translated by Chris Clouter The Regime of - TU Wien

Published in: Josef Trattner (Hg.): Foam. Vienna: Edition Selene, 2004, pp. 255-261;
translated by Chris Clouter
The Regime of Heteronomous Cultural Agents
Anita Aigner
“The heteronomous producer, whom the Italians magnificently call
tuttologo, is the Trojan horse by means of which all forms of social
stranglehold – that of the market, of fashion, of the state, of politics, of
journalism – are imported into the field of cultural production.”
(Pierre Bourdieu)
Autonomy in the different fields of cultural production, hard won over the course of history, is
not a commodity which will last for eternity. On the contrary, it has to be continually nurtured
and defended by incessant work against ever new forms of threat. All the more so as the
threats burdening the spheres of artistic production today are cunning in approach and remain
invisible.
What is happening to artistic production in modern industrial societies today is
something which has never happened before: the new forms of influence do not take effect
through personal relationships (such as between a painter and his client) or through political
power (for example, the persecution and appropriation of art during the dictatorial regimes of
the 20th century), but instead adopt the form of a power which is difficult to grasp, enforces
itself through very general mechanisms and evolves in confederacy with the media – i.e. that
of the market. Even the microcosm of autonomous production or the avant-garde, if you will,
which has always formed itself by a rejection of the market, has not stood in opposition to the
market for a long time. Artistic products as much as the names of the producers are employed
as carriers for advertising everywhere: whether it be cities, political parties, banks or
international fashion houses, they all increasingly compete in the fight to get noticed with the
help of sensational artistic production and big names. ‘Culture’ and famous names have
become an economic resource and marketing factor.
Admittedly, the influence of commercial forces on cultural or artistic fields, the market
situation as such, is nothing new. However, the dividing line between artistic experiment and
event culture has never been as blurred as it is today, nor have the economic and social
conditions for cultural production ever been permeated so much by the logic of profit, and the
success of art defined so much by visitor numbers and viewing statistics, by their reception in
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the press and on television. Servility towards the press – an unmistakable sign of
heteronomous cultural production – also increasingly takes hold of the autonomous producers
of culture (who are to be understood as those defining the form and content of their work
themselves) when they endure the power of mass media having its effect from without and
even readily accept and adopt the logic of marketing as their own. However, it is the influence
of people in the media first and foremost which is penetrating deeper into these autonomous
factions than ever before. What can be seen to be happening, among other things, is that
leading positions in the art and culture industry are being taken over by media executives. The
negative effect for cultural producers is that those who have the means of mass circulation at
their disposal also now have the power to sanction.
Contrary to the promises of demagogues who confer democratic legitimacy on the
media by insisting on granting everybody ‘the right to culture’, the supremacy of the media
represents one of the greatest threats to cultural production, as Pierre Bourdieu has repeatedly
stressed.1 Media supremacy does not just result in the breakdown of the principle of internal
hierarchy inside the field of cultural production through criteria of evaluation external to it,
and the increasing involvement of people (i.e. in art production, discourse or selection) who
are not completely conversant in the specific values of the artistic field. The main
consequence is that a superficial knowingness and a need to be part of it all is sweeping over
any serious debate or expert preoccupation with the issues, and the forms of mediation have
nothing other than a certain type of publicity at their disposal.
So what can be done to prevent artists from completely losing the right of disposal
over their means of production and distribution? An attempt to rescue the “autonomous
artwork” as it was once instigated by Adorno seems hopelessly passé in the face of a culture
industry which is also getting increasingly better at making self-referential, autonomous
production into a marketing factor for cities and tourism in international competition.
Nonetheless, it would be expedient to analyse the effects of the criteria introduced from
outside the field and championed in the main by media people in various areas of art. True to
the old adage that one can only have an effect on the world if one knows something of it,
artists can first defend themselves against the unreasonable demands of an art industry
controlled by media producers when they recognise the determining factors they are subject
to.
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In view of the virtuosity with which many artists operate the keyboard of the media, one could
at any rate be seized by strong misgivings as to whether an independence from external
powers (e.g. the media) represents a basic value in the field of art. Although artists
increasingly tend towards collaboration with the media, i.e. towards an unconditional
subordination to constraints which undermine the norms of an artistic field, they have only
been able to defend themselves occasionally against impertinences in the exploitation of their
activities by the mass media with great difficulty. This happens primarily in the broader media
where uninformed journalistic commentaries appear and mar the meaning and value already
ascribed to artistic contributions from inside the field and, as can be seen in Josef Trattner’s
contribution to the cultural capital Graz 2003 project, in populist picture production as well,
which transforms an experimental event into a trivial effort within a spectacle.
