Art, power and innovation

We can conceive the ‘art world’ as a kind of territory with borders managed by a network of powers (M. Foucault). The powerful players are collectors, gallery directors and critics, all those people who compete to define the nature of art and, therefore, what is worthy of being exhibited and/or sold on the market. The art world is always looking to other powers, in particular to politics (as it looked to religion in the past), because there it finds material and symbolic resources. On the other hand, every kind of power appreciates the arts as a potential source of legitimisation and consensus. However, it is only when clashing with the aesthetic and ideological limits of the time that artists can innovate. The innovation of today is probably created by those artists who position themselves outside aesthetic and social conventions (graffiti artists, so-called Outsider Art etc.) even though there is always the possibility that they can be captured by the powers and the art market.