Beyond nation, beyond art? : the 'rules of art' in contemporary Australia

The ‘rules of art’ I have in mind here are those which, in Pierre Bourdieu’s classic formulation, refer to the production of art in accordance with the principles of judgement that were autonomous to the French art field during the period (the late nineteenth century) of its hard-won (relative) independence from the economic and political fields. In his 1996 postscript to The Rules of Art, however, Bourdieu stressed the ‘threats to autonomy’ resulting from ‘the increasingly greater interpenetration between the world of art and the world of money’ (Bourdieu 1996, p. 344). The resulting erosion of the division between ‘the narrow field of producers for producers’ – in which artists are in control of the instruments of artistic production, circulation, evaluation and consecration – and the field of mass production could only by warded off, he argued, by a ‘corporatism of the universal’ (p. 348) in which artists and intellectuals would combine to create a ‘veritable Internationale of intellectuals committed to defending the autonomy of the universes of cultural production’ (p. 344). While this hasn’t happened – no more in Australia than elsewhere – I shall argue that Indigenous art practices have provided alternatives to, and complex alignments with, the ways in which the rules of art have been inflected by the trajectories that have characterized the recent development of the Australian art field.1 This calls for a brief sketch of the main economic, policy and institutional drivers of these trajectories.