As annoying as the sensation-hungry versions of artefacts and cultural events in the
mass media may sometimes be, one has to give due cognisance to these forms of ‘reception’,
even though they are considered as inexpert and therefore inferior from the standpoint of
competent critics and informed recipients. The problem is not so much that the local and
tabloid press report on the art event in a superficial manner but more that a relational logic has
established itself between the political protagonists, the cultural managers and media people,
making it axiomatic to collaborate with the ‘broadest’ media. It has become unthinkable to act
outside the media.
It comes as no surprise then that cultural politicians themselves, who naturally have a
vested interest in obtaining recognition for their activities via the media, call precisely those
people to the conductor’s podium who have the means at their disposal to broadcast cultural
products to all and sundry. This not only results in the compilation of programmes following
heteronomous criteria but also to cultural products being mediated in a form tailored to media
requirements. As a cultural event is only considered to be a success today – at least as far as
the heteronomous criteria of journalists and media producers are concerned – when it has
been well received by the press and television, which usually lack crucial expert awareness,
the products are immediately adapted – naturally with the assistance of PR advisers and
marketing specialists – with a view to circulation through the widest media coverage. All the
more so, of course, when those in charge actually come from the media themselves. Now one
could think that not much could go wrong precisely as far as the pictorial mediation of art
events is concerned because pictures simply just ‘record’. However, contrary to the
presumption that pictures (more than texts) describe indisputable reality, they are (like texts)
the product of a relatively explicit process of selection and construction. The fact that the
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‘perception filter’ of people in the media produce social representations which do not tally
with the perception criteria inside the field of art and create a reality for the medial viewing
attitudes of decision makers which eventually damage art, can also be seen in connection with
Josef Trattner’s Graz 2003 project.
It is by no means unimportant that advance recognition was given to the intervention in which
Trattner positioned a total of 42 foam rubber blocks at 11 public sites in the old centre of Graz
on 31st March, 2003. It already possessed significance and a special status by being
proclaimed the highpoint in the genre ‘art in public spaces’ of the Graz cultural capital
programme. The project was legitimised as ‘art’ beforehand, which should by no means be
taken for granted, and as such it utterly corresponded with the expectations and selection
criteria of journalists and media photographers, who are always in search of something
sensational and spectacular. Put on the scent by the cultural capital’s press releases and preinformed
in the actual sense of the word by ‘medially conditioned’ press texts, they were
attracted to an event laden with headline potential – it was after all a story which could make
the front page of the local newspapers. This was later confirmed in the Steirerkrone of 1st
April, 2003. (ill. 1)
The leading article picture shows a pretty young woman sitting on a pink foam rubber
block, who is holding the cultural capital Graz 2003 logo up high and is visibly delighted at
being an ornament like in the car advertisement. The influence exerted by the directing body
of the cultural capital on the media ‘exploitation’ of the art project, the working collaboration
between those responsible for the cultural capital and the media, is evident in this, even
though the result would only have been perfect in the eyes of marketing people if the artist
had let himself be photographed with the logo – something noteven an old member of the
avant-garde such as Vito Acconci stops short at.
That the responsible culture ‘makers’ share the same categorisations for thought,
action and perception as media people (something which naturally becomes most apparent
when the media ‘makers’ are likewise ‘makers’ of large cultural events), can best be
illustrated by the fact that a picture similar to that in the Steirerkrone was to be found in the
programme book of Graz 2003. (ill. 2)
It should be mentioned in passing that this photograph was taken by a different
photographer. Nevertheless, this only goes to confirm that the media photographers who were
present on location on the first day picked up on the arrangements made by PR professionals
‘completely naturally’, to some extent taking up the ball that had been played them. This was
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how the organisers controlled the media exploitation of the intervention without anyone
becoming conscious of the fact. Simply by understanding how to address the journalists and
photographers so that they did exactly what was expected of them.
Of course a cultural product is never bad just because it appears on television or is all over the
newspapers. Then again it is also never good simply for the same reasons. Moreover, it
certainly does not get adequate representation automatically through media depictions, and
this is the core of the problem. Exactly the opposite is true in fact as the images produced in
the name of culture industry marketing paradoxically conceal what they are putting on show.
