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John Cage said that music is the moral evaluation of sound. We might generalize his remark: when we speak of art, we make a moral evaluation of the relative worth of the various contributions to a work. It is no surprise that many of the participants differ with more conventional evaluations and rank their own contributions as more important than that of the artist as conventionally defined.

— Howard S. Becker Art Worlds (1982)

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More quotes by Howard S. Becker

I think it is generally true that sociology does not discover what no one ever knew before.

Art Worlds (1982)

(Art worlds) 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.

Art Worlds (1982)

The normal development of people in our society (and probably in any society) can be seen as a series of progressively increasing commitments to conventional norms and institutions.

Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963)

The marketing people don't care about the elegance and perfection that impresses the engineers' peers. They think engineers are impractical cuckoos who would just as soon bankrupt the company by pursuing perfectionist pipe dreams.

Writing for Social Scientists (1986)

Good sociology is sociological work that produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanations of how they come about and persist, and realistic proposals for their improvement or removal.

Becker (1972)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Howard S. Becker (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.