perceiving aspects of the building that are not immanent, I adjudicate perception in a relationship between perception and belief about what I have perceived. Not only is there a distinction between my perception and the object of my per-ception, there is also a distinction between my perception and my understanding of what I perceive. There is the building (the object of perception) about which this understanding constitutes a belief.
As I perceive the building, I do not perceive the interior of the building or the sides of the building that I cannot see. I perceive the building and perceive myself imagining the properties of “an interior” and “other sides.” The object of perception requires consciousness of a perceiving subject in order for it to be perceived. Consequently, a constituent of my perception of the building is a type of belief about it, and this belief is phenomenal, or perceived. This model then locates the subject as a structural aspect of a process of imagining aspects of the phenomenal world. This imagining introduces belief to an explanation of perception and phenomena, the role of which is to modulate, revise and reconstitute perception according to the creation of a subject. This constitutes intersubjective, social, and cultural knowledge.
To continue the example, my belief in those properties of the building that I cannot perceive also in-volves a functional ascription of value, both in Charles Broad’s sense of “obligation” or “deontology,” but also in the widest sense of adjudications of preference, approbation and disapprobation relative to what is both perceived and imagined. There is no neutral-value ontology in a structure of relative point of view. Hence, imagining ascribes value. This is the axiomatic characteristic of the perceived belief in the existence of un-perceived properties, relative to perception: in including itself as an object of perception, my point of view
9 ascribes value. This proposal lies at the heart of an explanation of the relationship between phenomena and ideas, which realizes the relative significance of institutional practices and practitioners, which in turn realizes the relative significance, that is, status, of types of media forms.
How are these values adjudicated? In perceiving a building and believing that it has properties that I do not perceive, I imagine myself in my relationship with the building. The value that I ascribe to this imagined relationship, including my part in it, can be described according to the degree of promotion of, or resistance to, this imagined relationship. My imagined beliefs about my relationship with the building are categorical and propositional. They are representations of the subject made by adjudicating the value of the imagined rela-tionship between the building and the subject. Hence, the subject describes either the coadunatory or inimical interrelation between systems of beliefs, ideas, or ascribed meanings, and phenomenal and social experiences of the world, which these systems either affirm or belie. It realizes the promotion or resistance of different types of imagining on the basis that they either reproduce or contradict a dominant structure of belief.
These structures of belief are phenomenal and affective because they are representations that are pro-duced and perceived. This is what Valentin Vološinov means when he insists that the structures of ideas that are realized in representations cannot be described except according to “the material basis” of the representation itself, even if this representation is cognitive and interoceptive. Further, this “material basis” can be nothing other than institutional––it is instantially produced relative to nominal behavior–– and therefore productive of degrees of resistance and compliance, creating society, as Antoine Destutt de Tracy proposed2.
The structures of beliefs are derived from the semiotic instantiation in present-time of the general po-tential resources of the body. As with the realization of any type of representation, structures of belief do not represent themselves. Rather they are only perceptible in realizations of their coadunatory or inimical func-tions in representafunc-tions. In this sense, representafunc-tions are simply acfunc-tions and the products of acfunc-tions. My be-having in a particular way and not in another realizes the system of ideas that structures my actions, in making changes to the ecology of the body. On this basis, it is possible to describe the way in which imagining itself is inhibited and facilitated. Imagining is inhibited and facilitated by degrees of resistance to or promotion of those values ascribed to unperceived properties in which there is a belief, where imagining is instantial relative to an institutional norm3.
Then the question remains as to the function by which resistance or promotion of one type of imagin-ing or another occurs. How is the nominal aspect of an institutional structure realized? What makes the nomi-nal? Simply, the nominal is believed to be what is true, and what is true is determined by the subject’s capacity to influence, that is, to make representations that are believed to be true. Hence, where nominal structure and individual iteration fully coincide, then what can be imagined can both be imagined and can be imagined to be true, and where they least coincide, either nothing can be imagined (imagination fails) or what is imagined is false.