A slightly more obvious effect of media exploitation is to be found in the fact that a
situation created by an artist to be experienced was shown in a way which was inappropriate
to it, no matter how well intended it might have been. The event took on a meaning which had
very little or nothing to do with reality, or the meaning or possible meaning created inside the
universe of art. At any rate, the images and texts produced in accordance with the perception
and evaluation criteria of media and marketing experts portrayed the artistic contribution in a
very definite way. They did not show it as they should have. It could also be said that they did
not represent the art event but falsified it instead, even contributed to its demise
unintentionally with their specific representation.
For the images and texts to actually have done what they pretended to, namely inform,
they would have had to provide not just a suggestion of the whole project – only a single
object was shown from an installation consisting of 432 – but they would also have had to
convey some idea of the processes of change anticipated for these objects which had been
made available for general use and manipulation. It was after all planned that the blocks
would be exposed to transformations through the weather and public for a bit longer than half
a year. However, journalists only have eyes for what they are capable of seeing. They see the
here and now of the immediate, the obvious fact of ‘fun and colourful objects’ populating
public space. They needed a ‘sensation’ and felt obliged to show that something was
‘missing’ in the cultural capital and not to explain a situation to be experienced created by an
artist. As a result they were also incapable of taking on the accidental, the uncontrollable and
unpredictable, which was an essential dimension of the intervention.
However, the journalists cannot be made personally responsible for their reductive and
flippant depictions as they are themselves subject to the rules and practices of journalism
as well as a whole range of other constraints: they are under time pressure, are obliged to use
a medial turn of phrase, and are subject to the constraint of having to describe a thing in such
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a way as to make it into a headline story – the dramatisation effect. Unfortunately, the lack
of specialist knowledge along with the prescribed shortness of a report often do not permit a
pertinent discussion of an issue as well.
Now one could argue that the distorting effect of the media is being exaggerated here. After
all, a form of use was insinuated with the woman posing on the foam rubber block – at least
as far as the allegation that the aspects of appropriation and transformation of the objects are
thematicised beforehand is concerned. Moreover, the short text in the Graz 2003 programme
book did announce that the foam rubber blocks were an invitation “to occupy them, to settle
down on them, to arrange them, to use them”, even “to wear them out.” To counterbalance
this, however, it must be stressed that the wide-impact reports carrying this pictorial motif
were generated out of the logic of event announcement. As such, these contributions by the
mass media mainly fulfilled the function of advertising for the Graz 2003 cultural event.
Neither the Graz 2003 project organisers nor the journalists were concerned with attributing
the art intervention with any specific meaning or value here. The project’s ‘lustrous side’
seemed to be of much more importance, i.e. the superficial effect of “aesthetic punctuation in
public space” (as the Graz 2003 homepage formulated it) and the criterion of public
effectiveness (and so the potential for media exploitation implicitly as well), which must have
motivated the organisers to include it in the programme. Accordingly, these images and press
reports sufficed in their task of suggesting a treatment of art which was as uncomplicated as
possible and a broad acceptance for these fun and colourful objects. Whereby the innocuous,
cheerfully nice and clean art reality produced by the media was also the desired product of the
responsible culture maker as well.
It is necessary to constantly remember that the media does not merely report on reality
alone but that it ‘creates’ one. As Patrick Champagne stresses in his study of the publicity
treatment of the misery in the outskirts of large French cities, “the media produce reality
effects by creating a media oriented way of seeing things, which contributes to the creation of
a reality which it pretends to describe.”3 The medially conditioned discussion of art also
produces spontaneous social representations which only express intentions or issues of the
cultural producers in a limited way. In the case of Trattner’s intervention, a ‘clean’ object was
constructed which utterly contrasted with the planned and completely public process of
‘deterioration’ in the object, its deformation, soiling and development right through to
‘shapeless’ material. The media perspective here created an object which clashed with
the ‘actual’ object. It created an image of the art project which would eventually lead to the
projects interruption and termination.
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The termination of the intervention was essentially due to the fact that the organisers
of the cultural capital did not share the artist’s view but that of the media instead. In addition,
art projects in public spaces stand under the auspices of the media more than those taking
place in protected spaces. The medial artefact of “public opinion”4 hung like the sword of
Damocles over the intervention. The fact that this so-called public opinion threatened to
change in the face of the soiled, the disorderly and the abject (which had been shoved into the
background beforehand even though it had been reckoned with), clearly explains the
organisers’ change in attitude as well (as far as one can talk of their having an attitude at all);
more concretely, the attitude of the director which led to the premature removal of the foam
rubber blocks from the city, which had become “unsightly”. However, behind the banal
criticism which was intended to justify the termination – the objects no longer appealed on an
aesthetic level, they even represented a danger to public safety – hid anonymous and invisible
mechanisms based on a recognition of the power of the media.
