There Is Not One Art World. There Are (at Least) Five

0:02Art as research and artistic research, like other kinds of academic or scholarly or research-based inquiry, produces knowledge. That's what artists produce, and they produce knowledge through the specific means that are artistic.

0:21Andrea Fraser:I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:33Andrea Fraser:If you've been around art in the last several decades or so, you likely have heard the term institutional critique. This is a genre of art that turns the lens back onto the world around the art object as its subject, finding playful or polemical ways to provoke thought on art's unspoken rules and expectations and links to the wider world. Andrea Frazier is one of the artists who has most helped define institutional critique as a genre and as a practice. She has done this in artworks that sometimes look like performances or lectures or works of research, but also in her essays and theoretical writings.

1:09Andrea Fraser:One of her recent essays, The Field of Contemporary Art, A Diagram, published over at EFLUX Notes, is an attempt literally to map out how contemporary art is not one thing, but a landscape of different competing camps and value systems so that you might figure out where you stand within it. She calls this theory a resource to make sense of a field that makes no sense. And she agreed to talk with me about it. It does contain a diagram, so if you want to, you can look that up. We'll link to it in the show notes. Andrea Fraser, thank you for talking to me today. Well, thank you for inviting me to speak with you, Ben.

1:47Andrea Fraser:This is great. Well, I am very excited to talk to you. I have so much that I want to pick your brain about that I want to get right into it. I found this text of yours, recent text, The Field of Contemporary Art or Diagram, and I thought it was just a revelation and snapped into focus some things I've been thinking about art and seemed like a development in the way you think about the art world, although I know it's an evolution over many years. So in this text, you break up what we think of as one art world into five different art subfields. The art market subfield, the exhibition subfield, the academic subfield, community-based subfields, and the field of cultural activism.

2:33Andrea Fraser:So where did this idea come to you, and what does it mean to you? Yeah, well, it's called the Ville de Contemporary Art, a Diagram. And the essay is an elaboration of this diagram that I have been developing. I first put this diagram together actually for a kind of a workshop with my graduate students at UCLA during COVID. And one of my students was taking a class looking at W.D. Du Bois diagrams. Oh, yeah. This is like data art before its time. which are amazing, incredibly beautiful, and had been sort of tasked in that class of diagramming their work, their interests, their practice. And I thought, well, this is brilliant.

3:19So I asked all of my graduate students to put together diagrams to somehow try to graphically represent their practices. And then I put together this diagram rather than diagramming my own practice. I diagram the field of art as a way of sort of framing that. So that was in 2021, I think. But the diagram itself is based on things that I've been thinking about, oh, at least 15 years, probably, and does represent really 40 years of my thinking about and trying to understand the fields of contemporary art and its institutions. And what the diagram represents is a hypothesis that the art field, the art world, or the field of art, to use Pierre Bourdieu's term, is fragmenting into increasingly autonomous subfields.

4:17And that this is a process that was spurred by the massive expansion of the art world starting in the 1990s through what I describe as sort of successive waves of growth. you know, first the kind of globalization of the art world, the biennial phenomena that everybody was talking about, you know, in the late 90s, the emergence of curatorial studies programs, of sort of a discipline, a field of practice discourse, a discipline of curatorial studies. Then in the early, you know, 2000s, the massive expansion of the art market, the proliferation of art fairs, the financialization of the art market.

4:58And then sort of along with both of those phenomena, the explosion in the number and type of art-related degree programs. So, you know, the first of the biennial phenomena, the kind of emergence of curatorial studies and so forth, represented the sort of expansion, but also the kind of consolidation, almost as an independent field or institution of what I call the field of exhibitions. And then, you know, we can recognize the art market. And then also kind of considering how something like an academic field developed as a subfield of the art world. I mean, there had been, you could say, an artistic subfield of academic fields, right, with art history and studio art education.

5:48But really, I think with the emergence of this sort of field of recognized field of practice and increasingly kind of institutionalized field of practice of artistic research and the boom in PhD programs and studio art, which, you know, is primarily a European phenomenon that had to do with European Union policy.

6:08Andrea Fraser:And a relatively new thing, this idea of artists with PhDs. Right. I mean, it was on the heels of the Bologna process in the EU, which was sort of bringing all of the higher education in the European Union into sort of standardizing it, which sort of opened the floodgates of funding, really for PhD programs in studio art. So these phenomena, you know, created sort of on the heels of this expansion also represented a kind of consolidation, if you will, of each of these fields. And so the hypothesis that is represented by the diagram is that in the art world today, you know, maybe we can still talk about one art world, but increasingly artists, artistic practices, discourse, art discourse, are located in specific subfields and that are actually sort of, you know, in many respects, sort of like radically functioning in radically different social spaces, economies, institutions with, you know, radically different and often conflicting perspectives on what art is, what artists do that's of value or worth to society, different criteria, different artistic practices.

