Sociologist Howard S. Becker’s concept for the milieu that artists create and require in order to produce art. Like that of Bourdieu, Pierre, Becker’s ultimate goal is to show that art is not the product of the isolated genius, but is rather the product of a cooperative community. An art world consists of the institutions and people necessary to the production and consumption of artistic works. Becker uses this notion to challenge the notion that the artist as ‘genius creator’ is solely responsible for the production of his or her work. As Becker notes, even the isolated poet still needs someone to produce the pens, paper, and so on they need to make their art. The artist relies on a network of people working in a cooperative manner to bring their works into being. The scale of the network varies considerably according to the type of art, with poetry at the low end of the scale and cinema at the high end requiring many hundreds of people to realize it. Art worlds also create and maintain their own conventions of practice, which facilitates the production of art---e.g. consider how difficult it would be to make and share music without the convention of written musical notation. Further Reading: H. Becker Art Worlds (1982).