The capacity to imagine oneself perceiving then allows “misrecognition,” or an internalized submis-sion to the status of the object of perception, including self-perception, that also insists on its own truth. This 2 He writes, “Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges” (6).
3 The use of the concept of the resistance to or promotion of types of imagining––of ideas––in explaining how the subject is created and institutions reproduce themselves, is first found in Marx and Engels, Mannheim, and Gramsci (12, 259, and 260).
hegemonic function, within which the subject continually struggles and by which it is subsumed, inculcates an imaginative as well as cognitive consensus, characterized by solipsism, and identifying particular situa-tions and behavior as pan-historic, a-temporal and pan-social. Concepts such as “true,” “woman,” or “nature” fall into this category, for example. As a result, different propositions about the world insist on their truth in opposition to others as a prerequisite of struggle itself, so that both ideas and imagining become instruments in social struggles between different types of misrecognition. It is not only a matter of the relative absence or presence of perceived and expected cues that inhibit imagining, but also of the similarity in the stance that the subject adopts towards perception in self-perceiving.
In bringing this general theorization to a close, I must not omit bodily practices and every type of so-cial manifestation and institution from the explanation. The promotion or resistance to ideas constitutes the capacity to imagine within conventions of inhibition and facilitation. Thus the constitutive generation of the subject, as a function of imagination, occurs in a dynamic relationship with the production of material prac-tices through habituation—not only through cognition or acts of imagination, but though the perpetuation and reproduction of types of actions and responses, even at the most micro level, and certainly in producing and understanding representations.
Having identified and characterized a relationship between phenomena and ideas, we are able consider some of the relationships between subjects, social institutions, media, and ideas that characterize differenc-es between the social environments in which both comics and fine artworks are produced, used, and made comprehensible. A specific theoretical framework can encompass these differences, describing the discursive co-dependency between forms of media, the uses to which they are put, and the habits of thought and expec-tation engendered by these uses. This theoretical frame describes these relationships as ideology, deriving in general from Karl Mannheim’s and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ critiques of ideocracy, the promotion of or resistance to ideas on the grounds of the degree to which they reproduce or contradict a dominant social structure4. Theorized this way, ideology is not a set of ideas, but rather the consolidatory or antagonistic
re-lationship between sets of ideas and people’s different experiences of the world, which these ideas might or might not contradict.
Struggle, resistance, and compliance are then as important in mapping the possibilities and limitations of imagining as they are in theorizing the emergence of institutional structures and, in particular, in discussing a significant manifestation of this struggle: the adoption of the practices and beliefs, as instantiations, relative to the nominal aspects of institutions, for whom the adoption constitutes subjective compliance, termed cultur-al hegemony. Hegemony, in this sense, is an operation in the field of a struggle to imagine, in which adopted meanings embody the perceived world and all of its changing possibilities and impossibilities.
Hence, the relationships between the dominant ideas of one group of people and the world experiences of other groups include misrecognition as a systemic function. Those ideas that dominate social discourse in any particular circumstance are not actively misrepresented by the dominant order, according to this model, but rather are misrecognized by others for whom their functions are invisible and for whom they are socially and materially disadvantageous. Here, a process of misrecognition is important because it adds complexity to the foundational idea in this model: that embodied social discourse in the form of practices and institutions
11 generates systems of ideas rather than the reverse. In cultural hegemonic relationships, however, imagined relationships motivate practices, apparently counter-intuitively. One of the functions of this misrecognition is an imaginative projection of timelessness upon hegemonic ideas. As a result, the function of cultural hegemo-ny is to inculcate a cognitive consensus identifying particular ideas not with the interests or behavior of one social group or other, but with a pan-historic, a-temporal, and pan-social concept such as “nature,” “human” or “quality,” for example.