7:24And so those four subfields in my diagram are then represented and positioned within coordinates developed by Pierre Bourdieu.

7:32Andrea Fraser:Which has to do with what kind of power defines success and where power is and how much power people have. And yeah, it's another remarkable thing about this graph, which people can look up, which is that it actually locates the different games you might be playing or subcultures. I don't even, you know, I guess social fields is what they are, social subfields. But I have definitely felt this, you know, that you suddenly feel like you're in a different, playing a different game. You're in a different social world where the rules of prestige are reversed or function very differently. like you said this comes from a long train of thought that you've had even I was reading up on past essays and I found a footnote in like a text from 2012 I think where you lay out these subfields or you talk about the problem with subfields within art I feel as if this is an evolution of your thinking though in terms of institutional critique You're one of the artists most associated with institutional critique.

8:38Andrea Fraser:And it's kind of an evolution in the institution, right? In how institutions function or what the institution of art is. Yeah, well, there's a kind of, the essay begins with a kind of historical gloss. And at my most kind of, I suppose, ambitious or grandiose with regard to this hypothesis, I'm describing this current configuration of the art world, I think, as the fourth or fifth iteration of the art field as it developed within the West, European tradition. In art history. And then sort of expanded through colonialism and globalization, you know, starting with it sort of early era sort of medieval Renaissance period of aristocratic and ecclesiastic patronage where artists basically functioned in guilds and had, you know, no autonomy.

9:40to the emergence of aesthetic theory, enlightenment aesthetic theory and symbolic systems, which identified aesthetics and aesthetic experience as a kind of end in itself. And then romanticism and the romantic reaction to industrialization, which put into place sort of notions of artistic genius and inspiration in some sense, and also a sense of artists functioning against the forces of capitalism and industrialization, sort of, and sometimes have their origin to that period. And then actually, ironically, and sort of most importantly, in some respects, the emergence of the bourgeois art market, in the context of which artists sort of stopped working on commission, you know, and became sort of independent, autonomous producers who have authority over their own labor in a certain sense, and the sort of freedoms that we associate with art making and with art production are really merged with the bourgeois art market.

10:43And with this, I follow Bourdieu's analysis in a way and how these conditions laid the groundwork for the emergence of modernism and avant-garde art as autonomous fields of production and reception.

11:00Andrea Fraser:Autonomous meaning with their own internal criteria. Yeah, Bourdieu has a couple of different ways of defining autonomy. I mean, one that's sort of a fun one. He defines autonomous producers as producers who produce only for the recognition of those whom they recognize. So it's like tiny mutual admiration societies, except in fact, what determines their structure is that they're not mutual admiration societies, but societies of sort of competition between and among people who share the same kind of specific competence, right? And so with that, there's a distinction between producers who produce for other producers who are also their competitors versus producers who produce for people who are not other producers, who are consumers, who do not share the specific competence of producers.

11:52And that would be one of the ways that one could think about the distinction between small scale or restricted or what has been called elite or high culture and popular or mass culture. It's not in terms of scale so much as in terms of the kinds of competencies that are assumed or demanded by production. And one of the other ways that Bourdieu has defined autonomy or the autonomy of fields, which is always a relative autonomy. It's not an absolute autonomy, you know, of the sort that certain sort of political and aesthetic philosophers might be reaching for, but a relative autonomy, and that is autonomy relative to other fields, is the capacity of a field, of the artistic field, to sort of define and insist on, impose its own specific criteria of value and valuation to the exclusion of the criteria that dominates other fields or that defines hierarchies of successor position on the fields.

12:53And in that respect, I mean, historically, he identified the way that artistic criteria rejected or excluded or even inverted economic criteria.

13:06Andrea Fraser:Right, right. That's the important thing, I think, or one of the important things. That is one of the most important principles for Bourdieu. But there's been a tendency and a kind of a risk almost of universalizing those conditions. And from a Bourdieu's perspective, Those are very specific historical and social conditions under which a particular kind of field that, as you can sort of say, was the kind of context of modernist and avant-garde practice developed. I mean, one of the things that is so impressive about the text for me in defining these five different subfields of art is that they are kind of freestanding worlds.

13:45Andrea Fraser:There's a different criteria of success that you lay out, a different relationship to audience, and also different ways of sustaining yourself within each of them. So they're all, you know, whatever autonomy each of them has, it's always in relationship to other ways that people survive. and practice, but that they really have separated off into different kinds of way of thinking about art if it's not a career. So I identify these five subfields, and certainly there are more, and the community-based subfield is not one subfield, but like hundreds or thousands, you know, of subfields, as many as there are communities.

