ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the most basic understanding of the role of the artist and the art field. Pierre Bourdieu has developed a useful framework for understanding artistic autonomy or culture's separation from the rest of the society. According to Bourdieu, the artistic field, like other fields, is historically constructed and contingent, but also involves fundamental laws, which he terms nomos: principles of vision and division' that separates one field from another. Bourdieu traces the development of the principle of artistic autonomy beginning with the Renaissance. He also characterises the Renaissance period as a time when individual subjectivity took on greater cultural importance within Western society, and where creativity came to be seen as an activity to be developed within isolation. Related to nomos is the concept of the illusio: the acceptance of the fundamental premise that the game, literary or scientific, is worth being taken seriously' which marks one as a member of a given field.