Building on this, I can argue that the promotion or resistance to ideas occurs alongside a hegemonic inculcation of material practices through habituation, not only through cognition or acts of imagination, but though the perpetuation and reproduction of types of actions and responses, even at the most micro level, such as gestures. Different groups of people utilize different types of expression from each other and utilize their bodies differently. As a result, these practices literally embody comprehensions of social differences and take a part, alongside the imaginative projection of ideas, in hegemonic relationships, the reproduction of social structures, and the broader struggles to influence. In these terms, ideology is dynamic. As Anthony Giddens identifies, “logonomic systems are by no means irresistible: on the contrary, the extent to which they hold sway or break down […] is itself [a] symptom of the state of society,” so that levels of equilibrium between the capacity to influence, on one hand, and the effect of dominant convention, on the other hand, articulate mu-tually antithetical affects and sustain dynamic contradictions, producing both social structures and individual agency (120).
Given this theoretical lens, in which practices and ideas are both codependent and systemically ob-scured, it is possible to take up the threads of Danto’s, Dickie’s, Becker’s, Zolberg’s and Beaty’s analysis of historic iterations in the milieux of comics and of fine art and approach any number of situations as realizations of the relative significance of institutional practices and practitioners, and specific relationships between phe-nomena and ideas. It is important that we do not think of these relationships as either circular or tactic: they are strictly hypotactic (that is, they function between and not across levels of structure), in that media forms do not realize institutions, but are realized by them, and institutions do not realize relationships between phe-nomena and ideas, but rather are realized by them. This condition of this explanation of the functions of forms, institutions, phenomena and ideas is adequate to obviate the need for a theorization of the status systems which structure historic iterations, beyond the analysis of historic iterations themselves.
Recall that I am proposing that we consider the analysis of historic iterations according to the reali-zation relationships between media forms, institutional practices and ideas in order to explain differences in status and significance according to a general model of the relationship between phenomena and ideas, that is, in order to make an explanation that is unavailable via the historic analysis of case studies or groups of case studies alone.
In this sense only, consider the productions of a number of artists whose status within the marketplaces of comics and fine art is either: a) transitional from comics markets to the fine art market (such as Gary Panter), or b) instrumentally utilizing generic ideas of one set of market practices in, say Anglophone comics, held by the participants in another market, such as the contemporary fine art market (such as Janette Parris and Ray-mond Pettibon) or c) applying established methods from one market to encompass and objectify the practices of another (such as Roy Lichtenstein, following, say Édouard Manet). Beaty devotes considerable attention
to Panter’s career, but his broadly historiographic analysis (which makes use of the notion that developments in the forms of Panter’s work are attempts by Panter to reverse engineer the inequitable status relationship between comics and art) does not explain how such a reverse engineering might function, but only that Panter provides a good example of a practitioner aware of the different relationships between media forms and the institutions that produce them. Considering an example of transition from the comics market to the fine art market, the vocal and perspicacious Panter is both familiar with and inured to the social mechanics of the fine art market, which he patently understands as a result of status-driven and finance-driven, often frustrated, at-tempts to transform his material and himself by changing his market. Panter sees no reason for his comics to be less valuable than fine artwork, apart from his relative lack of success in the fine art market or, rather, his inability to participate fully in the core practices that make the market. He is right. There is no reason for the disparity in value, apart from the performance of the work in two different markets (Beaty 132-133).
Parris, on the other hand, is a historic participant in the fine art market, self-positioning through the Goldsmith’s College Masters Program in London in 1994, an established market gateway at the time. Parris made aspects of the fine art market’s generic, that is, generalized, notion of comics part of her promotional “brand.” Joining a contemporaneous art market fashion for public participation, and coinciding with the early Anglophone rise of autobiographical and confessional comics, comics offered one formal response to the op-portunity for presenting People’s History as a fine art commodity.
