ABSTRACT
This first chapter outlines the book’s main ideas. It is based on three main principles: art is no longer a specialized field of cultural production; rather, it has merged with broader areas of social and economic reproduction. Secondly, this transformation is not necessarily a positive or negative thing. It derives from the active role that culture plays in reproducing and challenging neoliberal reason. Finally, if art is no longer recognizable as a specific field, then why are so many writers interested in producing literary fictions of the art system? In this chapter, I argue that the answer to that final question lies in the fact that literature finds in contemporary art a valuable interlocutor to measure its own partial financialization and subsumption in broader processes of social reproduction.
