How online discourse networks fields of practice: The discursive negotiation of autonomy on art organisation about pages

Abstract

This article examines how the online discourse of art organisations forges relationships between the artworld and the fields of politics and economy. Combining elements of Pierre Bourdieu’s field analysis and Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, the article analyses an elite art magazine, e-flux, and an elite art museum, IMMA, and the activities of discourses, genres, and utterances on their about pages. Its results suggest that the about pages of these organisations forge links between the artworld and the fields of politics and economy by mobilising discourse in these fields and by incorporating discourse practices from these fields. The ideological tension resulting from this interdiscursivity was found to be managed in different ways. The article thereby contributes to furthering our understanding of how discourse networks fields of practice.

Introduction

The internet is transforming the artworld, with millions across the globe now able to seamlessly keep abreast of the latest exhibitions, news, and opportunities, a privilege previously reserved for a well-travelled artworld elite (Atkins, 2014). At the same time, it has provided art organisations with new capacities to reach this global audience. It has also provided them with new capacities to speak to the political and economic fields; fields from which art organisations must strive to remain autonomous but upon which most rely for funding and revenue. Art organisation websites are therefore ideal research objects to further our understanding of how online discourse networks fields of practice. To pursue this aim, this article analyses how the about pages of an art museum and an art magazine mix discourses to address the artworld and the political and economic fields, and how they negotiate tensions resulting from this mixing. It thereby contributes to a transdisciplinary literature aiming to bring Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory into conversation with discourse analysis (e.g. Meadows, 2009; Diaz-Bone, 2013; Rössel and Pape, 2016; Angermuller, 2018; Hamann et al., 2019). It contributes in particular to Jens Maesse’s theorisation of transepistemic fields (2013, 2015), which helps explain the movement of discourses between fields.

The article first develops a conceptual framework (see the section “Conceptual framework”) and methodology (see the section “Methodology”), combining critical discourse analysis (e.g. Fairclough, 2003, 2010) with Bourdieusian research on fields (e.g. Bourdieu, 1996; Grenfell and Hardy, 2003) and language (e.g. Bourdieu and Thompson, 1991; Butler, 1999; Myles, 2010; Grenfell, 2011). It then analyses the field positions (see the section “Field analysis”) and about pages (see the section “Discourse analysis”) of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and the online art magazine e-flux. Results are discussed in the section “Discussion”.

Conceptual framework

This conceptual framework brings together field theory and Norman Fairclough’s dialectic relational approach to discourse analysis (DRA), which are seen as eminently compatible (e.g. Fairclough, 1993, p. 135; Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999, pp. 99–102; Blommaert, 2015; Forchtner and Schneickert, 2016; Sayer, 2018), as well as recent research bringing field theory into conversation with discourse analysis.

Field, capital, and habitus

A field is a group of agents which compete over cultural capital specific to their field (e.g. academic, artistic, journalistic), although field-specific capital may also have value in other fields. Cultural capital can take an embodied form as knowledge, an institutionalised form, such as a certificate or award, or an objectified form, such as a vehicle or artwork. Embodied capital is accumulated through experience in fields. The internal structure of perceptions this experience engenders in an individual is termed the habitus, which functions to guide an individual’s actions and is commonly expressed in their tastes, attitudes, posture, and so on. The habitus is structured by an individual’s experience but at the same time, on the basis of that experience, structures the fields in which they operate through this individual’s actions. Social capital is the resources one can gain access to through social networks. Economic capital is money, assets, or other forms of potentially profitable wealth. Linguistic capital describes the relative worth of a language aspect within a particular social context. For example, the capacity to enunciate the English language ‘correctly’ in the field of BBC television presenters. The varying compositions of capital possessed by agents are significant because “vastly different capital backgrounds can come together to establish a new legitimate configuration” (Grenfell and Hardy, 2003, p. 29). That is, field hierarchies change when agents with new compositions of capital rise to dominant positions. When an agent’s specific composition of capital is identified by others in a field, this composition is misrecognised as symbolising capacities innate to that agent, rather than recognised as composed of capital that has been acquired largely on the basis of social origin. Through this misrecognition, the forms composing the configuration become amalgamated to constitute that agent’s symbolic capital, their reputation. This misrecognition constitutes symbolic violence because it compels the dominated to accept their domination while disguising the fact that “the relationship within fields and their hierarchies of value are in reality purely arbitrary” (Grenfell, 2012, p. 104). This violence is primarily exercised by the structural relations of the field (the dominant need only “let the system they dominate take its own course in order to exercise their domination” (Bourdieu, 1977b, p. 190)) but also through language, such as classifications which are misrecognised as “natural” rather than “culturally arbitrary and historical” (Grenfell, 2012, p. 183).

Field positions and inter-field relations

Illustrated in Fig. 1, the Y-axis of a field represents the total volume of capital an agent possesses, and the X-axis represents the composition of this capital (cultural vs. economic). Cultural fields are relatedly characterised by an opposition between cultural and economic poles of production. The cultural pole tends toward longer production cycles, is more oriented toward seeking peer recognition, and places a higher value on the field’s autonomy. The economic pole tends toward shorter production cycles, is more oriented to accumulating profit (i.e. economic capital), and has stronger relationships to the fields of economy and/or politics.

Fig. 1: Synchronic field map.

Source: Author.

Three key field positions are the avant-garde, the consecrated avant-garde, and the rear-garde. Agents in the avant-garde are characterised by heterodox practices, a low volume of capital, a composition that favours cultural capital, autonomy from political and economic influence, and relative indifference to broad popularity and commercial success. Agents in the consecrated avant-garde, although previously occupying avant-garde positions, have accumulated enough reputation to establish their practices as legitimate in the artworld. Having achieved awards, prizes, and economic profit while demonstrating disinterest in popularity and commercial success, the consecrated avant-garde signal to the entire field and broader society the artworld’s commitment to peer recognition as the final arbiter of value. Their ascension to authority affirms the artworld’s autonomy. The diachronic movement of these positions is illustrated in Fig. 2, where generations move from right to left along diagonal lines, with time moving fastest on the lowest line and slowest on the highest. Most potential avant-gardes drift out of recognition but some progress to the consecrated avant-garde and then even fewer to the rear-garde, where they become sited beyond reproach.

Fig. 2: Diachronic field map.

Source: Author.

Cultural fields are only ever relatively autonomous, meaning they have relationships with other fields and are organised within a symbolic hierarchy of fields within society (i.e. field of social space) (Fig. 3). The field of cultural production, which contains all cultural fields, is dominated by the fields of economy and politics (together the field of power). Understood as meta fields, alongside what has been argued, the media field (Couldry, 2003), these fields can affect the value of capital in all fields as well as the hierarchical relationship between fields.

Fig. 3: Field of cultural production in the field of social space.

Source: Bourdieu (1996, p. 124).

Nomoi

The nomoi of the field are the evaluative assumptions implicitly held by its agents, which function as unspoken rules of appropriate behaviour. Nomoi are realised in relatively stable but continually develo** principles of vision and division, which divide and align perceptions into categories and thereby constitute subjects and objects from particular perspectives. Dominant principles emerge from contests within the social structure, within fields, or within classes, for example, to distinguish the symbolic value of one thing from another. For example, opera from cinema or arthouse films from blockbuster movies. These principles inform and guide different practices within a cultural field and these practices, in turn, inform and guide the ongoing development of those principles.

