Tattoo is a traditional art form spread over many cultures and societies. There is evidence of tattoo 12,000 years before Christ. This art form has spanned across different cultures, and carried with it different meanings. Associated with  elitist, and even sometimes eroticism, the meaning of this art form continues to transform. Tattoo traveled to American  society and became a popular art of the elite. Soon electric tattooing made the art affordable and the elite's saw little  reward in wearing something that was affordable to the average person. Tattoo changed from elegant to deviant almost  over night. The art began to define different social classifications and values in American society. The fascinating factor  is that today it has become very popular art form among the radical elite's, and is returning to a mainstream socially  accepted art form; but why? Has the art world changed its values or redefined art?

To define the art and understand the cultural and social meaning of aesthetic value, we must first define what an art  world is. Greetz writes, "All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large  number, of people.... The work always shows signs of that cooperation. The forms of cooperation may be ephemeral, but often become more or less routine, producing patterns of collective activity we can call an art world. The existence   of art worlds, as well as the way their existence affects both the production and consumption of the art, suggesting a sociological approach to the arts. It is not an approach that produces aesthetic judgments, although that is a task many  sociologist of art have set for themselves. It produces, instead, an understanding of the complexity of the cooperative networks through which art happens" (Becker: 1982). This demonstrates that the art world surrounding "tattoo" is all  of those who take part in the art, from those who make the needles, ink, chairs, web pages, and even the advertisements  displaying tattoo. This demonstrates that art forms are placed in a larger socially active realm. The cooperation of many  individuals to support the art gives the art its significance, and value. These social activities are incorporated into a  larger context of social patterned behavior and cultural cleavages that define social construction. For example, those  who admire paintings often give donations to the museum who displays this art form. This art world also collects the art and supports the artist of his or her choice, thus supporting the continuance of the art. The direct social interaction  of defining what social order they are apart of, is defined in their actions of who and what they support. "The definition of art in any society is never wholly intra-aesthetic, and indeed but rarely more than marginally so. The chief problem  presented by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force, in whatever form and in result of whatever skill it may come, is  how to place it within the other modes of social activity, how to incorporate it into the texture of a particular pattern of life. And such placing, the giving to art objects a cultural significance, this is always a local matter..."(Geertz: 1983).
 By defining what they feel is "high" art and those who deliver it, they are defining their place within that particular  social structure, thus loosing the credibility to define the art.

 "One important faucet of a sociological analysis of any social world is to see when, where, and how participants draw the lines that distinguish what they want to be taken as characteristic from what is not to be so taken. Art worlds  typically devote considerable attention to trying to decide what is and isn't an artist; by observing how an art world  makes those distinctions rather than trying to make them ourselves we can understand much of what goes on in that  world..."(Becker: 1982) " In sense, art worlds and worlds of commercial, craft, and folk art are parts of a larger social organization" (Becker: 1982). They define and support the art and are therefore the art world, culture and qualifiers of their world. Without acceptance, we as "outsiders," can not justify nor are qualified to judge the art of their culture. Thus, true definition of art can only take place within certain faucets of that particular culture, "what art is in classical China or classical Islam, what it is in the Pueblo southwest or highland New Guineas, is just not the same thing, no matter how universal the intrinsic qualities that actualize its emotional power.."(Greetz: 1983). To define the art of tattoo then, one would have to be part of that particular world, that particular place, and in that particular time.
 Today there are over 650 tattoo studios in the world, each with its own supporting art world. The number continues to grow and the art worlds continue to grow along with them. There are a variety of connecting factors that  incorporate the worlds by connecting them to mainstream ideas within their particular world, these include magazines,  conventions, tattoo supply houses, books, video, newsletters, clothing, and other supporting information. Dana's tattoo  studio which I frequent over the last sixteen weeks had its own cultural dynamics. I found that the artist traveled to many cities and countries to learn more about the art forms of other cultures practicing tattoo.

 To join this culture as an artist is no easy task. Often one would have to be accepted into the social group, and then go through a long and rigorous process of apprenticeship. Learning the history and traditions of tattoo is important to most, and is almost a requisite for those artist wanting to have recognition. The culture is inside, circular, and  surrounding, and to become part of it you must learn about the art. For example, you can not simply walk into a gallery and give your interpretation of what you think of a Picasso if you have no knowledge of who he was, or about  the time frame in which he was working, nor could you place yourself in the particular art world without knowledge, thus you have no right to define it.

