Back to the (invisible) Académie? The organization of poetry as a “pure” art form

Abstract

Using the case of French contemporary poetry, this article investigates the organization of “pure” art forms. These are highly legitimate art forms which, instead of being profit-oriented, comprise actors who strive primarily for esthetic recognition. The organizational life of such arts is based on a new academy system which is in some regards comparable to that of the 17th century—leading me to call the current system a “return to the academy.” I define an academy system as an assemblage of artistic institutions coupled with public funding for artists and artistic organizations. This two-pronged system organizes the arts along four dimensions: strategic, administrative, ideological, and professional. Its strategic mission is to support artistic creation, spread cultural democracy, and guarantee the construction and transmission of literary heritage. Paradoxically, the State cannot make these choices directly, firstly because of the widely accepted autonomy of art, and secondly because, in a democracy, the State can no longer select artists according to an explicit ideology. The academy is thereby “invisible.” Second paradox, its organization has led to the marketization of pure arts, and the transformation of artists into independent workers providing goods and services. Finally, I discuss how this system fits a new consumerist definition of culture, based on “traces” that have to be recorded and managed as heritage. These findings question the typical narrative that the arts were emancipated from the patronage system thanks to the market, as this does not apply to most artists.

Organization and the arts: Critical conversations on expanding meanings and understandings of who matters

“…Art often has some elements of potential opposition to such systems in-built into its form. As Dubois (2022) points out, “a poet is not seen as producing better work because she sells more in the short run—a poet will sell more on the long term because her work is recognized for its esthetic value” (p. 981). This is refracted in the organizational realm where smaller, alternative organizing around art may stand in opposition to large mainstream organizations commercializing art (Dubois, 2022), and even within the same publishing organization where editors may need to have a “dual character” that grapples with the “fundamentally antagonistic aptitudes” around “art and money, love of literature and the pursuit of profit” (Bourdieu, 2008: 138).…”