ABSTRACT
My starting point is that the meaning of art depends on a specific conjunction of aesthetic, ideological, economic and legal institutions. Until recently, for example, it was taken for granted that ‘music’ (a particular organisation of sound) was constituted as something fixed, something authored, and something that exists as property. These assumptions reflect the two sides of the bourgeois ideology of art, its simultaneous stress on individual creativity and individual ownership, on Romanticcapitalist ideology which has survived both the rise of the mass media and the development of electronic means of cultural reproduction. During the last two hundred years, though, the contradictions involved in this account of art have become harder and harder to manage.1