14:25And each of those subfields, you know, can be characterized in terms of its economy. Is it for-profit, non-profit, at public, DIY, and so forth. But the term that I associate with each field that's been the most valuable for me is, and I don't have a clear word for this, but it's sort of like, what is it that artists produce? Within each of those fields, sort of define what artists produce differently, of what art is and what art does. Perhaps it's most obvious in the academic field, where this is quite explicit. Artists produce knowledge. Art as research and artistic research, like other kinds of academic or scholarly or research-based inquiry, produces knowledge.

15:10That's what artists produce. And they produce knowledge through the specific means that are artistic. In community-based subfields, artists produce community. In the activist subfields, artists produce, and art produces social change. What might be a little bit more controversial is how I identify what artists produce or how art is defined within the exhibition and the market subfields, where I suggest that in the exhibition subfield, what artists produce above all is experience. And this relates to a way of, you know, now, I think, pretty accepted thinking about the exhibition field as part of an experience economy.

15:51But it also is a reflection on the nature of exhibitions and the nature of the criteria that seem to determine what gets selected for exhibitions, you know, increasingly. And then in the market field, what artists produce is value. We can define value in different ways. And I think there's a kind of critical perspective on that where it's like, oh, it's all about financial value or market value or economic value. But I would suggest that, first of all, it is artistic value. I mean, it's artistic value that, in some ways, becomes directly, more or less directly convertible, you know, into economic value.

16:34But the market, interestingly, is still the arena in which, in some ways, artistic value as such, as perhaps it has been defined traditionally in aesthetic and other traditions, sort of still pertains. But the problem there, you know, is that any kind of autonomy of artistic value within that context is relatively quickly lost to market forces and to economic value.

17:02Andrea Fraser:Yeah, you just become treated like a product easily. But I mean, I guess it's the most dominant one that relates to how your entire graph is made out of tensions between dominant and dominated. So in the graph, we talked about, so these subfields are organized within a set of coordinates. And the horizontal axis, which comes from Bordieu, represents on the one side, on the left side, appropriately, if you will, the diagram, cultural capital and on the right side, economic capital. And so there's a sort of a scale, and Borgio suggested that this is in a certain way a kind of hypothesis about what structures social space and that cultural fields as social spaces are structured by the distribution and the relative weight or importance of these two different forms of capital, of value, of power, of criteria.

18:02Andrea Fraser:Or do most famous for the concept of cultural capital. If people don't know his work, you may know that concept, which is that, you know, there's other forms of authority that aren't just financial authority. Right, exactly. There's been an argument that, well, cultural capital is dead, you know, and the art world is now completely defined by economic capital. But I think when you think about it, you can sort of see how the sort of space of the art field is still structured according to distributions of those forms of capital. And that's the horizontal axis. So the question is, if the autonomy of the art field relative to other forms of capital or other forms of power has depended on, historically, within this perspective, the capacity of kind of cultural capital to be the dominant principle of hierarchization, the dominant principle of status of power, and so on and so forth.

18:57And so you can sort of going from left to right, you can sort of map in a certain way how that autonomy or how the sort of weight of cultural capital sort of changes within the market field. But it's still at work in the market field, I would say.

19:13Andrea Fraser:Because ideally, for instance, in the academic world or in the world of intellectual production, that the most important person or most important artist is not the most marketable artist. It's the person who contributes most to the intellectual field in ways that might be intention with the market. Right. And one of the, I suppose, pieces of evidence, you know, that I could, that I can evoke to support this hypothesis of this sort of theory of the art world is, I think, the pretty indisputable fact that many of us have observed. They're artists who are very successful in the market, who sell their work, you know, at high prices, and whose work is basically never written about, never taught, doesn't exist in any kind of world of sort of scholarly, you know, study, and even rarely shown in museum contexts, right?

20:10And then there are artists whose work is constantly written about and taught and, you know, sort of at the forefront of art historical and scholarly research and whose work doesn't sell. Oh, for sure. You know, in a certain way, that was one of the things that me being maybe one of the artists on that side of things, you know, that it's like, what's going on here? How is this functioning? And then one can also now with the field of exhibitions, this is also true that there are artists who are very, very successful. And I put those in quotes, you know, whatever that means, but whose work is very present in the world of international exhibitions and survey exhibitions and public programs, but who have no market and even in many cases have sort of limited academic or intellectual reception, you know.

21:02Andrea Fraser:That is, again, one of the things I just found most convincing and that I connected with on the level of my own experience because I have felt very much for the last maybe decade but accelerating in recent times that in terms of exhibition spaces and market spaces, definitely that they were diverging. I mean, I think there's always been a divergence because, yeah, the distinction between economic and cultural capital is obviously very old as comes from Bordeaux. He's talking about the 19th century, really. But I have felt, you know, and when I've looked sort of empirically at, you know, the artists being shown most in exhibitions versus galleries, you know, it is clearly a different cast of characters.

