Introduction : the Australian art field : frictions and futures

![CDATA[The aim of this book is to probe key challenges facing the contemporary Australian art field by investigating the structure of the visual arts as an element of the broader field. The goal in undertaking this examination is both to contextualise longer-term changes affecting the ways in which visual art is produced, distributed, and consumed in Australia, as well as to place them within the context of parallel and intersecting international trends. In exploring the Australian visual art field, it is necessary also to consider the practices, policies, and institutions that organise that field and constitute its defining structures and contradictions. This is a framework inspired not only by the political and economic occurrences in Australia, but also, importantly, by Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical contributions in his analysis of the French art field. Tracing the processes and frictions of the Australian art field, which is to say a space of human action, competition, and achievement in the visual arts, is to examine a field that is comprised not only of structures and institutions, but of human strategies, tactics, and what Bourdieu called ‘habitus’ or dispositions.]]