Excerpt from The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984

From:

The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984. M. J. Taylor (ed.). New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006.

“In fact, what he had begun to unfold was a geneology of outsider-art practice that Pierre Bourdieu regarded as an epoch-making moment in cultural history. Rather than viewing the world in terms of Marxian economic capital or Foucauldian discourses, Bourdieu developed the concept of “the field of cultural production,” separate but related to the fields of economics, science, and politics. A sociologist by training, Bourdieu saw limitations to Foucault’s dire prognosis for the agency of the individual within culture, especially creative culture. For Bourdieu, economic capital did not apply as easily to the value of artworks as it did in other spheres of human activity. If the whole field of cultural production could be thought of as all those artists, poets, musicians, editors, publishers, critics, performers, and the literally hundreds of others involved in the creation, production, promotion, distribution, and preservation of cultural properties, then there could be subsets of this group who did not all conform to the desire for economic capital, but rather, and mostly because their work was experimental, sought, ‘symbolic capital’ from their peers. If the total creative world could be thought of as ‘large-scale’ production, then there could also be ‘restricted’ fields of production. For Bourdieu, the Symbolist poets represented the first field of ‘restricted’ production. Their works, often intensely personal, were produced with little thought of widespread distribution. In fact, often very small print runs numbering only a handful of copies were distributed to friends. This is certainly true of the work of Stephane Mallarme, for instance. The value of Symbolist works lay within the reputation of the author in his subfield of cultural production, not within the larger world of the marketplace.

The Downtown scene was exactly the ‘restricted’ field of cultural production of the sort that Bourdieu describes. The value of Downtown works emanated from the symbolic capital Downtown artists received from their peers. Artists worked in multiple media, and collaborated, criticized, supported, and valued each other’s works in a way that was unprecedented. The new modes of art—whether installation, performance, or a host of others—opened new paths for all art to follow. It is essential to remember that in this ten-year period, more artists were graduating from art schools than at any time in American history. The excitement of what was going on Downtown drew them to New York.

All these artists were living and working in an urban geographical space that was not more than twenty-by-twenty square blocks. Rarely has there been such a condensed and diverse group of artists in one place at one time, all sharing many of the same assumptions about how to make new art (30-31)”.