Abstract
The kinds of persons conventionally called “artists” presumably do not usually consult sociology books concerning art. They are too busy trying to forge their careers in what can be a cutthroat business, which over the last few decades has become ever more complexly transnational. What might a striving artist learn about career development by reading Larissa’s Buchholz’s The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy?
An artist endowed with large amounts of useful capital inherited from parents who were themselves artists, who has attended high-level art training institutions, and who had a very skillful sense of how to play the various games upon which artistic fields turn (including the presenting of themselves in ways that appeal to multiple audiences and powerful allies simultaneously) will be far more likely to succeed than those not enjoying such advantages. These well-equipped persons will most likely gravitate toward the more “autonomous” wings of the specific artistic fields they are playing in, and toward more “autonomous” genres (e.g., concept-driven installations rather than, say, some sorts of painting).
These are domains where the consecrating judgments of consecrated actors—the most prestigious avant-garde gallerists, the most influential critics, and so forth—hold sway. If you come from a country that has hitherto not been much on the global map in terms of fielding the personnel that make up the globally recognized artistic elite, that is useful. Consecrators are now very much on the lookout for persons they can promote as being fresh talent from outside the conventional geography of the global North’s fields of artistic production, the presence of such persons being evidence of how “diverse” and much less Eurocentric art has become. And if you can develop a subtle strategy whereby you can deploy your perceived ethnicity in ways that suit you and your supporters while also avoiding being reduced to that ethnicity, so much the better. You are playing the game in a way that might make your name adulated by those who count in this sort of game around the world.
But if you are not endowed with those sorts of powers, do not bother with trying to succeed near the autonomous pole of the field of your kind of art, or the more autonomous genres of production. You do not have the kinds of resources necessary for success in such domains. Perhaps you were born to lower-class parents who gave you no useful art-related capital to inherit, and maybe you only went to a lowly provincial art school, where you picked up less refined skills, both artistic and careerist. You would be well advised to devote your attention to activities clustering around the “heteronomous” pole of the global(ized) art field. It does not really matter if the fancier critics think you are lousy, for your success is measured instead in how much money your most recent work has sold for. That is ever easier for interested parties to track, given the advent of easily accessible price databases. To succeed in the heteronomous spaces of art-for-money’s-sake you should produce, in a post-Warhol manner, standardized work as part of an identifiable artistic brand, with recurring features of (unthreatening) style and (lack of) content. It must be easily understood by the sorts of collectors who have a lot of cash to spend but are not necessarily possessed of very much understanding of the intricacies of contemporary art.
Concentrate on making stuff that works as talking points, or wallpaper, on very rich people’s walls and can be stored in the vaults of private banks. That is the sort of work that sells at the world’s leading auction houses. If they see you as a reliable and prolific commodity producer with ever-increasing capacity for making money, that is when the investors and the speculators will become interested, and the price of your works may grow hugely and fast. But as just one more fashionable commodity producer, your market value may suddenly fall precipitously, as the whole bandwagon moves on. To play this highly profitable but high-risk game, it helps to have come from a very established art country—the United States, the United Kingdom, some others. China for a while was starting to be the source of some commodity producers of this sort, because of a new breed of hyper-rich Chinese collectors and investors, but there is less action in that regard today.
These two ideal-typical stories were reconstructed from the accounts offered by Buchholz of the highly successful careers of Gabriel Orozco in the autonomous art field and Yue Minjun in its heteronomous counterpart. These accounts form Chapters Six and Seven respectively of Buchholz’s eight chapter and almost 400-page book, which is abundant in many kinds of empirical data to bolster its claims. These are the more “action”-focused parts of the text. The earlier sections of the book are the more “structural” parts, in that they set out what Buchholz takes to be the essential properties of global(ized) art at the present time.
At the conceptual level, the book seeks to update and reconstruct Bourdieu’s field-theoretical understanding of artistic production for reasons of making it more fit for the purpose of understanding transnational dynamics and global trends. This means defining what transnational fields of artistic production and dissemination look like in general today and also specifying which particular mechanisms are repeatedly at work within them. Buchholz clearly and carefully spells these matters out in detail.
The book’s central contention is that there are today two different transnational art systems, understood as transnational fields, one of more autonomous activities, the other of more heteronomous activities. The vast influx of money into the latter over the last several decades has not destroyed the former, as some might think, but instead has encouraged an ever-greater separation of the two domains, reinforcing the specific logic of operation of the autonomous area.
The book’s secondary claim follows directly from this modeling of global art reality. If we consider how “diverse,” or not, the world’s art-making personnel have become over the decades, there is markedly more, if still very patchy, representation of artists from countries beyond the old core of North America and Western Europe in the autonomous field than there is in the heteronomous field. Artists from what used to be labeled as the world’s art peripheries can fare better in the autonomous domain for various reasons, such as doing the kind of work that gatekeepers there favor, and their presence in biennials and other such locations being welcomed by gatekeeping and consecrating actors, making things seem more open, fresh, and cutting-edge than if they were not there.
The book is precisely “neo-Bourdieusian.” The essential vision of Bourdieu as to the necessity of construing artistic production in terms of fields and field dynamics is retained, while some fine-tuning of the original model goes on. This is all very valuable. Yet as the book exists primarily within its own neo-Bourdieusian universe, opportunities to engage with other types of sociology of art are not taken, even if just to argue how they might struggle to comprehend the global structures and processes that Buchholz believes the neo-Bourdieusian account of transnational fields, rooted in the key notions of autonomy and heteronomy, can handle so adeptly.
We are offered a model that seems to be able to explain everything. Too little sense is given of what might be underplayed or ignored by the Bourdieusian line of sight, or at least the version that is dominant in U.S. sociology. The use of Bourdieu is selective. The key Bourdieusian concept of illusio is not really used, either in terms of individual actors’ belief-driven investments in the transnational games they play, or in terms of what differences the global and transnational dimensions of those games may make in terms of how the neo-Bourdieusian sociologist understands how beliefs in the value of artistic creators and their creations are constructed, reproduced, contested, or destroyed.
The point that fields are all about conflict between actors, individual and collective, is reiterated, but the nature of those conflicts does not fully come out, especially in the presentation of the careers of Orozco and Minjun. We are told much more about who helped them on the road to glory than who fought with and opposed them. Their careers are narrated in a mostly conventional Bourdieusian manner, with little room for any deviations from what (neo-)Bourdieusian logic would expect to happen. The careers are narrated in a way intended to illustrate the general account of the autonomous and heteronomous fields, but the narration also confirms that account in ways that seem somewhat overly neat and self-confirming. We are offered only one artist each for each field, so no comparisons can be made, either between these individuals and other successful artists in their respective areas (who may have had very different experiences), or between successes, mediocrities, and failures. Analysis of those who play the game badly may reveal aspects of fields that the analysis of their successful peers does not and may even bring to light phenomena that do not fit well with the field-theoretical model. Focusing on both the less and more successful might have loosened up and enriched the theorization of fields.
Nonetheless, this is an exceptionally clearly and logically written book. It will certainly be an obligatory reference point for a long time, inside and outside of sociology, for those who are interested in contemporary art, artistic globalization, and neo-Bourdieusian studies of cultural production. Hopefully some artists will read it too, but they will need a lot of cultural capital.