The art of the ‘art world’ (of galleries and critics and serious culture) as the perpetual pursuit of new experience hit a wall about the same time the profit rate hit a wall – in the late 1960s… But who is this ‘art world?’ This is the period, especially in European social-democratic countries, at which it becomes possible for more and more proletarians to get ‘higher’ educations, to go to art school on the welfare state’s dime, to acquire some exposure to ‘culture’ without necessarily any prospects of joining the cognoscenti of New York art-opening wine-sniffers. At the same time Bourdieu is formulating his theory of culture as gate-keeping status-marker, the solidity of this kind of boundary is being objectively undermined. In a way, in the 1970s, art (particularly ‘high art’ of the visual type that is un-reproducible and thus subject to the dynamic of monopoly rent) becomes, on the one side, an asset for financial speculation no different from real estate, entirely removed from anyone but the super-rich (which it proceeds to guiltily reflect upon), and on the other, something kids on the dole do for kicks. Massive amounts of small capitalists are expropriated, the class relation polarizes objectively as the cultural coordinates of pseudo-caste are blasted to pieces. A large middle-bourgeoisie distinguished by ‘taste’ as the ‘public’ for ‘serious culture’ dissolves into laid-back hip billionaires à la Richard Branson, and a proletarian avant-garde à la Throbbing Gristle, with a vast indeterminate sea in between; the ‘art world’ becomes an appendage of high finance as it loses its monopoly on the aesthetic, and the commitment vs. autonomy debates are revived in the squats.