In order to understand why such a power can develop, reference must first be made to
the fact that, although the ideological constitution of those who decide on culture tolerates art
as a ‘hard locational factor’, this does not hold true for art as a medium with which questions
on the condition of public spaces are raised. Some business people did protest against the
‘mess’ in front of their shop doors – which only goes to show that public space is not so
public after all – but the art intervention only became a problem for the cultural capital
organisers when the press began to report negatively.
The symbolic power of the media, which not only has an effect on those who are on
the receiving end but also those who exercise it, is founded upon the fact that the media
succeeds in getting whatever it reports on to be taken for the truth. In any event, the director’s
decision to prematurely remove the by then “unsightly” foam rubber blocks from the city
centre was a product of mass media logic. It was a form of submission to the dominance of
the media in as far as it was not, as it was being presented to the outside world, a reaction to
an unexpected transformation – the experimental situation had been announced as such – but
was instead a reaction to negative press coverage. The local press had proclaimed the project,
which it had naïvely seen as solely about ‘furnishing up’ the city with colourful objects, as the
“flop of the week”: “The ‘good pieces’ were so desolate after just a few weeks that they now
have to be removed again.” Now it is debatable whether the vulgar, individual meanness
which is at the root of the media verdict on the experimental situation was shared by the
cultural organisers. A number of things would speak for this homology; in any case, the
trigger for withdrawal was a fear of losing control over the public opinion produced by the
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media and the circumstance that the ‘popularity’ or ‘social success’ of the project, i.e. its
recognition by a wide public and therefore also the reputation of Graz as the cultural capital,
were at stake.
The real damage done by the medial view of cultural production lies in the fact that the art
intervention was robbed of its critical dimension, something it adopts in opposition to the
culture industry and the legitimate (predominant) patterns of perception held towards art. The
artist publicly refused to produce artefacts that could be marketed as articles, left the classical
term ‘autonomous artwork’ for such work behind him, and delegated the task of creating form
to the public, an act which is reserved for an artist in the orthodox tradition. What then is
more central to the situation the artist created here than a form of self-questioning which
investigates the circumstances and conditioning dictating how art is viewed, the tacit
acceptance of a supertemporal principle, and the recognition of the artwork as such? Does the
ephemeral staging of this transient ‘art of decay’, which dissolves within a short time into
nothingness (albeit prematurely here) and is apparently messy but nevertheless tears the body
with it, not also provoke the question of what art can and should do in public consumer
zones? Does it not demonstrate how damaged consumer society and the public space
consumerism has entirely absorbed actually is?
Is the public not called upon to examine its own preferences and axiomatically
conceived relationship and response to art in the face of the sensual stimulation, one might
almost say the physically seductive power of the objects, as well as to reassess an educated
(art)taste, which is prejudiced by a “fundamental rejection of the easy” (in the sense of
“effortlessly decipherable”, “superficial”, “cheap”, “frivolous”, “sensational”) commensurate
with the connotations of bourgeois ethics and aesthetics5, and, last but not least, reappraise its
strangely chaste and uninvolved, if not even ignorant relationship to art encountered in public
spaces?
This area of investigation remains a public taboo, however, even though it seems that
nothing is ‘more natural’ than to question the obligatory cult of ritualistically worshipping art
– something which obviously belongs to the fulfilment of life for an educated member of
society – when confronted with foam rubber blocks which, shortly after being delivered
straight from the factory without the artist doing anything to them, became scruffy.
The question provoked by the artist on the fundamentals of an artwork as a symbolic object
with meaning and value has as little chance of being mentioned in the mass media reports of
the journalistic world, which are controlled by heteronomous cultural agents, as the message
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of being just as well served by the sensual and immediately accessible pleasures, decried as
“primitive” because they are physically obtrusive (such as those offered by the foam rubber
blocks) than by the sublimated and always slightly morose forms of pleasure provided by
untouchable museum art.
Although such questions would be best suited to unveiling tacit preconceptions, the
prerequisite being that art reproduces itself as a social universe, art connoisseurs and fans (and
culture journalists and cultural politicians can certainly be counted among them) do not pose
them. This is not least because the view of the media, which does not permit the self-reflexive
and critical potential of experimental situations to be perceived and discussed, dominates the
communication process. This dominant position of the media in a culture industry which also
knows how to provide a lay clientele equipped with modest cultural facilities with the
religious object ‘art’, not only contributes in creating cultural preferences and an ‘interest’ for
‘art’ among the public at large, which are only to be destroyed later, but it also functions as a
force to make things banal.
