It's about the prize

In the Economy of Prestige, James F. English continues Bourdieu’s (and Weber’s) work of disenchantment. Bourdieu demystified ‘pure’ art’s illusion of transcendence by identifying its inner logic as one moment in a dialectic of merchandise and signification, money and art, bourgeois and avant-garde. This antagonism generates the cognitive pre-conditions necessary for the field of cultural production to exist and allows for symbolic value to be consecrated on its products. English isolates a specific moment in the process of consecration, the attribution of artistic and literary prizes, and demystifies it by exposing its unacknowledged rules and dialectical workings. His main idea is that works of art receive symbolic value, not through the awarding of prizes, but through contempt for the awards process itself: that critics rail against misguided awards committees incapable of recognizing true art presupposes that the latter exists and maintains the unconscious collective belief (illusio) that art is a special commodity owing its prestige to the fact that it inhabits a realm above crass political or mercantile interests. The prize is an example of symbolic value production, in which value is conferred onto that which lacks it intrinsically. In the symbolic economy, products such books or paintings have little value as physical objects; what counts is that they be recognized as valuable, which is neither automatic nor intuitive but constructed by institutions, among them the prize industry, that allocate worth onto that which is otherwise worthless. Prizes maintain the illusion that recognition of good art is intuitive, self-evident; when they go to the wrong pearson (such as Sully Prudhomme and not Tolstoy, or Larry Heinemann and not Toni Morrison), the resultant scandal—“the instrument par excellence of symbolic action”—confirms our belief that artistic greatness announces itself while obscuring the fact that artistic value is a cultural commodity socially produced by critics, professors, award committees, by all those agents with vested interests in believing in it. Distaining the prize industry reassures us that art has value; or rather, it reassures those of us who need to believe that art is valuable. I am one who needs such an illusion.