 To understand this we must understand social control and cleavages that define who we are, what symbols we use  to define ourselves and how. We need to identify ourselves within society and the world, giving ourselves definitions  of the self, the us and the "other." Who are they and why?
 "Man is a creator and user of symbols (Babcock: 1978). These symbols define not just our art but our social values. These symbols are often defined by inverting who we know we are not as explained by Barbara Babcock as  symbolic inversion. "Symbolic inversion" may be broadly defined as any act of expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and norms be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, or social and political" (Babcock: 1978). Measuring against things that we are not defines who we are and what is important and acceptable within our culture group. "Desire that inversion be  regarded as a dimension of deliberate, self-conscious, patterned behavior" (Babcock: 1978). This patterned behavior is part of a larger social context of defining what art is, and to define this you must be part of the group, not the one  standing outside inverting what you are not. The social characteristics of inversion follow social class and acceptance.
 "Specifically symbol-using animal will necessarily introduce a symbol ingredient into every experience. Hence, every experience will be imbued with negativity" (Babcock: 1978). Thus, the factors that give you the right to define what is  or is not art, can only be defined by those who are part of the art world surrounding and supporting it, and if you are on  the outside looking in you simply can not judge, qualify, interpret, or even classify the art. We invert everything  within our society to better understand who we are, and where are particular identity exist. By defining yourself outside  of the art world of tattoo you have systematically unfairly judged it, thus negation leads to misinterpretation. This can  be seen in the larger social context by how people gain power through inverting what they are not. The elite's often  point to the lower classes and define themselves by saying we are not them, as well as the lower classes defining  themselves by the same token. This fits the larger social patterned interaction that takes place throughout the art world by defining first who the "others" are.  Self empowerment is seen through the ranking of self and the "other." Stallybrass and White give the example of  literary ranking to define how this works in a cultural system. "The ranking of literary genres or authors in a hierarchy analogous to social classes is a particularly clear example of a much broader and more complex cultural process whereby the human body, psychic forms, geographical space and the social formation are all constructed within interrelating and dependent hierarchies of high and low" (Stallybrass and White: 1986). Making the high depend on the low is the symbolism that has been a large part of our understanding of who we are. The interrelation comes from the inversion of the other to define ones self. What is acceptable to one group is not by the other, however there is the needfor the low to define the difference of high. "More particularly it attends both to the formation of these hierarchies and to  the process through which the low troubles the high. The high/low opposition in each of our four symbolic domains  -psychic forms, the human body, geographical space, and the social order- is a fundamental basis to mechanisms of ordering and sense-making in European culture's. Divisions and discriminations in one domain are continually  structured, legitimated and dissolved by reference to the vertical symbolic hierarchy which operates in the other three domains. Culture's 'think themselves' in the most immediate and affective ways through the combined symbolism's of  these four hierarchies" (Stallybrass and White: 1986).The Enlightenment period and Western imperialism are clear
 examples of how this works. The thought that those who were uneducated and primitive need to be enlightened to the standards of those who were. This led to the destruction of cultures and societies by those who knew little about them.
  In Plato's The Republic, he gives the example of those lesser people in caves who should be led by those enlightened  leaders trained in the understandings of the world. This type of thinking has been in our society for years and yet goes unquestioned. How can one group place themselves within a social structure that they have no experience with. By  defining them as substandard, needing leadership, they are destroying part of the world and culture without  understanding it. By defining art as one particular form we can not, nor do we, give the recognition to those art forms, or societies, that we do not understand. Instead we often fix those that are not like us, the enlighten ones of the earth, the leaders. "A recurrent pattern emerges: the 'top' attempts to reject and eliminate the bottom' for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low "other"(Stallybrass and White: 1986).
 "The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a  psychological dependence upon precisely those others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level. It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central" (Stallbrass and White: 1986). With this centrality comes the attraction to the other. This attraction usually based on the fact that one world is needed to define the opposite, and where need is placed, attract is instilled. The attraction to this other gives the elite's a space in which they can take part, but stay far enough away, that their group or social order is not threatened.
 Therefore we see many people taking part in the art form of tattoo, but at the same time hiding it form their peers. This
 leads us back to the question of how tattoo has become so popularized today.
The growth in popularity can be explained by the notion of tourism. Tourism developed during the Enlightenmentperiod, and helped define ones social order, by visiting what it is not. By doing so we are often attracted to who the "others" are and what happens within their social order empowering ourselves through defining the "other."  "Relationship of the "other" to its stigmatized role and the "double inversion" of assuming a deviant role, and regarding it as acceptable or successful" (Babcock: 1978). MacCannell gives his interpretation of tourism and social order by the tourist trying to define self while visiting the "other." " The modern critique of tourist is not an analytical reflection on the problem of tourism-it is a part of the problem... They are reproached for being satisfied with superficial experiences of other peoples and other places." Therefore we often visit or take part in different cultures to experience a sense of vacation from our everyday lives. However, by a visit we can stay far enough away from the culture that we are visitingand not fall into their particular social cleavage. By touring an inversion of our culture we are in a sense traveling to an exotic place, and this can be just as exciting as an African safari. "All tourist desire this deeper involvement with society and culture to some degree; it is a basic component of their motivation to travel" (MacCannell: 1976). This interpretation of tourism can be explained by Babcock as "in its obvious and overt forms such as "rituals of rebellion," role reversal and institutionalized clowning... The world upside down , a more or less familiar environment arranged to contrast with the way the world is commonly experienced then that what is "not...the concept of 'inversion' represents the pre-social period...before there was an ordered society, when there was, instead, a world of social disorder or chaos  (Babcock: 1978) a vacation from the norm of what we define as ordered and self identity. By visiting different social groups we can feel like we are bad, cool, or even part of a group. By simply going and getting a tattoo one can feel like they are part of the social order, but only visiting it when feeling the need to vacation from their social realm. This is often seen in new art or unusual art.

