What is art and who are artists

The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. - BookForum - book reviews
ArtForum, Nov, 1996 by Arthur C. Danto

It is one of Pierre Bourdieu's polemical aims in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field to challenge Sartre's scheme of free original choice - what he contemptuously describes as "this sort of conceptual monster . . . a free and conscious act of autocreation" - by identifying, in massive detail, precisely the social and historical structures within which choices are made and what he terms "cultural products" are created. "God is dead, but the uncreated creator has taken his place." And a kind of illusio "directs the gaze towards the apparent producer - painter, composer, writer - and prevents us from asking who created this 'creator' and the magic power of transubstantiation with which the 'creator' is endowed." But "it is enough to pose the forbidden question to perceive that the artist who makes the work is himself made, at the core of the field of production, by the whole ensemble of those who help to 'discover' him and to consecrate him as an artist."...

Analytical philosophers have tended to resist the "death of the artist" by insisting on the role of artistic intention in identifying and explaining works of art, without realizing that a further step must be taken in order to explain intentions themselves. We cannot form just any intention whatever. Bourdieu's concept of the field, "a network of objective relations . . . between positions - for example, the position corresponding to a genre like the novel . . . or from another point of view, the position locating a review, a salon, or a circle," is his way of charting the universe of intentions. But "each position is objectively defined by its objective relationship with other positions." To be an artist is to occupy a position in the field known as the art world, which means that one is objectively related to the positions of critics, dealers, collectors, curators, and the like. It is the fields that "create the creators" who internalize what is possible in reference to other positions. Fields, of course, are always in the process of change, so the intentions that can be formed at one stage in their evolution cannot be formed at another. The "field" is an immeasurably more nuanced structure than whatever it is that philosophers subscribing to what is called the "Institutional Theory of Art" have so far sought to make explicit.

One of the chief architects of the Institutional Theory, philosopher George Dickie, has recently given particular prominence to the role of the artist in determining what can and cannot be a work of art, but he failed to appreciate that there is a prior question of who is an artist, and for this one must refer to something like Bourdieu's field for an answer. Since fields are objective structures, the questions of what is art and who are artists are themselves objective matters, and Bourdieu has sought to put in place the kind of science required for understanding both: it is a historical science of cultural fields.