ABSTRACT
Precisely because aesthetic utterances and users of them meet in the domain of distribution, for a clear understanding of this encounter and the conditions it places on the functioning of art, it will be necessary not only to investigate the organization of this encounter as such, but also to answer two other questions: a) what types of aesthetic communication are brought in by the artists, and b) who are the participants in the communication taking place. When these questions relate to the domains of the art world as a whole – including the domain of contextualization in which realized values are placed in systems other than the aesthetic one – a matrix as presented in figure 9.1 can be drawn. It will be clear that what happens in the first two domains – the making of art and the programming – conditions what occurs in the third domain: the realization of aesthetic values by audiences, resulting in the arts functioning in society. In the fourth domain this can lead to brief or lasting effects on mental, ideological or social structures. Figure 9.1 depicts a condition-result relationship, presented from top left to bottom right, in which the distribution domain plays the central role.
