The Inter- and Trans-disciplinary Condition of Art in Contemporary Culture

Abstract

The production, the system and the circuits of the arts are not what they used to be a few decades ago. The tangle of the field of the arts, which includes not only its already heterogeneous production, but also all its exhibition, reception and market networks, has become densely complex. Therefore, before demonizing what many call the cacophony of the arts, one must consider the conjunctures of their historicity, the heterogeneity of the roles of their insertion in the contradictory, paradoxical, and conflicting socio-cultural environments of our time. In the midst of the whirlwind of artistic production and circulation in contemporary times, this article seeks its foundations in Benjamin's conception of the artist as a producer, a conception that is only intelligible if we take into account, with Benjamin, the inalienable historicity of art as well.