Autonomy from political and economic influence has been the defining principle of cultural fields since they emerged in the 19th century (Bourdieu, 2017). This romantic ideal separates artists who pursue their vision with integrity from so-called ‘hacks’ and ‘sell outs’ (in theory if not always in practice), while also, by extension, distinguishing those buying and appreciating art from their seemingly more mercantile neighbours. Artworld autonomy is therefore a necessary condition for both the status of artists and the symbolic value of their products. The nomos prizing artistic autonomy is similarly championed in other cultural fields, such as literature, and other so-called cultural industries, such as documentary-making and journalism (Hesmondhalgh, 2002). Nomoi are partly realised through discourse (Bourdieu, 1977a) and have been observed to structure discourse. For example, a discursive limit on the use of explicitly evaluative modifiers to represent artists (e.g. brilliant, talented) has been linked to the artworld’s nomos of autonomy (Soro et al., 2019), specifically the evaluative distinction between culturally and commercially motivated discourse (i.e. between poetics and rhetoric). A discursive norm on the use of national-ethnic classifications to represent artists (e.g. UK-based African artist) has been linked to the artworld’s nomos of multicultural values (Soro et al., 2019), specifically the evaluative distinction between cosmopolitan, international artists and local, provincial artists (Harris, 2013).

Discourses and discursive fields

Discourses are ways “of representing places, people or things” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 25) which carry within them particular “value systems and associated assumptions” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 58), making them mechanisms for the exercising of symbolic violence (Fairclough, 2003, p. 185). Discourses are porous and interrelated. A text may contain or operationalise multiple discourses. When a discourse from one field is at work in another, it is recontextualised, and may introduce to one field ideas, values, or assumptions from another (Fairclough, 2010, p. 233). The discourse of a cultural field—the utterances of all its agents—therefore intercourses with the discourses of other fields, constituting interdiscursive relationships. For example, a marketing discourse has been seen to colonise the field of higher education, introducing attendant neoliberal ideology (Fairclough, 2007). The recontextualisation of this economic logic of practice, a product of the field of power, has also been observed in cultural fields (e.g. Eikhof and Haunschild, 2007; Kundu and Nadine, 2015; Clair, 2016). Recontextualisation also occurs between cultural fields. In the early 19th century, for example, literary discourse dominated the appreciation of British landscape painting (Heffernan, 1991; Bourdieu, 2017, p. 268) while in the 20th, concepts belonging to cybernetic and technological discourses, such as “dematerialization”, “virtualization”, “de-authorization” and “digitization”, influenced art practices and were thus incorporated within art discourse (Ilfeld, 2012).

Key to recontextualisation is the importation of, or colonisation by, ideological discursive formations (IDFs), which are the “ideological positions and their related language aspects in a given discourse” (Fairclough, 2010, p. 37). IDFs can compete with or dominate each other within a given text as organisations “may house two or more distinguishable ideological formations […] which tend to be associated with different forces within the [organisation]” (Fairclough, 2010, p. 42). If an IDF achieves dominance, it is likely to achieve “the capacity to ‘naturalise' ideologies, i.e., to win acceptance for them as non-ideological” (Fairclough, 2010, p. 30). The conflicting IDFs identified in the about pages analysed here relate to autonomous art and art for the public’s sake in the field of art museums and autonomous art and cultural production for profit’s sake in the field of art magazines. At stake in this online discourse, therefore, is the ongoing naturalisation of particular states of the artworld’s autonomy.

The concept of discursive field has been developed from a number of vantages (e.g. Maingueneau, 1999; Keller, 2011; Rear, 2013; Angermuller, 2018) and is here taken to refer to the totality of the discourse produced in a field. Examining how the meaning and form of economic theory are transformed by the movement of discourse from the field of economics to the field of media, Maesse developed the concept of trans-epistemic discursive fields (Fig. 4). This concept helps conceptualise how the about pages analysed here contribute to a broader networking of knowledge, meaning, and discourse practices between the artworld on the one hand and the fields of politics and economy on the other.

Fig. 4: Trans-epistemic discursive field relations.

Source: Author.

Performativity

Utterances in fields are always performative in the sense of performing actions because, firstly, they necessarily impose a particular perspective of the field as legitimate (Bourdieu and Thompson, 1991, p. 75), secondly, in doing so, they work to bring the world they describe into being, and thirdly because they are a means through which speakers continually embody social structures and thereby produce their habituses. Utterances, therefore, articulate the habitus and the social context, bringing both into being within moments of potential transformation (Butler, 1999, p. 117).

Utterances are also said to be performative in the sense that they are ‘dramaturgical’. Excepting parody, slippages, and intentionally deviant acts, utterances that articulate established subject positions, such as artist, art museum, and art magazine, are always tailored, strategically or intuitively, to foster an impression of reality that supports the performance of that subject position (Goffman, 1990). This is because the location of these positions in the social structure and the social expectations as to how they should be performed are historically determined and pre-exist our embodiment and performance of them (Berger and Luckman, 1966, p. 33), both of which are primarily doxic. In cultural fields, this impulse to embody subject positions and adopt associated forms of communication is key to the functioning of genres. For example, the emergence of the novel corresponds to the birth of the modern notion of the author (Barthes, 1977; Foucault, 1971). The combined utterances of a field, therefore, propel a process that reproduces, contests, negotiates, and potentially transforms, not only habituses, subject positions, and field structures, but also the field’s characteristic modes and forms of communication. In this sense, it is partially through a dialectic between fields and utterances that fields are made. But not all utterances are equal. For Bourdieu, the capacity for an agent’s utterance to impose meanings as legitimate within a field, their discursive power, is based, firstly, on the relationship between their linguistic capital (e.g. accent) and the linguistic market (the social context) (Bourdieu, 1977a, p. 654), secondly, on their possession of capital (Bourdieu and Thompson, 1991, p. 106), and thirdly, on the extent they occupy a spokesperson position in their field (Bourdieu and Thompson, 1991, pp. 109–110). Butler adds to this by proposing that utterances, in moments when they say what cannot be said (Foucault, 1971, p. 52) or transgress the “laws” of the linguistic market (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, pp. 257–258), can acquire their own capacities to transform the habituses of speakers and the nomoi of a field, and also therefore to affect the ongoing formation of their meaning (Butler, 1999; Nentwich et al., 2015). The meaning of an utterance (or other linguistic unit) and its potential to perform actions in a field is further characterised by a discontinuity produced by variations in origin and interpretive contexts so that utterances acquire meanings as they move between fields and these meanings can perform different functions within different fields. This “spectral performativity” (Maesse, 2013) helps explain how an utterance might perform the possession of different species of capital depending on the field in which it is interpreted (Soro, 2021).

Methodology

The article discusses analyses of two versions of IMMA and e-flux’s about pages, the first pair gathered in 2016 and the second in 2023, as well as analyses of the about pages of MACBA (a national modern and contemporary art museum in Catalonia, Spain), the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA), and Dia Art Foundation (Dia), and the art magazines ARTnews, Frieze, and Spike (Table 1). In using this relatively small corpus and sample population, the article does not produce empirical results with strong external validity to the broad and diverse array of discourse practices in the artworld. However, the leading status of IMMA and e-flux within their respective subfields (see the section “Field analysis”) makes their discourse practices significant in terms of their effects on the artworld. That is the capacities of their utterances to create the artworld by describing it and to contribute to the formation of discursive norms and limits.

Table 1 Corpora.

