The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram, Andrea Fraser. e-flux Notes, October 17, 2024.
The exponential growth of the art world since the mid-1990s is often framed as a process of geographical expansion and integration driven by neoliberal globalization and wealth concentration. However, this expansion was enabled, more broadly, by the power of contemporary art to capture an extraordinary range of investments: not only financial investments from private, public, and nonprofit sectors, but also the aspirations and energy of growing numbers of people drawn to the field and the possibilities it promises. And this expansion was also enabled, ironically or not, by radical avant-garde and political negations of aesthetic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries, which created the conditions for art’s extraordinary expansive capacity and incorporative power.
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Today, the consolidation of art’s subfields has produced distinct arenas of discourse and practice and has defined distinct stakes within their specific material and symbolic economies. Competition over the distribution of these stakes seems to have overtaken any significant contestation of their definition. What once might have been relations of struggle between these subfields, or over the values that define them, now appear to be relations of mutual dependency, if not parasitism. It is the mutual dependency of art’s subfields, above all, that holds the field of contemporary art together and each of its subfields within it.
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Many artists work at the intersections of different subfields, creating art that reflects multiple criteria and even attempting to produce value, experience, knowledge, community, and social change all at once. From some perspectives, working across criteria may represent resistance to capitulation to any one subfield. Or it may represent the ambition to engage with more than one, for greater success or simply survival. Or it may reflect the condition of being ambivalently split between different criteria and values and social spaces. Or it may simply reflect the confusion produced by fields that tend to obscure their basic conditions in order to protect their interdependency. In any case, the circular logic of this analysis implies that the most successful or impactful practices in each subfield are those that fulfill its specific criteria most fully. At the same time, every subfield remains the site of struggle over the criteria that define success within it. In this regard, the most ambitious and influential practices may be those that succeed in redefining the criteria of their subfield, or of the art field as a whole.
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If politics are struggles over the definition and distribution of the values and forms of power that structure social space, Bourdieu’s model offers a way to understand the complexity of the different forms of power at work in the art field and of the relationships among them.
One implication of Bourdieu’s analysis of the location of cultural fields within the field of power is that most struggles within cultural fields, as well as struggles waged from cultural fields within the field of power, carry a structural ambiguity, if not duplicity. They are, for the most part, not liberatory struggles against power but competitive struggles among the empowered over the nature of power and its distribution; they are not struggles between classes but struggles between what Bourdieu calls “dominant class fractions,” which serve to reproduce the “division of the labor domination” (cultural and economic, symbolic and material) more than to transform it. At the same time, it is in the dominated position of cultural fields within the field of power that Bourdieu finds the conditions for the historical tendency of cultural producers to feel and potentially act in “solidarity with the occupants of the culturally and economically dominated positions” outside of the field of power, “to put forward a critical definition of the social world, to mobilize … dominated classes and subvert the order prevailing in the field of power.” However, even with this structural basis, such solidarity, “based on homologies of position combined with profound differences of condition,” may produce little more than self-mystification among cultural producers while serving as grist for the mill of cultural production and for the reproduction of the art field itself.
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Recognizing that the art field, and subfields within it, are structured according to multiple and competing forms of power, and identifying those forms of power and their dynamics, is the only meaningful way to consider their politics. So, the first question to ask of any field is: What are the criteria revealed by the practices that are supported and succeed within it? What are the values that underlie those criteria, and thus structure hierarchies of position within the field? What forms of capital, or power, do those values represent and in what social spaces and groups are they concentrated? What forms of domination do their concentration represent? Which of those values and hierarchies are at stake in struggles within the field? Are those struggles competitive struggles to gain power and position within those hierarchies, or transformative struggles to change them? What forms of power are employed in these struggles themselves and what hierarchies and forms of domination do they produce or reproduce? What new forms of social organization or principles of hierarchization, if any, are emerging in their place?