Similarly, although with quite different raw materials, Pettibon also commodifies aspects of perceived comics culture for the fine art market. Pettibon’s work both matches and objectifies the list of characteristics of practice of Anglophone American comics discussed by Beaty: appeals to folk nationalism; the appearance of a dynamic of exclusion and inclusion which turns on an axis of arcane knowledge or expertise, coupled with the projection of marginalization; “outsiderness” or a sense of social disenfranchisement; a lack of academic training in culture; and visionary psychology and a sense of exclusive belonging, in opposition to a cultural mainstream. Of course, Pettibon’s artworks are not authorless in the sense that Beaty describes American comics as historically seeming authorless. Rather, aided by his high profile as a punk scenester, Pettibon trans-forms these characteristics into the unique attributes of a single author––himself––one of the prerequisite of art market practices5.
The development of the status of the artworks of both Parris and Pettibon, with specific different de-grees of success, are antithetical to Panter. While Panter seeks to create parity between the different dede-grees of status of comics and artworks, by appealing to their putative formal properties, Parris and Pettibon strategical-ly index the lower status of their products as part of the creation and maintenance of a commoditized idea of authenticity: they have attained sufficient capacity to influence, in the milieu of the fine art market, to enable them to trade upon exactly those properties in their products which Panter seeks to diminish. They utilize ge-neric ideas of one set of market practices in order to influence the participants in another.
Lichtenstein, on the other hand, although still often discussed as an “appropriator” of comics’ forms, was, perhaps paradoxically, a conservative painter repeating the historically tested social formulae of other 5 Kimmelman takes both Pettibon and his high status in the art market at face value, writing that he was “a marginal, cultish scrib-bler and lyric poet of obsessive, black-humored art,” who has “now become one of the exalted fixtures on the international art scene,
13 successful contemporary painters. This historically tested method constitutes the application of established methods from one market to encompass and objectify the practices of another. In a reading that is antithetical to much of the analysis of Lichtenstein’s iconography, it is possible to claim that he did not employ the formal devices of comics at all. Rather, he made paintings that depicted comics, in the way that Fantin-Latour had made paintings that depicted vases of flowers or Millais had made a painting that depicted Ophelia. In this, Lichtenstein follows Manet, whose depictions of depictions form a minor but important part of a project to enumerate the experiences of the contemporary life of the 1870s. For Lichtenstein, comics imagery provid-ed a painting challenge––that is, how to make paintings depicting contemporary American life in the 1950s and 1960s. However, for the fine art market of the period, paintings depicting comics provided essential new news6.
Considering these examples in ideological terms, the social antagonism between different propositions about the world requires that competing propositions insist on the truth of their particular vision, in opposition to others, as a foundation of struggle itself, rather than producing any understanding that contingency is the single condition by which hegemony is undermined. By insisting on this truth, both comics and works of art become objects without a subject, which are theoretically disembodied, in which specific tropes are identified with hierarchically arranged meanings, emerging with pan-subjective, pan-cultural consistency across all hu-man times and places. They become fixed tools used in social struggles between different types of misrecog-nition.
It is not surprising, then, that there is still contemporary currency in both misrecognition and the per-petuation of objectification in some traditions within the academic discipline of art history, for example, par-ticularly if we recall that art history is always a putative origin story. Art historian Claire Bishop exemplifies misrecognition when she writes in her 2012 Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship “art is given to be seen by others” (241). This description demarcates the way in which the experience of a work of art is placed theoretically beyond the discourse of the work (including the practices that constitute a market) in any way other than as a distinct situation in which, alone, a scopophillic view can be taken. In effect, this theoretical delimitation of the experience of an audience is an art-historical definition of the work of art itself, or an approach to cultural experience that misrecognizes and effaces social relationships by objec-tifying and instrumentalizing them.
As Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress remind us, the social equilibrium achieved through this type of objectification constitutes exactly a misrecognition of those social praxes that produce the situation itself because “‘truth’ and ‘reality’ […] mark agreement over or challenges to the temporary state of the semiotic system,” so that “‘Truth’ is therefore a description of the state when social participants […] accept the system of classification” (122 and 130). From a fine art market point of view, there are no reasons why the use of the forms of comics should be a special case: this market is interested only in renewing, maintaining, and histor-ically validating the partnerships and practices that constitute it as “true.” As I have described, on this basis, the central question remains as to the function by which resistance or promotion of one type of imagining or another occurs. How is the nominal aspect of an institutional structure realized? What makes the nominal, if 6 Beaty describes the debates that apply the idea of plagiarism to Lichtenstein’s iconography without considering the possibilities either that he is not utilizing the visual tropes of comics to present a distinct depicted object (the “reality” of contemporary life), or that comics are, in fact, the objects of his paintings––that he is literally painting pictures of comics. See Beaty (51-69).
the nominal is always true?
Any type of form is plausible on the occasion of its recognition, or should I say production by institutional practices, realizing a specific relationship between phenomena and ideas. Imagining ascribes value to phenom-ena, but imagining is an institutional function, the specific iterations of which are only mandated according to relative capacities to influence. The solipsism between media forms and the capacity to influence is itself a function of the institution that neither formal properties nor, as in the case of Panter, practitioner awareness of the mechanisms by which these formal properties are accorded significance, can either contradict or override.
Works Cited
Beaty, Bart. Comics Versus Art. Toronto UP, 2012. Becker, Howard. Art Worlds. California UP, 2008.
Berthou, Benoît, and Jean-Philippe Martin. “La lecture de bande dessinées: quelle étude?” La bande dessinée: quelle lecture, quelle culture? edited by Benoît Berthou, Editions de la Bibliothèque publique d’infor-mation, collection “Etudes et Recherches,” 2015, pp. 1-35.
Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. Verso, 2012. Brienza, Manga in America. Bloomsbury, 2016.
Broad, Charles. Five Types of Ethical Theory. Routledge, 2000.
Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy vol. 61, no. 19, 1964, pp. 571-84. Destutt de Tracy, Antoine. A Treatise on Political Economy. Centre for Health Education, 1970. Dickie, George. Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Cornell University Press, 1974. ______. The Art Circle: A Theory of Art. Haven, 1984.
Hodge, Robert, and Gunther Kress. Social Semiotics. Polity, 1988.
Giddens, Anthony. New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies. Stan-ford UP, 1993.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers, 1971.
Kimmelman, Michael. “The Underbelly Artist.” The New York Times Magazine, 9 Oct. 2005, http://www. nytimes.com/2005/10/09/magazine/the-underbelly-artist.html. Accessed 10 June 2016.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology. Martino, 2011.
Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Martino, 2015. McAndrew, Clare. TEFAF Art Market Report 2014: the global art market, with a focus on the US and China.
The European Fine Art Foundation, 2014.
Vološinov, Valentin. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Harvard UP, 1973. Zolberg, Vera. Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. Cambridge UP, 1990.
Dr. Simon Grennan is a scholar of visual narratology (www.simongrennan.com). He is author of A Theory
of Narrative Drawing (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), co-editor, with Laurence Grove, of Transforming Anthony Trollope: “Dispossession,” Victorianism and 19th century word and image (Leuven University Press 2015) and contributor to Representing multiculturalism in comics and graphic novels (Routledge 2014) and others. He is the creator of Dispossession, a graphic adaptation of a novel by Anthony Trollope (Jonathan Cape and Les Impressions Nouvelles 2015) and, since 1990, half of the international artists team Grennan &
Speran-15 dio, which has produced of over forty comics and books (www.kartoonkings.com). Dr. Grennan is Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of Chester and Principal Investigator for the two-year research project Marie Duval presents Ally Sloper: The female cartoonist and popular theatre in London 1869-85, funded by an AHRC Research Grant: Early Career (2014).