Accounting for the history of autonomy in the fields of art magazines and art museums, and plotting the positions, habitus, and inter-field relationships of e-flux and IMMA, provides the context required to interpret how their discourse practices realise inter-field relationships. As the organisations studied occupy leading positions in their respective sub-fields, data on their habitus, capital, and field positions are readily available in secondary research and field-specific literature. The habitus of an organisation is typically analysed by attending to the habitus of the agents who compose it, particularly their capital, other metrics such as awards, rankings, revenue, audience size and demography, and their expressed dispositions (e.g. Duval, 2005; Bourdieu, 2005). Where points scales (e.g. 1–10) can be used to quantify the value of different species of capital (e.g. Nalaskowski and Dejna, 2015), here I describe the quantity of species possessed using the scale: none, low, medium, high, very high to avoid assumptions about differences in value between species of capital. Plotting agents’ synchronic field positions involves attending to their orientation to poles of production and the volume, quality, and composition of their capital while plotting diachronic field positions involves attending to their trajectory in the field over time.

Discourse analysis attends to interdiscursivity, meaning the mixing of different discourses in texts. Discourses are identified here by attending to genres, themes, lexicons, classification schemes, performative utterances, and other discourse features. Genres are conventionalised ways of acting through discourse (Bhatia, 2002, p. 6). They are analysed here as mixes of generic elements that may be hierarchically ordered within a text and may realise different functions (Fairclough, 2003, pp. 70–71). The generic elements of texts can be identified by attending to their purposes and functions, as well as their linguistic features (e.g. text structure, modality, grammatical mood, speech function, semantic relations) (Fairclough, 2003, p. 66). Where relevant, the analysis also attends to the styles used, which are ways of “performing a certain identity or role” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 25) and vary according to mode (e.g. written), tenor (e.g. formal), and rhetorical mode (e.g. descriptive) (Fairclough, 2009, p. 127). Thematic analysis attends to the repetition and reoccurrence of themes (Lawless and Chen, 2019), lexical analysis to the terminology used (to represent subjects, events, circumstances, etc.) and its appropriateness for the text (Fairclough, 2010, p. 37, 43; 2007, p. 133), and classification schemes are identified in terms or phrases, for example, that construct subjects, events, circumstances, and so on, according to particular visions of the world (Fairclough, 2003, p. 130, pp. 138–149). Analysing different versions of IMMA and e-flux’s about pages also relies on intertextual analysis of what has been added or subtracted (Fairclough, 2003).

When attending to utterances, facts represented can be “secondary to the values they convey, within the particular value system that is implicit” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 111). While for Fairclough this value-system is “discourse-relative” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 172), here reference is made to the field in which the utterance is mobilised. While a range of linguistic devices realise evaluative functions (e.g. legitimation strategies (Van Leeuwen, 2007), hedging (Afshar et al., 2014)), this analysis focuses on performances of reputation (Soro, 2021), a typology of devices that explain how symbolic value is discursively constructed at the level of utterance within a specific field. This helps reveal the symbolic activities of utterances across fields of practice. Performances of position explicitly or implicitly represent the occupation of a field position (e.g. by an agent, object, or event). This position can be Y-axis (i.e. rank), X-axis (i.e. orientation), or diachronic (e.g. avant-garde, rear-garde). Performances of capital explicitly or implicitly represent possession of a particular form, species, and state of capital. Performances of conformity explicitly or implicitly represent adherence to nomoi. The semantic units defined as performances of reputation, which may be a statement, phrase, or word, are said to perform because, in representing the field, they foster a particular impression of it, and in doing so, work to bring the field into being according to this impression.

Field analysis

A brief history of autonomy in the fields of art museums and art magazines

The history of autonomy in the field of European national art museums properly begins in 1793 when the Louvre emerged as the archetype of the public-facing museum, soon followed by similarly modelled museums in every major European city (McClellan, 2003, p. 8). These new institutions were bound to the instrumental aims of national governments who had begun to recognise the propagandistic value of making their nations’ art collections publicly accessible (McClellan, 2003, p. 4; Bennett, 1988, pp. 73–76). Correspondingly, museum publics increased throughout the 19th century and art museums were increasingly seen as ways to enlighten the poor, in particular in Victorian England. The applied art museum, which focused on industrial goods rather than high art, soon emerged as a new means for the working classes to better themselves through the emulation of other visitors (McClellan, 2003, p. 12). However, high art and applied art museums championed opposing ideologies: Art for art’s sake (e.g. autonomous art) and art for the public’s sake. By the 1920s, most museums “pursued a middle course between the two philosophies” but by and large the public came second (McClellan, 2003, p. 20). By the 1940s, high art aestheticism won out (Corsane, 2005, p. 92). In the US context at least, public art museums have since been primarily focused on building historically important international collections and supporting scholarship within elite curator circles (Potvin, 2012, pp. 57–58). By the mid-20th century, economic power had shifted from the state to private hands, particularly those of wealthy board members, and art museum practices became more commercial and increasingly shaped by private interests (Buck-Morss et al., 1997, p. 10; Brown, 2019, p. 10; Shaw, 2020). Margaret Thatcher’s government championed this enterprise focus in the UK, as have UK governments since. The resultant underfunding installed a commercial principle in the field of art museums: the privileging of entertainment over education and footfall over care for collections (Hewison, 2005, pp. 158–160).

National art museums today must therefore negotiate relationships to the artistic field by fostering innovation (aesthetic and otherwise), forming canons, and conserving collections, to the political field by appealing to and educating the public and fostering politically supported values, such as democracy and inclusivity (Brown, 2020, p. 203), and, to the economic field by pursuing commercial viability and meeting the interests of investors, trustees, collectors, corporations, and private institutions. Of course, the extent to which each museum negotiates relationships with these fields varies depending, for example, on its reliance on national funding, corporate sponsorship, or commercial revenue streams.

Discussed elsewhere (Soro, 2021; Soro et al., 2019), the field of art magazines emerged in Germany in the mid-18th century on the heels of innovations in printing technology, expanding to the US and other European nations in the early 19th century. By the early 20th century, art magazines had to carefully negotiate their relationships with the artistic and economic fields, striving “for a tone of impartiality” while maintaining links with the art trade and actively promoting art to readers (Pezzini, 2013, p. 14). Where some of these early publications aimed at audiences interested in the contemporary art of the day, others aimed at avant-garde artists and intellectuals, and others still at audiences with more antiquarian and scholarly interests (Roberts, 1976, pp. 48–49). A distinction between more market and public-focused and more artist and intellectual-focused magazines continues today, with magazines such as ARTnews and Freize occupying positions near the economic pole of the field, magazines such as e-flux and Spike occupying positions near the cultural pole, with the most dominant magazine Artforum loosely designating a central position. In the 1970s, considered the zenith of the field’s discursive power (Allen, 2011, p. 7), the opposition between these poles was fiercely contested when Artforum adopted a new “up-to-date look and sensibility”, slick graphic design, and began using glossy photographic reproductions, altering its “role in the evaluation of art and greatly amplifying its promotional tendencies” (Allen, 2011, p. 23). This resulted in a highly publicised rift and led key Artforum editors to resign. Since then, art magazines have in general become more commercially oriented but continue to play an essential role in the artworld’s reputational economy through their commentary, promotion, and advertising (Thompson, 2010, pp. 32–51).

Art magazines must therefore maintain their reputations in the artworld through art reviews, art criticism, news reporting, and so on, while also generating revenue in the commercial field through advertising and subscriptions. The extent to which an art magazine must conform to the anti-commercial nomos of the artworld, that is to which it must champion the principle of artistic autonomy, depends on its field position, which is more or less homologous to the positions its audience members occupy in analogous fields (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 165).