 New and unusual art forms as Constance Perin has defined, by quoting at length, Arnold Hauser, "High, serious, uncompromising art has a disturbing effect, often distressing and torturing; popular art, on the other hand, wants to soothe, distract us from the painful problems of existence, and instead of inspiring us to activity and exertion, criticism and self-examination, moves us on the contrary to passivity and self-satisfaction...The chances of success of important  works are lessened by the fact that the new, the unusual, and the difficult have of themselves a disturbing effect upon an  uneducated and not especially artistically experienced audience and move them to take up a negative position (Hauser: 1983; Perlin: 1994). Although this can be explained through symbolic inversion as attraction to the negative, what we are not. However, she goes further; "Barque and other painters first reacted little differently to Picasso's work. "the  traditional stylistic fractures of painting were so thoroughly violated that their orientation toward painting was no longer applicable. Rather than permit themselves to be disoriented, they denied Picasso's work admission into their category of painting and consequently in to their category of art"(Peckham: 1965; Perlin: 1994) However at the same time we are repulsed by the new art form or that which is out of our social norm, we are attracted to it. People distance  them selves from areas that they do not understand. When they visit or take part in the "unusual" their not really sure why. Often the elitist take part within a culture transforming it into fad. Usually those who begin fads are not empowered (i.e. black youths who have changed they way white youths dress). People take part to invert them selves and become or visit something that they are not. Max Gluckmas maintains that while such "rites of reversal obviously include a protest against the established order,....they are intended to preserve and strengthen the established order. People support it even if they hate it because it lets them define who they are. "An especially important form of symbolic inversion is "that used to mark a boundary, between peoples, between categories of persons, between life and  death." Hostile or suspect neighbors of the Lugbara are inverted; witches among the Kaguru dance upside down; in Toraja land of the dead everything is the reverse of what it is in this world, to the extent that words even mean the opposite of their everyday connotations or are pronounced backwards" this means that group membership is determined  not only by what members share, but by what the members recognize that "significant others" do not share. Thus they develop the notions of stereotyping and deviance: the definition of those outsiders on the periphery" in terms of how  they depart from insiders in the direction of nature or chaos." (Babcock: 1978)
 "I believe that the serious wrongness lies exactly in the ancient effort to find order in a situation which offers us the opportunity to experience disorder......I think it is time to praise disorder a little... Social cultural uses and  consequences of this manipulation, with understanding how inversions may operate as a means of social control, of social protest, of social change, and of social deviance" (Babcock: 1978). We have to ask questions about time, place and social meanings before placing our social values upon art and culture that is different from our own. We have to ask  who the people are that define, control, articulate, and display art within our society. We must understand that we are in a postmodern period and our actions haven't followed suit to our social system. Learned pattern behaviors of the
 Enlightenment period are still causing many to invert what they do not fully understand, and never will. We are a made society filled with different cultures, ideas, beliefs, values, and art.