AN ART FOR ART’S SAKE OR A CRITICAL CONCEPT OF ART’S AUTONOMY? AUTONOMY, ARM’S LENGTH DISTANCE AND ART’S FREEDOM

What is the relationship between the philosophical concept of the “autonomy of art” and the cultural policy-notion of “artistic freedom”? This article seeks to answer this question by taking the Swedish governmental report This Is How Free Art Is ( Så fri är konsten 2021) and its reception in the Swedish main stream media as an emblematic example and by reading it symptomatically. Firstly, it traces the critical history of “artistic freedom” and the interrelated term “arm’s length distance”, primarily in the context of Great Britain. Secondly, it critically reconstructs the concept of the “ autonomy of art” in the history of Western philosophy by making a critique of a fetishized notion of art’s autonomy in the name of l’art pour l’art . The main ar-gument is that the idea about art’s autonomy, on which the Swedish report leans, resembles such philosophical and art historical idea of art’s autonomy. The claim is also that such an understanding of art does not tie up, either philosophically or historically, with the arm’s length principle, since they ultimately rely on different conceptions of art’s freedom.

length distance principle for ideological reasons as well as cases in which the interest of the municipality has been promoted, sacrificing the ideal of art's freedom and thereby turning art into an instrument for the growth of the municipality or the region.
Greatest emphasis, though, both in the report and in the preceding media debate, has been placed on the state level, primarily focusing on specific information for which the Swedish Arts Council and the Swedish Film Institute, for example, ask their applicants.
This information can be about, inter alia, getting a picture of the applicants' gender and ethnicity. More concretely, a particular formulation used in research applications, namely if, and if so how, the project might "integrate an equality, LGBTQ, diversity and intercultural perspective", 6 has been the target for much debate.
This question, though, is neither obligatory nor is it evaluated. In an attempt to answer these questions, I will firstly clarify what the report is aiming at when it speaks in terms of 'artistic freedom' and 'the arm's length principle', by giving a historical background to them. Thereafter I briefly sketch the history of the concept of 'autonomy' in Western philosophy, then relating it to what can be described as 'the autonomy of art' and closely related ideas about bourgeois art, as it came to be formulated by the end of the 18th century and the beginning of 19th century, principally in Germany, England and France. Here I focus on two ways in which the autonomy of art has been theorised, the first of which is tied to what regularly is understood as 'l'art pour l'art', while the second can be termed a critical concept of art's autonomy. I conclude this investigation by discussing how the two different conceptualisations of the autonomy of art relate to one another, and argue as to which of these different understandings of art's autonomy looms inside of the report, even if it is never spelled out. One of the main arguments I am seeking to make here is that the idea about art's autonomy, on which the report leans, resembles the philosophical and art historical idea of 'l'art pour l'art.' A further argument is that such an understanding of art does not tie up, either philosophically or historically, with the arm's length principle, since they ultimately rely on different conceptions of art's freedom. The more general aim with the article is to begin to unravel the oft-cited, yet so rarely critically discussed, concept of 'artistic freedom' by relating it to an idea of 'art's autonomy', as formulated in the Western history of philosophy. By doing this I hope to add some philosophico-historical weight to a cultural debate which rarely traces the long historical lines of ideas and their possible traces in contemporary discussions. This, looking further ahead, could help to construct a critical concept of the autonomy of art and culture that is relevant for the democratic present.

