Art as a Networked Chorus

I’ve always found the idea of art history as a linear progression of singular geniuses to be a poor fit for the complexities of practice. A more useful image for me is that of a delta, where multiple currents of thought, material conditions, and social forces flow together. While this image suggests a natural process, it’s crucial to remember that these currents are directed by constructed, institutional, and often contested human choices. Within this landscape, the influence of certain social frameworks is unavoidable. The ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, in particular, seem to be everywhere. This ubiquity makes it necessary not only to grapple with his perspective but also to place it alongside other, often conflicting, currents. My approach is not to create a neat synthesis or to be orthodox in using these theories. Instead, I find the most insight emerges from the friction between their different worldviews - holding them in tension rather than trying to resolve them. This method, by necessity, carries with it a limit to its own thoroughness; by not adhering to a single school of thought, it trades depth in one for breadth across many.

Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural capital remains a powerful tool for understanding how social structures are reproduced. Yet, I find its deterministic undertones - the sense that an individual’s path is almost entirely predicted by their social starting point - can overlook the agency and unexpected shifts that occur within the field. His model, grounded in a specific historical moment, also struggles to fully contain the fluid and eclectic nature of contemporary culture, where a self-taught digital artist, for instance, can bypass traditional gatekeepers and achieve institutional recognition through online networks.

The American sociologist Howard Becker’s concept of ‘art worlds’ offers an alternative by demonstrating that art is never a solo act but the outcome of a vast network of actors operating according to shared conventions. While this view is essential, a feminist critique would push further, asking which forms of labor within this network are valued and which are rendered invisible. A networked view, while helping to make the often gendered work of administration and care visible, also raises the difficult question of whether it risks diffusing responsibility for it.

Where Becker maps cooperation, Nathalie Heinich illuminates the grammar of the art world by studying its disputes. Her concept of the ‘singularity regime’ - the powerful myth of the unique, individual creator - is a prime target for this critique, as this ideal of genius has historically been constructed as masculine, often excluding or marginalizing women whose creative practices were more collaborative or domestically situated.

A different perspective comes from Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a framework developed in the 1980s by thinkers like Bruno Latour. It grew out of science and technology studies (STS), a field concerned with how knowledge and artifacts are produced. ANT’s key move was to treat all elements in a network as potential actants. Agency, in this view, is distributed and relational, emerging from connections rather than being inherent to a single actor. This perspective confronts the material realities of art-making, from the ecological footprint of server farms to the extractive conditions under which training data is scraped, allowing for a description of these complex systems without reducing them to simple hierarchies or human intention alone.

Here, a non-Western concepts such as the Japanese Ma offers a valuable complication. Ma refers to the active, energetic interval or void between things. To take Ma seriously in artistic analysis would mean examining not just the objects in a gallery, but the charged space between them; not just the notes in a composition, but the generative power of the silence that structures it. It challenges the object-oriented focus of ANT by proposing that agency might also reside in the resonance of a pause or a relationship, rather than only in the actants themselves.

This networked view reframes artistic creation itself as a form of collective distillation. Any artwork is a condensation of histories, materials, and shared conventions. AI is not unique in this regard, but it is a contemporary example that makes the process brutally explicit. Its reliance on a vast and controversially sourced archive makes the extractive conditions of culture visible, while its dependence on massive infrastructure makes the realities of capital concentration and ecological cost unavoidable. In this sense, AI acts as a magnifying glass for the power relations and networked dependencies latent in all forms of artistic production. It reframes my role not as a singular creator, but as a curator, editor, and collaborator with a vast dataset - a role that perhaps all artists, in their own way, have always occupied.

These concurrent currents of social power, collaborative work, and material agency reveal a difficult truth: the impossibility of a pure position. To participate as a professional artist is to be inherently implicated in networks with their ecological costs, extractive data practices, and embedded hierarchies. The ethical challenge, then, is not a futile search for purity, but a pragmatic commitment to damage reduction. This means using the very tools of networked analysis to trace the lines of influence and harm that flow through one’s own work - to understand the supply chains of one’s materials, the labor conditions behind one’s platforms, and the biases in one’s data. Agency, in this view, is not about escaping the network, but about making more informed and intentional choices within it. Making art becomes less a solo performance from a stage of purity and more an act of consciously navigating a complex and often troubled collaboration, aiming not for a perfect harmony, but for a more considered and less harmful resonance.

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