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plpietra 's review for:
Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction
by Julian Stallabrass
Flaubert more than implies that the free mastery of the artist (and reader or viewer) is a cruel power. In Bourdieu's analysis, Flaubert's freedom, and that of the avant-garde in general, was purchased at the price of actual disconnection from the world of the economy. Other bohemian writers were the main and grossly inadequate market for such work, and books were written in deliberate defiance of bourgeois understanding. The autonomy of art was carved out of a reaction against both elevated bourgeois writing and engaged, realist literature; acclaim was only—if ever—achieved after the long passage of time, as new avant-garde forms displaced and familiarized the old. It is easy to see that the conditions for that freedom no longer exist in the art world. The plausibility and power of art's freedom are on the wane. Among the opening remarks of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno has this to say about artistic freedom: 'absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole'. Until that wider unfreedom is confronted, the particular freedoms of art run through the fingers like sand. To break with the autonomy of free art is to remove one of the masks of free trade. Or to put it the other way around, if capitalist free trade is to be abandoned as a model for global development, so must its ally, free art.