ARTISTIC FREEDOM AND THE ARM'S LENGTH PRINCIPLE
In the report it is established that artistic freedom and the arm's length principle are central to both its analysis and the recommendations it advances. Yet, at the same time, we are told they are concepts "without fixed definitions" and that "researchers as well as different countries' cultural policy approach the concepts in different ways." 9 The authors of the report therefore offer their own definitions of these concepts. Artistic freedom is "an ideal that is based on the notion that the art and culture that is produced in society should to the extent possible reflect free creative processes and be evaluated based on its artistic qualities." This is an ideal which is itself expressed in Swedish cultural policy's national goal, namely that "culture should be a dynamic, challenging and unbound force with the freedom of speech as its ground." 10 Concerning the arm's length principle, the authors of the report write that it is built on two conditions in Swedish cultural policy. Firstly, that politicians and political assemblies should "refrain from steering that affects or risks affecting the phenomenon that artists and cultural creators choose to depict, but also how phenomena are depicted." 11 Secondly, that there should be an organisational distance between political decision making and artistic practice." To a large extent, the arm's length principle thus aims to create conditions for artistic freedom by advocating an organisational protection from political decisions about artistic freedom." 12 Dependent on geographical and historical contexts as these concepts are, it is impossible to make thoroughgoing positivistic definitions of "artistic freedom" and "the arm's length principle", just as the report says it cannot do. For example, countries as different as France, Denmark and Great Britain all applied the principle of arm's length distance in their cultural policy after the Second World War. The precise procedure of this differed, however, depending on each country's specific context. 13 In this way, it is difficult, and indeed far from desirable, to make an ahistorical and positivistic definition of concepts. 14 On the contrary, what is important is to trace these ideas critically and historically to understand their contemporary meanings. This must be our first task.
The arm's length principle is, as it sounds, a metaphor to keep something at a distance. The idea can be traced at least to the beginning of the 20th century, for instance to 1918 in Great Britain and the British advisory committee University Grants Committee, which intended to formulate the relation between the state and universities. 15 Yet it was not until 1946 that the idea, if not yet the term, was being used for the first time in relation to art and culture by the chairman of the then recently established independent government authority, The British Arts Council. This was an organization that developed out of The Council for Encouragement of the Music and the Arts (CEMA) and which had been instituted at the beginning of the Second World War as a state fund for the arts and culture. The chairman of both of these state governmental cultural institutions was the influential British social liberal economist John Maynard Keynes who argued that the state, on the one hand, and art and culture, on the other, should exist at a relative distance from one another. Similar to how universities should be free from political interference, Keynes argued that experts, rather than politicians, should judge and distribute funds to artists and organisations. "The deal, so as to speak, is that government provides grant-in-aid to legally independent organisations (an arts council being one such) for generalised purposes, such as: 'to develop and improve the knowledge, understanding and practise of the arts; [and] to increase the accessibility of the arts to the public'." 16 Instead of ministers steering state authorities they should act independently with their own professionals, which, in the case of cultural and arts institutions, include artists, intellectuals and other cultural workers. As Keynes himself expressed it in his opening speech to the British Arts Council: Henceforward we are to be a permanent body, independent in constitution, free from red tape, but financed by the Treasury and ultimately responsible to Parliament, which will have to be satisfied with what we are doing when from time to time it votes us money. If we behave foolishly any Member of Parliament will be able to question the Chancellor of the Exchequer and ask why. Our name is to be the Arts Council of Great Britain. I hope you will call us the Arts Council for short, and not try to turn our initials into a false, invented word. We have carefully selected initials which we hope are unpro-