IMMA and comparative cases in the field of art museums

Ireland’s premier national institution for contemporary art, IMMA exhibits top-tier artists and research-based work, programmes academic events, and delivers educational courses. Among IMMA’s reputable staff, current director Annie Fletcher is a Trinity College Dublin graduate, lecturer at De Appel and the Dutch Art Institute, former chief curator of the Van Abbe museum, and has worked with Douglas Hyde and EVA International - all top-tier institutions in the Irish and Dutch artworlds. IMMA’s former director, Sarah Glennie, has a BA in Art History from Bristol University and an MA in Museum and Curatorial Studies from Manchester University. She worked with Tate St. Ives, Kettle’s Yard Gallery, the Henry Moore Foundation, and PS1/MoMa, and was director of both the Irish Film Institute and the National College of Art and Design in Dublin—all top-tier institutions in the Irish, UK, and US artworlds. Sean Kissane, curator of exhibitions at IMMA, has produced major touring exhibitions and retrospectives and published several books on modernist and Irish art. He is currently enrolled in the doctoral programme at Technological University Dublin’s Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media. This high volume of very high-quality embodied artistic capital and medium volume of medium-quality academic capital is complemented by a very high volume of very high-quality objectified artistic capital, IMMA’s collection, which includes the work of most top-tier Irish contemporary artists and many top-tier international artists, such as Lucian Freud and Paula Rego. IMMA also possesses a high volume of very high-quality political capital, evidenced in the percentage of its funding from the state (90%) and the state’s bequeathment of IMMA’s premises, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, a 17th-century architectural and historical landmark.

IMMA’s well-formed artistic, academic, and political capital and its history of pioneering work in Ireland provide significant discursive power, establishing it as a spokesperson in the Irish artworld. This composition corresponds to IMMA’s strong relationship to the political field, moderate relationship with academia, and its relative autonomy from the economic field (patrons provide only 2% of its funding annually). IMMA can therefore be seen to have a need to negotiate a commitment to the goals of the artworld’s cultural pole (e.g. autonomy, experimentation, and criticality) to maintain its artworld reputation and the goals of the political field (e.g. education, public popularity, mainstream appeal) to maintain its perceived value in terms of public expenditure.

This article analyses the field positions and about pages (see the section “Discourse analysis”) of MACBA, Dia, and DIA to better account for how the presence of IDFs and their negotiation on IMMA’s About page relates to the specificity of IMMA’s position in the field of art museums. These comparisons help illustrate both, variation and homologous correspondences in art museum discourse and the utility of the article’s conceptual framework for analysing them.

MACBA is arguably the most important modern and contemporary art museum in Spain. It exhibits ground-breaking contemporary art, such as the work of Andrea Frazer, and has an impressive collection, including works by Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí. It provides the public with free access to books, publications, and its archive through its Study Center, its Library Reading Room, and its Special Collections Room. MACBA is managed by a consortium, with members including the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Regional Government of Catalonia, and Barcelona City Council. Its autonomy was brought into question in 2015 when then-director Bartomeu Marí, on the eve of an exhibition opening, attempted to hurriedly remove a work by Ines Doujak that brutally satirised the Spanish monarchy, which has longstanding links to the museum. After a “social media uproar” (e-flux, 2015), the exhibition went ahead and Marí resigned, but not before firing the two curators of the exhibition. The similarities between MACBA and IMMA go beyond their acronymic titles (styled after New York’s archetypal MoMa). They are both public art museums occupying leading, spokesperson positions in their national contemporary art fields, meaning both must maintain their high-status reputations in the contemporary artworld while managing their autonomy from the state bodies that provide their funding.

Dia is an influential private museum with a range of constantly changing sites and installations, including eight permanent sites across the United States and Germany. It commissions, supports, maintains, and acquires works by historically important artists, including Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, and Andy Warhol. It is particularly well known for its acquisition and maintenance of large land art pieces, such as Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. It was founded in 1974 by the heir to the Schlumberger oil-field company Philippa de Menil (whose family has been termed the Medici of modern art), art dealer and collector Heiner Friedrich, and art historian Helen Winkler. Its current director is Jessica Morgon, former curator at Tate and Artistic Director of the 10th Gwangju Biennale. This very high volume of economic and artistic capital allows Dia to be avant-garde-ist in its approach to collecting, management, and display and leaves it largely free of influence from the political field.

DIA’s galleries host one of the most impressive art collections in the world. Valued at $8.1 billion in 2014 (Kennedy, 2014), it includes works by Giovanni Bellini, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Andy Warhol. Founded in the late 19th century by local philanthropists, the institute has changed ownership from an independent non-profit to a public art museum (i.e. run as a city department) and back. Its building and collection are currently owned by the City of Detroit, but it relies heavily on private donations. DIA is a very different type of museum to IMMA and MACBA on the one hand and Dia on the other. IMMA and MACBA are public institutions whose reputations rely, not only on their collections and staff credentials but also on their capacities to lead trends in their respective national art fields. Dia is a kind of avant-garde-ist private museum whose reputation is based, not only on its collection and staff credentials but also on its unconventional, innovative approach. By contrast, DIA is an older, more conservative type of art museum. It is not claiming to lead trends in the artworld or to lead innovation in experimental art museum practices. Its reputation is primarily based on the very significant cultural contribution its collection makes to the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan. It therefore has less symbolic need to signal its autonomy to the artworld—its mission and vision being more in line with more traditional public art museums, such as Ireland’s National Gallery and Spain’s Prado Museum.

E-flux and comparative cases in the field of online art magazines

Founded in response to internet technology in 1998, e-flux was avant-garde in that it introduced the online context to artworld discourse. It did not however suffer the symbolic poverty typically associated with this position as its ‘start-up cultural capital’ supported its near-immediate consecration. Key players in the artworld, e-flux’s editors Anton Vidolke and Julieta Aranda have exhibited artwork and curated at the most prestigious artworld events (e.g. Venice Biennale) as well as teaching at prestigious art educational institutes (e.g. SAAS Free). E-flux’s contributors are among the most prestigious academics and artists in the world (e.g. Slavoj Zizek, Martha Rosler). By virtue of this high volume of very high-quality artistic and academic capital, its cultural pole orientation, and the influential role played by its Announcement page, e-flux occupies an important spokesperson position in the contemporary artworld.

E-flux’s website has a diverse format of pages, including Video, Film, and Architecture pages. Key to its field relationships are its Journal page, which publishes scholarly articles that tend toward themes of capitalist critique and philosophical debate, and its Announcement page, which advertises press releases for art events (emailed to e-flux subscribers as often as three times daily). Not anyone can advertise on e-flux’s Announcement page, with the press releases that are selected often requiring revision and resubmission prior to publication. This peer review status makes e-flux announcements an essential sign of distinction for art events, particularly those positioned at the cultural pole. By virtue of its Journal and Announcement pages, e-flux is seen to have strong relationships to the academic and economic fields and a weak relationship to the political field. E-flux therefore needs to champion the goals of the artworld’s cultural pole to maintain its artworld reputation while pursuing revenue in the commercial field to maintain its viability and profitability.

This article analyses the field positions and about pages (see the section “Discourse analysis”) of ARTnews, Freize, and Spike to better account for how the presence of IDFs and their negotiation on e-flux’s About page may relate to the specificity of its position in the field of art magazines, thereby hel** to illustrate variation and homologous correspondences and to demonstrate the utility of the article’s conceptual framework.