21:47Andrea Fraser:It's interesting to me that something you mentioned in the text that I'd like to hear more about is it started for you, in some ways this thought started for you with a proposal for an exhibition, one of these big surveys, Documenta 14, where you were kind of taking some of these thoughts and trying to create a provocation about really embracing the fragmentation of art worlds, like surfacing that. So maybe tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, well, actually, I think the earliest version of this comes out of the essay that I wrote in 2011 called Le 1 % C 'est Moi, which was about the intimate connection between the art market boom of that time and of the last, you know, three decades and the massive global wealth concentration that we've been seeing during that period.

22:35And that essay was very much of a polemic, and it ends with the vision of artists and curators and scholars and holders of cultural capital of withdrawing that cultural capital from the art market. So the art market would just split off, you know, into the luxury goods sector and the financial markets that it was increasingly becoming anyway. the idea that this sort of splitting off of the market would enable the rest of the art world to retain some of the autonomy that it seemed to be losing to that market. And that way of thinking then further developed when I was invited to make a proposal for Documenta 14.

23:17And at that point, I had been thinking also of the function of survey exhibitions and also of art discourse, the kind of regressive role that survey exhibitions play, actually. If one thinks about the historical development of the field toward this sort of fragmentation and toward the increasing autonomy of these subfields, that they might even emerge as fields in themselves and no longer as subfields, that exhibitions like Documenta, and I was thinking of maybe the last few that we'd seen, as well as, you know, all kinds of biennials.

23:57Andrea Fraser:The big ones, yeah. The big shows that set the discourse. Right. They sort of pull together artists and practices and positions that really, as if they exist in the same field, as if they exist in the same social space, as if there's a kind of continuum between Jeff Koons and community. Andrea Frazier. Well, whatever. You know, I was thinking of more radical positions. Community murals or something like that. As if there's a kind of continuum between sort of big market artists and community-based artists who reject the market, as if there's a continuum between artists who are engaged in research-based practice and artists who, you know, are sort of producing large-scale public spectacle.

24:42And so my proposal was that to invite different sort of sub-curators, if you will, or curatorial teams from these different sub-fields to create exhibitions that corresponded to their criteria and their values. And then to have these exhibitions and these positions kind of confront each other across the space of the exhibition as a whole and to have that debate about what those values are, what that criteria is, what are the sort of areas of conflict and incompatibility as well as the potential dialogue between those. So, you know, I was not selected. So that exhibition never happened. Too bad.

25:22Andrea Fraser:It would have been a cool show. I would have loved to see what that looked like. So my thinking about this continued to develop from that point.

25:40Andrea Fraser:and that's the development i i kind of want to get at because i i think as it said this began in an essay thinking about inequality and the intense domination of art by money which is something you have written quite a lot about and it's one of the main threads throughout your your work and this kind of idea that maybe let's just let's just be clear that we're not a part of that and embrace these other forms of cultural power and then it seems like this is a development in the way you think about institutions and where the object of critique is because am i wrong it seems like you sort of realize oh you're just when you think you're outside of power you're you're back in and all these other forms of languages of art or subfields of art are in their own way part of this same art system that exploded since the um the 90s or the 2000s or wherever you want to market that entangle you in different ways in different forms of power games and that it would be false to think you were finding some sort of pure space outside of them in academia, in exhibitions, which I have to say personally has been part of the anguished conversation of the last 10 years when there's all these new protest movements thinking about power, that all the different forms of power get questioned.

27:16Andrea Fraser:and kind of where you thought your safe space was vanishes in a certain sense. Yeah, I think that that all does reflect some of my thinking. I think the primary motivation for getting this essay out, well, it had a lot to do with my role as a full-time professor and, you know, in a public university. Sure, sure. I mean, there's quite a lot of angst about art school and art teaching. Sort of thinking like, you know, all the students that I work with, the young artists, the young artists that I see starting their careers, it just seems like, wow, what a mess. Yeah. It's, I mean, not a mess because there's, you know, they're making great work, but often they just have agendas that seem to me cross purposes with itself.

28:08Andrea Fraser:In a certain way, you know, the essay, which was published in Eflux Notes, which is, of course, a particular kind of platform for a particular kind of intellectual orientation that I would locate firmly within an academic field, whether or not people actually have academic positions. It's a platform in which the discourse and the values of the writing are very much informed by certain kinds of theory that really comes out of the academic field, even if it has also very much political context. Because this is sort of where the reflexive critique is, right? I mean, and reflexive critique is the way that I define institutional critique.