However, this levelling is – different to that which is spoken of by reactionary thinkers
who consider consecrated culture as an instrument of power and distinction threatened by
barbarians – nothing other than an effect of medially conditioned presentation.6 Just as purely
quantitative, coarse, technocratic observation categories do not allow brilliant scientific
achievements to be distinguished from meaningless ones in scientific publication databases,
the dividing line is also levelled between ‘commercial’ and autonomous production (i.e.
created independent of commercial constraints) in the cultural correspondence of the mass
media, where everything is understood and processed without distinction according to the
specific categories of perception and judgement belonging to journalism and marketing.
However, journalistic reporting structured by marketing interests not only blurs the
dividing lines between autonomous and heteronomous production, whereby they principally
cancel out the actions with which art (since Duchamp) protects itself against the art industry
(which does not mean that art is in any position to subject itself to radical enlightenment), it is
also an instrument for upholding a symbolic order.
As mass media cultural reporting dominates the various discourses or areas of
discourse on art and culture, occupying to a certain extent a monopoly position in the
formation of cultural preferences, determining the safety barriers of cultural consumption and
representing the fund from which the “recognition signs” suitable for making distinctions can
be obtained for show, it is also the culture-medium on which the universally shared belief in
the meaningfulness of art reproduces itself, allowing that illusio of common sense (Bourdieu),
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the objects, people and situations to be recognised and receive recognition as culturally
sanctioned. The media do not simply ‘inform’ on art but are always also an instrument for
generating (pre)conceptions on whatever is called art. They generate a broad interest for ‘art
and culture’ and so stimulate the demand for cultural production. This does not represent a
problem in itself if the unrelentingly prevalent logic of political and economic profit, which
helps autonomous art to achieve ‘social’ success (a wide public), did not break down the
principle of internal hierarchic order and conceal the artistic intervention’s critical dimension
within which the laws governing the function of art are reworked or disputed. This results not
only in the artist but also the art consumer being denied the opportunity of a self-reflexive
confrontation with the (pre)conceptions demanded by the culture industry and the potential
for emancipation of a formal experimental experience situation.This potential for
emancipation can obviously not be recognised by heteronomous cultural agents. As the sellers
of the commodity ‘art’, itself obviously only saleable when pleasant and trim, they are not in a
position to defend autonomous production due to their preconceptions and their training (or
lack of it). For they cannot fulfil the latter, for they cannot understand that popularity does not
represent a category for the most autonomous sub-divisions of cultural production, leastways
not a prominent one because they hastily bend to pressure from the media, the economy and
politics, they finally represent a threat to cultural production – that is why the director tried to
appease the artist after the termination of his project, which had been instigated without prior
consultation, with the fact that he had “had his advertising” and so the “contract” had been
kept in as far as he had managed to get what was in the director’s eyes the decisive (symbolic)
profit.
This too cannot be concealed behind their public appearance as art admirers, defenders
and promoters of art – something the protagonists feel all the more called to do when they
lack sovereignty, i.e. that specific authority which makes them resistant to the pressure of
various forms of power. Of course, as administrators of public funds they make cultural
productions ‘possible’, even if not ad hominem, for the autonomous as well. However, the
fact is that under cultural-political directives, which can themselves only be explained through
location competition, art financed with public funds (i.e. autonomous art which does not
exhibit any attempt to conform as well) is subject to the conditions set by the culture industry.
Artistic autonomy is therefore implicitly relative, even when the artists imagine themselves to
be completely independent. Even the most autonomous cultural producers are always
governed in this sense as well. However, the freedom of the market mechanisms ‘of the first
order’ (for example, the influence of clients on form and content) cover the market
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mechanisms ‘of the second order’ (the catchphrase being art as a locational factor), which the
protagonists cannot subordinate or can only do so by not accepting it. Art is a means to an
end, something which is evident in the language of the ‘makers’, who follow the
discourses of a neo-liberal view of the world ever more openly. The director was proud of
making Graz into a ‘label’ with the aid of cultural producers – the success of this label being
put on balance publicly on the Graz 2003 webpage with (and how could it be any different)
the media reception, and measuring it against visitor and tourist numbers – and he called for
the “Graz label” to continue to be “cultivated and exploited”, that is to say, not to miss the
opportunity of using the symbolic capital accumulated with the assistance of art.