Founded in 1902, ARTnews is the oldest art magazine still in circulation. Its reputation has waned through the years as it changed hands from owner to owner, merged with Art in America, adopted tabloid features such as its Top 200 Artists List, and became increasingly market focused. Although positioned at the commercial pole of the field (and increasingly so), and although the status of its contributors has declined, its longstanding reputation, sizable readership (180,000), and record of award-winning art journalism mean it remains among the most important artworld publications.

Founded in 1991 by Oxford graduates Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover (OBE), Frieze Magazine is a partner of Frieze Art Fair, which, founded in 2003, is among the most important art fairs in the artworld. Frieze Magazine has a readership of approximately 250,000. It mixes exhibition reviews, interviews, and other art-related news content with journalism focused on Frieze Art Fairs, which take place in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Seoul. The commercial focus of the magazine is balanced by the significant volume of reviews and interviews it provides. Indeed, the Fairs & Events and Shop subpages are positioned after the Features & Interviews, Exhibition Reviews, Opinion, and Watch & Listen subpages, signalling its primary focus to be art journalism rather than art fair promotion. We can see Freize as occupying a high-status position at the commercial pole of the field of art magazines.

Founded in 2004 by artist Rita Vitorelli, Spike is a more academic and more explicitly critical publication than ARTnews and Frieze, and its articles are written in more esoteric prose. Indeed, it labels much of its content using the tag “Discourse”. It, therefore, occupies a position near the cultural pole, although, with a circulation of 12,000, it is less established than e-flux.

This brief overview of positions and field relationships reveals that IMMA and e-flux must negotiate their principle relationship to the artistic field with their relationships to legitimating fields. Where e-flux’s relationship to academia distinguishes its audience, it does not significantly undermine its artistic autonomy as both academia and the artworld are cultural fields. By contrast, its relationship to the economic field and IMMA’s relationship to the political field must, to some extent, be managed to preserve the semblance of their autonomy in artworld circles. That is, while IMMA and e-flux are expected to pursue national political ends and revenue, respectively, these pursuits should be seen to affect their artistic autonomy as little as possible lest they face symbolic costs to their artworld reputations.

MACBA was seen to occupy a position in the Spanish national field loosely homologous to the position IMMA occupies in the Irish field. Dia occupies a more avant-garde-ist position in the field of art museums, closer to the cultural pole, suggesting it has a greater need to demonstrate autonomy, and DIA to occupy a position closer to the political pole, which should correspond to a lesser need. Spike is positioned toward the cultural pole in the field of art magazines but not as close to this pole as e-flux, meaning it should have a lesser need to demonstrate autonomy but a greater need than ARTnews and Freize, which occupy positions closer to the economic pole.

IMMA and e-flux occupy dominant Y-axis positions within their fields. In the artworld, therefore, their discourse practices significantly influence what is regarded as a legitimate stance toward autonomy as well as the relative value that different species of capital are seen to have (e.g. artistic, political, economic). Furthermore, within their respective sub-fields, their use of different discourse practices and features also influences the legitimacy of those practices and features, including those incorporated from other fields.

Focusing primarily on IMMA and e-flux, the following section will examine how the about pages of the organisations discussed above realise relationships to the fields of politics and economy, and how they negotiate the ideological tensions these relationships create.

Discourse analysis

IDFs and field relationships on IMMA’s About page

IMMA’s About page has six primary subpages, which themselves have numerous subpages (Table 2). I will omit from the analysis here the RHK Building and Site subpages, which detail the history of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, the Job and Opportunities and Venue Hire subpages, which report practical information, and the Press Centre subpage, which is an archive of 467 press releases dating back to 1996.

Table 2 Webpage map.

Administrative genres

The 45 Policies and Reports subpages include pages such as Website Privacy Policy, Gender Equality Policy, CCTV Policy, Quarterly Prompt Payment Reports, and Code of Conduct. These pages provide information on governance and legislation in a technical language and cannot be seen to be of interest to the average page visitor. Adopting an administrative discourse¹, they are better interpreted as aimed at actors in the political field—those who both, possess appropriate linguistic capital to competently interpret the discourse and have some interest in monitoring IMMA’s governance. For example, civil servants in the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. The Annual Reports & Financial Statements subpage appears particularly specific to the political field. It provides seven annual financial statements which can be downloaded as Microsoft Word (MS) documents and sixteen annual reports, which can be downloaded as MS docs or PDFs, with the final report taking the form of a webpage. The older MS docs typically unpack their content in the formal, terse style of a report while the later PDFs and webpage incorporate an informal, elaborate style, colourful images, creative graphic design, and more frequent positive evaluations. It would be easy to mistake the later reports as aimed at typical page visitors as they provide IMMA-related news content in an easy-to-read and persuasive style. However, it is unlikely IMMA expects potential museum visitors, art enthusiasts, artists, and other typical About page visitors to follow a link to a tier 4 subpage titled Annual Report & Financial Statement 2021. Rather, these and the other administrative genres appear directed at the political field. At the same time, they make IMMA’s governance and administration more transparent in the artworld.

The About IMMA subpage has eight subpages (Fig. 5), three of which—Governance, Website Colophon, and Contact Us—report information in a formal, terse style. The Governance subpage, also interpreted as an administrative genre, reports on IMMA’s governance by the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and its government-appointed board members, referencing legislation and other information with primary relevance to the political field, stating, for example: “IMMA [..] must observe and comply with the Governing Laws of the Republic of Ireland and applicable overarching EU Laws and Regulations, including compliance with the Companies Act 2014”. This statement examples the political lexicon salient in the administrative genres more generally, which demands of readers specifically formed embodied knowledge and linguistic capital.

Fig. 5

IMMA 2023 About page. Source: https://imma.ie/about/overview/.

MACBA’s similarly labyrinthian About page also contains numerous subpages and similar administrative genres and documents, such as the Budgetary and Financial Management subpage and the Status of Implementation of 2019 Revenue Budget PDF. We see in this striking bounty of administrative discourse how these national art museum about pages do significant work representing their institutions to the political field, while also championing an emergent nomos focused on transparency in the field of art museums², which might be seen add legitimacy to this politically oriented activity in the artworld.

Narrative genres

The Overview page is the landing subpage of IMMA’s About page. It contains the type of short, punchy text that has come to characterise about pages, with its salient themes providing a neat example of the About page’s focus on artworld status on the one hand (Table 3:1–6) and political status and public service on the other (Table 3: 7–17).

Table 3 Themes in the Overview subpage of the About IMMA subpage on IMMA’s 2023 About page.

The Mission & Vision, How IMMA was established, Information for Artists, and IMMA Director subpages are more elaborate and descriptive than the Overview page, containing more elements of biography and promotion. Each of these pages construct narratives about IMMA. Within these narrative pages, an artworld oriented discourse constructs IMMA’s reputation by performing its leading position in the consecrated avant garde (Table 4: 18, 19), its orientation to the cultural pole of the artworld (Table 4: 21, 22), its objectified and institutionalised artistic capital (Table 4: 23, 2, 25, 26), and its conformity to artworld nomoi surrounding artistic experimentation (Table 4: 27, 28, 29, 10) and cosmopolitan values (Table 4: 31). Another linguistic means through which IMMA constructs its artworld status is the claim it “is Ireland’s National Cultural Institution for Modern and Contemporary Art”. This classification was more pronounced in IMMA’s 2016 About page which used the definite article in its specifying function³ when stating: “As the national institution for contemporary art, IMMA is […].” Both classifications imply IMMA is the only national institution for modern and contemporary art in Ireland, discounting The Lab and The Hugh Lane Gallery, as well as Arts Council Ireland, among others. The grounds for this claim are further undermined later within the 2016 and 2023 texts when IMMA states that it “was established […] as Ireland’s first national institution for the presentation and collection of modern and contemporary art”. This apparent contradiction between being the first and the only suggests the classification is likely meant to be figurative. It appears to be a rhetorical device. Whether employed intuitively or deployed strategically, it functions to trigger the assumption that IMMA is so much more important than other Irish national contemporary art institutions that it constitutes a superior class of institution of which it is the sole member. Each of these performative utterances works to conjure the status of IMMA in the minds of the About page reader but especially those in the artworld who best understand the art field-specific meaning and value of what is represented. These narrative texts thereby link IMMA to the artworld. They are a means of acting in the artistic field, where peer recognition rather than political recognition or public popularity is the primary basis of reputation.

