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

The study addresses how the internet has transformed the artworld’s communication practices and expanded art organisations’ capacities to speak simultaneously to artworld peers and to political and economic fields upon which they depend. It asks how art organisations’ online about pages mix discourses to address the artworld alongside political and economic audiences, and how they negotiate tensions between the artworld’s nomos of autonomy and the instrumental demands of politics/economy. The article positions this inquiry within efforts to bridge Bourdieu’s field theory with discourse analysis, contributing especially to the concept of transepistemic discursive fields that explain movement of discourses between fields.

The conceptual framework aligns Bourdieu’s field theory (fields, capital, habitus, nomoi, autonomy) with Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach to discourse (discourses, genres, interdiscursivity, ideological discursive formations/IDFs, recontextualisation). Prior work shows how fields are structured by volumes and compositions of capital (cultural, economic, social, linguistic), opposition between cultural and economic poles, and diachronic movements between avant-garde, consecrated avant-garde, and rear-garde positions. Autonomy from political and economic influence has historically underpinned cultural fields’ legitimacy. Discourses function as mechanisms of symbolic power and can be recontextualised across fields (e.g., marketization of higher education; economic logics in cultural fields). Maesse’s transepistemic discursive fields explain how discourses circulate between fields (e.g., economics and media). Performativity (Bourdieu, Butler) highlights how utterances enact field positions, capital, and can transform nomoi. In the art museum field, historical tensions between ‘art for art’s sake’ and ‘art for the public’s sake’ persist alongside contemporary pressures of state underfunding and commercialization. In art magazines, long-standing tensions between cultural and commercial poles shape editorial and promotional practices. This body of literature frames expectations about how about pages may articulate and negotiate competing IDFs.

Comparative critical discourse analysis combined with Bourdieusian field analysis. Corpus: two versions (2016 and 2023) of about pages for IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) and e-flux; comparative 2023 about pages for MACBA (Barcelona), Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), Dia Art Foundation (Dia), and art magazines ARTnews, Frieze, Spike. Table 1 lists URLs and compilation dates. Field analysis: secondary sources and field literature used to map organisations’ positions (volume/composition of capital, trajectories), habitus, and inter-field relations (politics, economy, academia). Discourse analysis: focus on interdiscursivity by identifying genres (administrative vs narrative vs commercial), themes, lexicons, classification schemes, and performative utterances; attention to styles (mode, tenor, rhetoric) and intertextual changes between 2016 and 2023 pages. A typology of ‘performances of reputation’ (performances of position, capital, and conformity to nomoi) was applied to utterances to trace how symbolic value is constructed across fields.

• About pages network the artworld’s discursive field with politics and economy through symbolic and interdiscursive exchange. IMMA mobilises political/administrative discourse (governance, legislation, financial statements) and narrative discourse aimed at artworld peers; e-flux mixes an artworld-oriented narrative with a veiled commercial FAQ addressing advertisers.
• IMMA (public museum; ~90% state funding; only ~2% patrons) prominently features administrative genres (policies, reports) that speak to the political field (e.g., compliance with Irish and EU laws) while narrative subpages perform artworld status (consecrated avant-garde positioning; internationalism; innovation/experimentation) and public mission (visitor numbers, learning/engagement, inclusivity). IMMA’s Overview/Mission/History pages simultaneously perform artistic and political/philanthropic capital (e.g., 489,000 visitors in 2017; corporate partners; audience demographics), mingling IDFs of artworld autonomy and art-for-the-public’s sake.
• MACBA mirrors IMMA’s mix but explicitly reframes education as emancipation and ‘generating knowledge,’ distancing itself from instrumental political goals (entertainment/socialization) to defend autonomy.
• Dia’s page evidences dominance of an artworld-autonomy IDF (mission centered on realizing and preserving artists’ visions; minimal public-service emphasis; no administrative genres). DIA’s page evidences dominance of a public-service/political IDF (community ‘town square,’ inclusion, education; administrative transparency; limited emphasis on canon formation/experimentation).
• E-flux’s narrative addresses artworld audiences using an academic lexicon and performances of artistic/academic capital (e.g., contributors, presence at Documenta/Venice; journal’s ‘influential/canonical’ essays; artists-founded). The FAQ uses a commercial lexicon (exact reader counts/demographics; lists of ‘leading’ client institutions) to address advertisers, constructing readers as valuable commercial segments (e.g., 150,000+ visual arts professionals, segmented by role and geography). ‘Announcements’ lexicalisation dresses paid press releases in cultural terms, veiling commercial instrumentality.
• Between 2016 and 2023, e-flux’s about page became more terse and promotional; some elements that obliquely framed its business model (e.g., ‘made free for’ readers by fees from institutions) were removed; a prior classification (‘publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and enterprise’) that negotiated culture-commerce identity was also reduced.
• Other magazines (ARTnews, Frieze, Spike) keep about pages artworld-facing (performing embodied artistic capital via contributor prestige) and move commercial discourse to separate advertising pages (e.g., specs, publishing schedules), thereby avoiding interdiscursive tension within about pages. Spike explicitly claims avant-gardist editorial stance and ‘new forms of art criticism’ while also noting online marketing on its advertise page.
• Overall, ideological tensions created by interdiscursivity are managed differently: IMMA mingles discourses (middle way); MACBA argues autonomy through emancipatory framing; Dia and DIA exhibit dominant single IDFs; e-flux strategically veils commercial discourse within an FAQ to maintain cultural-pole legitimacy while addressing advertisers.

Findings show that about pages are active sites of transepistemic exchange where discourse practices and symbolic resources circulate between fields. By mobilising political/administrative genres and metrics (IMMA) and commercial genres/quantifications (e-flux) within artworld-branded spaces, organisations both address external legitimating fields and contribute to normalising those discursive elements within the artworld. This addresses the research question by demonstrating concrete mechanisms—genre selection, lexical choices, performative utterances—through which autonomy is negotiated: either by mingling and balancing competing IDFs (IMMA), reframing public engagement to align with artworld nomoi (MACBA), or veiling commercial discourse to reduce reputational costs (e-flux). Comparative cases (Dia, DIA, ARTnews/Frieze/Spike) show how field position (public vs private, cultural vs economic pole) shapes the chosen negotiation strategy and whether a single IDF dominates. Thus, online about pages play a performative role in reproducing/transforming the artworld’s autonomy and its relationship to politics/economy.

The article demonstrates that art organisations’ about pages network the artworld with political and economic fields via symbolic and interdiscursive exchange, and that the ideological tensions this creates are managed through distinct strategies shaped by field position. Conceptually, it integrates Bourdieu’s field theory with Fairclough’s CDA and Maesse’s transepistemic discursive fields to illuminate how genres and utterances perform capital, positions, and conformity to nomoi across fields. Methodologically, it operationalises ‘performances of reputation’ to trace symbolic value construction at the utterance level. Future research should: examine broader samples across cultural fields to map variation in interdiscursivity; study recontextualisation of commercial/promotional discourse in cultural and scientific fields; analyse cross-field exchanges mediated by media platforms; and investigate how such exchanges reconfigure the value of different capitals and the naturalisation of field-specific nomoi.

The corpus is small and focused (two focal organisations with limited comparative cases), limiting external validity and generalisability across the diverse artworld. Analyses rely on publicly available about pages at specific time points (2016, 2023), so findings may not capture the full range of organisational communications or temporal dynamics across other periods or platforms.