Art in the Internet Age III: The Rules of Art

In Parts 1 and 2, we have made mention of autonomous art, or ‘art for art’s sake’, a movement which developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in defence against economic and political pressures. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu writes in his influential study, The Rules of Art, artists, at around this time, start to ‘manifest their independence with respect to external powers’. They reject the ‘exigencies of politics’ and ‘the injunctions of morality’, recognising no jurisdiction but that of their art.

Bourdieu calls this autonomous art scene the ‘economic world inverted’: ‘the artist cannot triumph on the symbolic terrain except by losing on the economic terrain (at least in the short run), and vice versa (at least in the long run)’. Commercial success comes to be seen as a sign of inferiority. Artists like Flaubert (Bourdieu’s main example), argue that art is ‘beyond appraisal’, foreign to the logic of the economy — which creates, as Bourdieu notes, a catch-22; are these artists unsuccessful by choice, or are they simply saying that to make themselves feel better: ‘making a necessity of their virtue, they can always be suspected of making a virtue of necessity’.