Table 4 Performances of reputation, IMMA About page 2023.

Appearing to address audiences in the political field and public sphere, the narrative texts also construct IMMA’s political and public reputation by performing its possession of political and philanthropic capital⁴ and its adherence to the ideology of art for the public’s sake (Table 5: 32–46). The primary form of capital mobilised here is IMMA’s audience, with its quantity and quality performed through exact quantifications, including the claim that IMMA’s “audience is young, with over 65% of [its] visitors aged under 44”. IMMA’s recognition by noteworthy politicians and corporate sponsors is also saliently represented (Table 5: 35, 37, 38, 39, 40), communicating its institutionally recognised status in the political and economic fields. By representing IMMA’s focus on connecting people with art and art with society (Table 5: 41, 42, 43, 44, 45), IMMA’s conformance to the political nomos that national art museums should serve the public interest more than the more esoteric and aesthetic interests of artworld peers is repeatedly, if typically implicitly, declared. This conformity is also made somewhat explicit, however, through direct quotation of IMMA’s first director, who staked IMMA’s claim to an “enormous public responsibility to speak to […] the broadest range of people possible” (Table 5: 46). By constructing IMMA’s political and public status and the strength of its commitment to public service, these utterances work to maintain IMMA’s political support and public popularity, key bases for its funding. The narrative texts therefore address the political field as well as the artworld.

Table 5 Examples of performances of reputation on IMMA’s About page.

Mingled IDFs

Where the narrative texts on IMMA’s About page contain a discourse oriented to the artworld and a discourse oriented to the political field, the administrative genres solely contain the latter. These discourses carry ideologies belonging to these fields, that is autonomous art and art for the public’s sake. The tension between these IDFs is negotiated to a limited extent through the page’s hierarchical structuring of subpages. For the most part, however, the IDFs are set to work alongside each other, allowing IMMA to act within the artistic, political, and social fields simultaneously. This ‘mingling’ is in line with the middle course noted in Section 4.1, adhering to the artworld nomos of autonomy as well as the political nomos of public service.

Comparative cases in the field of art museums

MACBA’s About page is formatted similarly to IMMA’s, with multiple subpages separating narratives on MACBA from administrative genres reporting on governance, legislation, policy, and so on. The page similarly performs political and artworld capital (e.g. Table 6: 47, 48) and similarly weaves together elements of discourses on autonomous art, art for the nation’s sake, and art for the public’s sake, as evidenced, for example, by MACBA’s aims “to go beyond what is known, or accepted, as real and possible in order to venture into the realm of the probable”, to “focus on Catalan production”, and to disseminate “today’s art among broader audiences”. However, where its commitment to canon formation and artistic innovation are made clear by repeated references to its “building a public art collection in Catalonia and [its] decisive role in reflection, research and dissemination regarding contemporary art”, MACBA is also careful to make clear that its educational programming is not seen “as an instrumental tool but rather as a means for emancipation”, as a method of “seeking out new ways to generate knowledge”. MACBA, therefore, claims to engage with the public, not so much to educate or entertain them, but rather to “empower [them to] trigger social transformations”. While these aims are not necessarily mutually exclusive with those of the political field, which to a certain extent might support such aims for cultural institutions, their representation implicitly distances MACBA from the ideological principle that national art museums should realise political goals, such as ‘bettering’ or entertaining the public. This argumentation helps explain away the tension between MACBA’s artworld and public-political prerogatives, lessening the extent to which it appears to surrender autonomy to the political field. This case illustrates how the contest between these IDFs within the online discourse of public contemporary art museums’ can be negotiated through explicit argumentation, bringing into the open a contest that may otherwise, as in the case of IMMA, be left implicit. The conspicuousness of this argumentation on MACBA’s About page attests to the awareness of this contest in the art museum field.

Table 6 Examples of performances of reputation on MACBA’s About page.

Where IMMA and MACBA’s about pages evidence a contest between an IDF linked to artistic autonomy and an IDF linked to public service, the about pages of Dia and DIA respectively illustrate cases in which these IDFs have achieved dominance.

Dia’s brief and simple About page contains no administrative genres. Its six paragraphs—Mission, History, Sites, Dia Beacon, Dia Chelsea, Affiliates—prominently express Dia’s strong commitment to the ideology of the artworld’s cultural pole. The Mission paragraph states Dia’s mission to be “advancing, realizing, and preserving the vision of artists” and hel** “artists achieve visionary projects that might not otherwise be realized because of scale or scope”. This commitment is further expressed through the statements: “[f]rom the beginning, Dia demonstrated a willingness to follow and support artists’ ideas”, and “Dia has collaborated with other organizations to help share the visions and aspirations of artists”. It is important to note that the about page references public service by highlighting that some of Dia’s major projects are “open to the public” and that it presents “public programs” in addition to its special exhibitions. The theme of public service is however extremely limited in comparison to the theme of supporting artistic experimentation and autonomy. The about page is therefore seen to evidence the dominance of an IDF oriented to an artworld audience, in particular audiences at the artworld’s cultural pole.

DIA’s About page contains a similar mix of narrative genres (e.g. About the Collection, History, Leadership) and administrative genres (e.g. Financial Statements, Board of Directors Meeting Minutes, Annual County Engagement Reports) as the about pages of IMMA and MACBA but has far less subpages. The lead paragraph, titled About the DIA, states DIA “strives to be the town square of our community, a gathering place for everybody and [to] create experiences that help each visitor find personal meaning with the art”. The second paragraph, titled Strategic Plan, outlines the pillars of DIA’s strategic plan, which include creating “an extraordinary experience for every DIA visitor, onsite, online, and in the community”, continuing “to foster a sense of belonging for our team, visitors and tri-county communities”, cultivating “a collaborative, inclusive, and equitable workplace culture”, develo** “education, exhibition and public programs and steward[ing] our art collection”, securing “financial stability and support[ing] creativity for current and future generations by growing the DIA’s endowment”, and building “digital capabilities that enable efficient teamwork and inspire our onsite and online audiences”. Notably absent are the goals of the artworld’s cultural pole, such as canon formation, supporting artistic innovation and experimentation, and fostering critical subjectivities, for example. The presence of administrative genres directed at the political field, the salience of DIA’s commitment to public service in its narrative genres, and the absence of expressions of commitment to the nomoi of the artworld’s cultural pole evidence the dominance of an IDF focused on addressing audiences in the political and social fields.

IDFs and field relationships on e-flux’s About page

E-flux’s About page has no subpages. The 2023 version scrolls vertically from a narrative text to a list of frequently asked questions (Fig. 6). The 2016 version separated these sections horizontally through two columns, making their distinction clearer (Fig. 7). Despite some modifications to both sections, the 2016 and 2023 pages mix the same discourses and perform the same functions.