That in the end it is all about the material and immaterial profits (for politics and the
economy) which might be gained with the help of cultural attractions has since become a
well-known fact and is something which cannot escape even the most naïve form of criticism.
Nonetheless, it must be possible to safeguard the requirements for autonomous art production
even in a culture dominated by market values. Politicians must under no circumstances allow
that cultural production is subjected to the external interests of borrowed attitudes which are
foreign to it, which stands in complete contrast to what they are actually doing. This is what
the oft-cited freedom or autonomy of art actually means. However, just the opposite is being
promoted when those in power simultaneously use and submit to the dominating effect of the
media, when they fill the highest posts in the art and culture industry with people from the
media.
When cultural production is selected on the basis of heteronomous criteria, i.e. that
belonging outside the field, and is selected by people who, from the point of view of the
internal definition of the “guild” as Bourdieu terms it, have not paid their entrance fee, the
prerequisites for autonomous production are not safeguarded. The heteronomous cultural
agents, who orientate themselves with the sensation value of the interventions, the artists’
degree of celebrity and the quota of reports on television and in the press, do enormous
damage to the various fields of cultural production. They not only infiltrate the specific values
of autonomous production and blur the dividing line between commercial and autonomous
production but, moreover, smother every form of critically self-reflexive preoccupation with
art in that they control the vehicles of communication and produce superficial information. By
doing this they are working against everything which could subject art and art consumption to
elucidation.
The various autonomous spheres of cultural production threaten to enter into a process
of involution in opposition to the opinion of cultural politicians and managers, who alone
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etray their naïve and vulgar concept of democracy when they interpret the success of culture
as progress when it is measured by its range. This regressive development is all the more to be
feared as the powers that be in politics, the economy and the media still decide on art and
culture in hermetically closed ranks or, put in another way, exclude intellectual and
autonomous protagonists in the field of art from committees.7 At any rate, the more forcefully
heteronomous executives who consider themselves and the universe of art to be enlightened
intercede on behalf of autonomous spheres of production, the further advanced this regression
probably is. When the director of Graz 2003 felt compelled to proclaim on the Graz 2003
homepage “that art and culture are a means of life and survival for an enlightened and
democratic society”, this might have met with fundamental agreement if practice had not
shown that culture cannot be considered to be an instrument of freedom here but merely a
commodity, a means to sell.
____________________________
1 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Culture in Danger’, in Pierre Bourdieu, Firing back: against the tyranny of the market 2,
transl. by Loïc Wacquant, (New York: New Press), 2003, (Contre-feux 2: Pour un mouvement social européen,
Paris: Éditions Raisons d’agir, 2001); Pierre Bourdieu, The rules of art: genesis and structure of the literary field,
transl. by Susan Emanuel, (Cambridge: Polity Press), 1996 (1995), (Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure
du champ littéraire, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992); Pierre Bourdieu, On television and journalism, transl. by
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, (London: Pluto Press), 1998, (Sur la television, Paris: Éditions Raisons d’agir,
1996).
2 Which is problematic in so far that the fragmentary excerpt of a position can only be limitedly taken as a
sample of the interventions which differ according to the situations at various locations.
3 Patrick Champagne, ‘Die Sicht der Medien’, in Pierre Bourdieu et al, Das Elend der Welt. Zeugnisse und
Diagnosen alltäglichen Leidens an der Gesellschaft, (La misère du monde. Paris: Édtions du Seuil, 1993) – no
English translation is available.
4 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Public Opinion Does Not Exist’, in Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in question, transl. by
Richard Nice, (London: Sage), 1993, (Questions de sociologie. Paris: Les éditions
de minuit, 1980).
5 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu in his postscript ‘Towards a Vulgar Critique of Pure Critques’, Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgement of Taste, transl. by Richard Nice, (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1984,
(La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1979), in which he shows how much
all legitimate aesthetics is based on an aversion and repulsion to everything that is “easy”, “superficial” and the
immediate sensations reduced to the pleasure of the senses.
6 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, On television and journalism, see footnote 1.
7 The fact that the board of the Graz 2003 – Kulturhauptstadt Europas Organisations G.m.b.H. was made up of
ten members exclusively from politics (the City of Graz, Federal Province of Styria, National Federal
Government, Bank for Carinthia and Styria) and the programme was surrendered to a manager from the media
not only demonstrates the governing structures and the influence of heteronomous people on art production
but also the subordinate position of cultural producers. It would be unthinkable, for instance, to transpose such
relations onto the documenta, where the power to sanction and distribution rights (still?) rest in the hands
of sovereign protagonists.
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