What Happened to Autonomy? Visual art practices in the creative industries Era

This thesis concerns the autonomy of visual artists in an era of a booming creative economy and simultaneously declining governmental support for the arts and culture. The research is particularly directed toward the concept of autonomy. On the one hand, there is social autonomy, which can be deduced from the level of autonomy that the field of cultural production has as such, relative to the dominant field of power (politics and economics). On the other hand, there is artistic autonomy, which refers to the level of autonomy individual artists have in their artistic practices. Both can be determined by investigating overall tendencies in the practices and perceptions of the collective of artists. While there are a significant number of artists who can be pinned to either one of the opposing poles, it is exactly the in-between place that can help to determine potential value shifts within the art world. As political and economic restraints have been put on the field of cultural production from the outside, the question must be about the effect this has on the inside. By looking at the group of artists that engages in both autonomous production and more commercial applied art production as part of their multiple jobholding practices, it is possible to make distinctions.