Fig. 6

E-flux 2023 About page. Source: https://www.e-flux.com/about.

Fig. 7

E-flux 2016 About page. Source: https://figshare.com/s/15d6869f19c021acc30d.

Narrative genres

The narrative text in the 2023 and 2016 pages appears to specifically address the artworld, which is to say e-flux readers, through frequent performances of artistic and academic capital and an academic lexicon (e.g. “eflux.com spans numerous strains of critical discourse”). This lexicon is consistent with e-flux’s field position and habitus and evidences the high-quality linguistic capital required of e-flux readers, a valued sign of distinction at the artworld’s cultural pole. The 2023 narrative text contains biographic elements but adopts a terse, formal style, giving it some semblance of a report, although a high frequency of explicitly evaluative modifiers, such as “”most significant”, “key”, “most influential”, and “canonical” (Table 7: 49, 50, 51, 52, 54), makes it promotional purpose readily apparent. By contrast, the 2016 text performs e-flux’s capital more implicitly by representing its artistic and academic practices, such as the platform it offers to art schools and art academies, the art projects it produces, the academic essays it produces, and the programme of exhibitions it maintains (Table 7: 55, 56, 57, 58). The 2016 page also devotes more space to recounting e-flux’s history and relatedly draws more on an informal, conversational style (e.g. “In November 1998”, “One month later”, “tiny storefront”), although this style remains present in the 2023 text to a lesser extent (e.g. “Stay tuned!”). The greater salience of autobiographical genre elements in the 2016 narrative, its more informal style, and its lower frequency of less explicit performances of reputation create a greater semblance of personal identity for e-flux. This helps texture out differences between e-flux and its readers in terms of status (i.e. social hierarchy), time, and space (i.e. social distance). Also subtracted from the 2023 page, the 2016 page contains a hierarchically organised classification scheme, naming e-flux as a “publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform and enterprise”. This listing worked to negotiate the culture-commerce tension facing art magazines by foregrounding e-flux’s cultural practices, including the radical ontological claim of being an artwork, but also clearly presenting e-flux’s commercial practices as definitive of its identity. Another significant subtraction is an utterance representing subscribers to e-flux announcements as receiving a “free” service (Table 7: 59) despite these readers, when commodified as advertising recipients, actually generating e-flux’s revenue. The phrase “is made free for” obscures the attention readers exchange while the phrase “paid by” conjures a somewhat direct reallocation of resources from “museums and other institutions of art” to services for e-flux readers, concealing e-flux’s extraction of profit and operating costs. The utterance thereby dresses e-flux’s commercialisation of readers in the guise of altruism. The narrative texts on the 2016 and 2023 pages are both clearly directed to an artworld audience. Variations in the lexicon, classification scheme, and performances of capital, however, evidence how the narrative in the 2023 page has been made less esoteric and more promotional.

Table 7 Examples of performances of capital and subtractions on e-flux’s About pages.

Commercial genres

Assigned to the right-hand column on the 2016 page, the FAQ text (Table 8: 60) introduces a commercial discourse, marking a sharp departure from the narrative text in terms of genre, lexicon, and classification. Each tag question provides information that is only of interest to advertising clients, begging the question of whether they really are the questions e-flux is most frequently asked. It is worth noting that Frieze also employs the FAQ genre on its About page but the first six out of a total of seven questions—“What is frieze magazine?”, “Where can I buy frieze magazine?”, “How much is frieze magazine?”, “How do I subscribe to frieze magazine?”, “I’m an existing frieze magazine subscriber. Can I still access frieze.com?”, “When should I expect my magazine to arrive?”, “How can I find out more about frieze magazine?”, “How can I advertise in frieze magazine?”—are clearly directed to readers. This further undermines the plausibility that the questions answered on e-flux’s About page are indeed those most frequently asked.

Table 8 FAQ text on e-flux’s 2023 About page.

The commercial discourse in the FAQ text is realised in a commercial lexicon that contains exact quantifications (e.g. “150,000+ visual arts professionals”) and demographics (“10% consultants”), each explicitly evaluating e-flux readers accordingly to economic rationality. The contrast between the discourses at work in the narrative and FAQ texts are further revealed in the 2016 page’s representation of readers, who are classified as “readers” in the narrative text and as “visual arts professionals” in the FAQ text; the former lexicalisation constructing a subject position involved in knowledge transmission and the latter a position that designates status and commercial value.

The FAQ text constructs the commercial value of e-flux as an advertising platform by performing the value of its readers and the field positions of its advertising clients. The value of readers as commercial capital is explicitly constructed in terms of their quantity (“150,000+”) and quality (e.g. “15% museum affiliated”). While these utterances are seen to perform value specific to the commercial field, the listing of “leading” art institutions is spectrally performative. Discussed elsewhere (Soro, 2021), here e-flux uses an exhaustive list to apply the modifier “leading” to every organisation listed, performing the dominant positions of each institution within their respective sub-fields and, more broadly, within the artworld. Each institution cited is a distinct resource of reputation, a unique form of capital possessed by e-flux. To an artworld reader, these institutions are recognised as forms of institutionalised artistic capital—formal recognition by artworld institutions. At the same time, in the field of advertising clients, they are forms of institutionalised commercial capital, each one indexing an institutional recognition of e-flux’s value as an advertising platform. These performances, therefore, mobilise different species of capital depending on the field in which they are interpreted. This dual function lends further opacity to the veil shielding the commercial discourse of the FAQ text from the scrutiny of e-flux’s typical readers. This is not to claim that e-flux is aiming to fool its readers into mistaking the FAQs as being addressed toward them. Rather, it is to propose that the nomos limiting naked expressions of commercial instrumentality, which is particularly impelling at the artworld’s cultural pole, likely led e-flux to intuitively or strategically veil the commercial function of the about page. In any case, the FAQ genre functions to lightly cloak communication with potential advertisers in a simulated dialogue with readers. The semblance of casual conversation it creates wraps its commercial discourse in a cultural function, reducing the conspicuousness of its instrumentality. This thin veiling is also apparent in e-flux’s lexicalisation of the paid press releases it publishes as “announcements” (60), a classification that also dresses a commercial practice in cultural garb.

Comparative cases in the field of online art magazines

ARTnews’ About page has undergone some transformation since ARTnews was acquired by Penske Media Corporation. Where it previously contained a single paragraph and linked images, this paragraph, largely unchanged, is now accompanied by an About paragraph on Art in America (a sister publication ARTnews merged with under the previous ownership of BMP Media Holdings) and an About Our Team paragraph, which details the biographies of ARTnews and Art in America staff.

Speaking to the artworld, the ARTnews paragraph on ARTnews’ About page is focused on constructing its artworld status (Table 9: 61). It lists a range of famous contributors (Table 9: 61), most of whom do not have any content still available on the site and many of whom passed away some time ago. This name-drop** evidences the declined status of ARTnews’ contributors and the page’s rhetorical function. Of particular relevance here is that the paragraph, and indeed the About page more generally, does not contain commercial discourse, as found on e-flux’s About page.

We find a similarly artworld-oriented discourse on the about pages of Frieze and Spike, both of which focus on performing embodied artistic capital (e.g. Table 9: 62, 63). Indeed, Frieze’s page goes as far as to claim it is “the world’s leading platform for modern and contemporary art”. Spike’s About page expresses commitment to the principle of artistic autonomy more clearly and substantially than the about pages of ARTnews and Freize, highlighting Spike’s focus on “vigorous, independent, and meaningful art criticism“, its avant-garde-ist editorial approach, described as “usually open”, and its commitment to social critique, realised through the claim that it “not afraid of controversy and provocation”. While commercial discourse is notably absent on these three publications’ about pages, they mobilise it on separate advertising pages. ARTnews’ Advertising page is lean, repeating the About page paragraph with the addition of a prompt for clients (i.e. “For advertising inquiries, please email ads@artnews.com”). By contrast, the advertise pages of Frieze and Spike deploy a commercial lexicon (e.g. “online marketing” (Table 9: 64)) and commercial genres, including ad specifications (Fig. 8) and Frieze’s downloadable Publishing Schedule. By addressing their potential advertising clients on specialised advertising pages, these publications avoid bringing the ideologies of autonomous art and culture for profit’s sake into contact within their about pages.

Table 9 Examples of performances of artworld reputation on the about pages of ARTnews, Frieze, and Spike.

Fig. 8

Advertising specifications on Spike’s Advertise page. Source: https://spikeartmagazine.com/advertise.

One interpretation for the interdiscursive mixing on e-flux’s About page is that it eliminates the need for an advertise page, the presence of which may highlight more strongly the commercial function of e-flux’s Announcement page and associate e-flux with the more overtly commercial practices of the journalistic field. Justifying this interpretation, e-flux’s position as a consecrated avant garde, its academically styled journal, its focus on capitalist critique, and its claim to be an art project mean it likely has a greater need to distinguish itself from commerce than other art magazines. The placement of a veiled commercial discourse on e-flux’s About page is therefore seen to have a strategic function. It circumvents the need for an advertise page, reducing the conspicuousness of the commercial activity on e-flux’s website overall, which supports e-flux’s status as an art project and bastion of capitalist critique.

This brief comparison serves to illustrate how ideological tensions created when art magazines mix artworld and commercially oriented discourses are negotiated differently, and, therefore, how variations in interdiscursivity within the artworld’s subfields can contribute to the ongoing transformation of the artworld’s autonomy.

Discussion

To further our understanding of how online discourse networks fields of practice, this article examined how the online discourse of art organisations is implicated in the continual reproduction and transformation of the artworld’s autonomy from legitimating fields. Its results suggest the about pages of IMMA and e-flux forge relationships of symbolic and interdiscursive exchange between the artworld and the fields of politics and economy. Symbolic exchange is realised when IMMA proposes the recognition of political and philanthropic capital and adherence to the political nomos of public service and when e-flux proposes the recognition of commercial capital. Representations of these capital and nomoi are mobilised to address the political and economic fields, where IMMA and e-flux need to construct reputation, but these representations are also inescapably mobilised in the artworld, thereby working to alter the configurations of capital and implicit ideological principles seen to have value there. Interdiscursive exchange is realised when discourse elements from the fields of politics and economy are recontextualised within artworld discourse, as occurs when IMMA uses administrative genres and a political lexicon and when e-flux uses rhetorical tag-questions, exact quantifications, demographics, and instrumentally commercial classifications. Again, these discourse elements are mobilised to address the political and economic fields but are also necessarily mobilised in the artworld, thereby working to naturalise the use of these elements within it. Illustrated in Figs. 9 and 10, the about pages of IMMA and e-flux are therefore seen to network the discursive field of the artworld with the discursive fields of politics and economy. Within this space, discourses practices from the fields of politics and economy are recontextualised within the artworld and performative utterances in the artworld are mobilised within the fields of politics and economy. By using a novel conceptual framework to illustrate these two discursive processes in practice, this article has furthered our understanding of how discourse networks fields of practice.

Fig. 9: Transepistemic field relationships constituted by IMMA’s About page.

Source: Author.

Fig. 10: Transepistemic field relationships constituted by e-flux’s About page.

Source: Author.

The ideological tensions created by the about pages’ networking of discursive fields were found to be managed in different ways, accepting the limited corpora cannot demonstrate the myriad of ways this management likely occurs in artworld websites. On IMMA’s About page, the most conspicuously administrative genres, such as annual reports and financial statements, are somewhat tucked away from the average site visitor within the 4th tier of the About page’s subpages, excepting the 2nd tier subpage Governance, which is prominently presented. Most of the other 2nd tier About IMMA subpages, such as Overview, Mission & Vision, and How IMMA was established, adopt a narrative genre to represent IMMA to the artworld, performing its championing of innovative and experimental art and its status as a dynamic, internationally recognised, and leading artworld institution. But they also perform capital specific to the political field, such as visitor growth and the funding it has raised, as well as its commitment to the principle of art for the public’s sake. IMMA’s About page was therefore seen to take a middle-way approach, mingling a politically oriented discourse with a more prominent artworld-oriented discourse while mingling expressions of commitment to political nomoi with expressions of commitment to artworld nomoi. The ideological tension between artworld and political prerogatives was addressed more definitively on MACBA’s About page, which similarly mingles the aforementioned discourses, but which is also careful to explain MACBA’s educational programming as a means of emancipating and empowering the public. This helps to signal that MACBA’s primary commitment is to the artworld’s nomoi and to distance MACBA from some of the more politically oriented goals historically associated with national art museums, such as recreation and ‘socialising’ the working class.

E-flux’s About page negotiates an ideological tension between e-flux’s championing of artworld autonomy and its production of culture for purposes of profit by reducing the conspicuousness of its commercial work (and of e-flux’s practices more generally). While the page’s narrative genre is clearly promotional, this promotion addresses the artworld using an academic lexicon and referencing e-flux’s artworld capital. By contrast, the FAQ genre addresses the field of advertising clients, performing commercial capital and adopting elements of commercial discourse, and there is therefore a reputational motivation to disguise the work it is doing. The genre’s instrumentality is largely veiled through its simulation of dialogue with readers, which effectively wraps its commercial practice in cultural garb.

The about pages of Dia and DIA example art museums that adhere more squarely to artworld nomoi and political nomoi, respectively, and therefore have no tension to negotiate. The about pages of ARTnews, Freize, and Spike similarly demonstrate dominant IDFS, each appearing to exclusively address the artworld while their advertising pages address the economic field. The target and reference corpora discussed here illustrate the variation in the fields of art museums and art magazines with regard to the discursive linking of the artworld and the political and economic fields, accepting that there is certainly more variation than is evidenced here. The artworld’s discursive field, therefore, appears as a site wherein contests between IDFs are implicitly waged, with consequences for the ongoing reproduction and transformation of artworld autonomy.

In summary, the article showed how the exchange between transepistemic discursive fields is forged by the artworld’s incorporation of discourse practices from and its mobilisation of performative utterances in legitimating fields, and how this forging creates ideological tensions relating to artworld autonomy that is negotiated in different ways. Further research on how online discourse is reproducing and transforming relationships between fields of practice is certainly warranted and has particular importance for cultural fields, which rely on their partial autonomy for self-determination and their special status in society. Future research may look to the recontextualisation of commercial and promotional discourses in cultural fields, which would support the rich literature on the commercialisation of culture in the context of capitalism and more recently, neoliberalism. It may also look to transepistemic discursive exchange between cultural fields and between scientific fields, which would provide new insight into transdisciplinarity within these fields. It may also look to how the specialised discourses of cultural and scientific fields are recontextualised and mobilised for different purposes in the field of media, as Maesse has done with the field of economics. In short, there are rich linkages between the discourses of fields of practice that have consequential effects on those fields and are therefore worthy of further attention.