nounceable. 17
This idea about arm's length distance shelters a tension that is An Art for Art's Sake or a Critical Concept of Art's Autonomy?
In his article "The End of Laissez-Faire" Keynes describes the philosophico-political heritage of the notion of laissez-faire, and how it was established and evolved during the 18th century as a resistance and answer to what had earlier been the church, God or the king as the governing authority over the human being. 20 In the same article, as the title shows, Keynes also carries out a strong critique of the same principle. Partly because it contains ideas that lean on Charles Darwin in naturalising property rights and human being's freedom. 21 "It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive 'natural liberty' in their economic activities." 22 Furthermore Keynes argues that it "is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest." 23 On the contrary, there are examples when a person only acts in their own self interest. Therefore, Keynes suggests "that progress lies in the growth and the recognition of semi-autonomous bodies within the State-bodies whose criterion of action within their own field is solely the public good as they understand it." 24 It is these semi-autonomous institutions which the arm's length principle symbolises.
Thus, even though, as some commentators argue, the arm's length principle can be traced to the neoliberal notion of laissez-faire, in fact the way in which Keynes constructs the relationship between state and the individual, and how this difference is transposed by him onto the state and arts and culture, serves as another example, one that is also mirrored in his economical politics. 25 For Keynes, the arm's length principle in no way meant that the state should adopt an 'anything goes' attitude to the arts, leaving it all to a "free market." On the contrary, he advocated that the state save the arts from the market. He wrote about this already in 1936, in an introduction to an article series entitled "Art and the State", where he criticises the then prevailing politics of state laissez-faire towards the arts.
The exploitation and incidental destruction of the divine gift of the public entertainer by prostituting it to the purposes of financial gain is one of the worser crimes of present-day capitalism. How the state could best play its proper part it is hard to say. We must learn by trial and error. But anything would be better than the present system. The position today of artists of all sorts is disastrous. The attitude of an artist to his work renders him exceptionally unsuited for financial contacts. His state of mind is just the opposite of that of a man the main purpose of whose work is his livelihood. The artist alternates between economic imprudence, when any association between his work and money is repugnant, and an excessive greediness, when no reward seems adequate to what is without price. He needs economic security and enough income, and then to be left to himself, at the same time the servant of the public and his own master. He is not easy to help. For he needs a responsive spirit of the age, which we cannot deliberately invoke. We can help him best, perhaps, by promoting an atmosphere of openhandedness, of liberality, of candour, of toleration, of experiment, of optimism, which expects to find some things good. It is our sitting tight-buttoned in the present, with no hope or belief in the future, which weighs him down. 26 Here, as in other texts by Keynes, we see how, following his economic principles, he proposes state control of the arts and culture, but with the purpose of leaving them alone. This liberal yet regulating disposition towards the arts, and culture's relation to the state, connects with Keynes' economic policy, according to which the state, as Keynes regarded it after having lived through the 1930s depression, should act as regulator and in that way hinder mass unemployment and poverty. According to Keynes, the state should after the Second World War regulate and steer the market and, in that way, build a strong welfare society. Similarly, the arts and culture should be made free and independent-not free within a free market, but free in a political sense. As Dave Beech puts it: What the Keynesian architecture of the Arts Council deliberately set out to do was not only secure funding for art but to establish an institutional framework for that funding that coincided neither with the state nor with the market. The state would supply the funds but would otherwise have no direct say in how the money was to be disbursed. 27 After the arm's length principle had been introduced in 1946 in Great Britain it was directly imported to several European countries, and informed the cultural policies of, for example, France That Keynes advocated a stronger role for government in the arts-in order to set them free-was also expressed in the fact that this form of governmental steering, coupled with the welfare state, emerged during a period often referred to as the "golden years" of economic and societal development. In Sweden this was characterised by, for example, the expansion and democratisation of university systems, an increase in real wages for everyone in a way that had not been seen previously, and the establishment of a uni- replied that it was that contemporary provocative art should not be financed by the state. He was above all critical of the so called 1% rule which, since the 1930s in Sweden, has aimed to redirect one per cent of its budget for public buildings to art. 33 Contemporary art, Erixon declared, should instead be financed by the private sector while public funding should go to art and culture that creates "belonging" and "community". The most striking aspect of this position is that it would, unrepentantly, result in the abolition of the arm's length principle and therefore an indepen dent art. 34 emerging at the beginning of the 19th century in England and France. But as we will see, the focus there is on art's freedom, rather than 'artistic' freedom. It is also clear from the report-even if it is not expressed explicitly-that while 'the arm's length principle' is a political tool for the purpose of 'governing' art, 'artistic freedom' is the goal to be achieved. But what is art's freedom?
The report states that artistic activity should be judged on its own merits, in the absence of external standards and without external influence from political decisions. Artistic freedom here is thus to a large extent a freedom in which art-its 'free creative processes'-should govern itself and be judged based on this self-determination. It is an idea of negative freedom, in that it is a freedom from political control at both the organisational level and at the level of content. At the same time, freedom is here a result of a specific constitution of cultural policy, itself a form of political steering. Furthermore, this is an understanding of art's freedom which has similarities with the concept of autonomy as it has been formulated within the Western history of philosophy, from antiquity onwards. For a more multifaceted and philosophico-critical view of the concepts 'artistic freedom' and the 'arm's length principle', as they are presented specifically in the reportand in cultural policy more generally-we should turn to their closest relatives within Western philosophical and art philosophical history: 'autonomy' and 'art's autonomy'.

AUTONOMY AS SELF-DETERMINATION
The concept of autonomy is generally traced back to the classical Greek term, 'autonomia', which refers to a city state's autonomy to govern and administer itself. Here, 'auto' denotes self/I while 'nomos' stands for law. In Aristotle we find the term autarkiaautarchy-which in classical Greek stands for self-sufficiency and independence from external influences. Even if Aristotle wrote about autonomy in relation to subjects, such as friendship and the noble man, it was above all with respect to the independence of the state he was referring to. 36 For example, in Politics he writes that the purpose of political society is self-sufficiency, meaning that a state is independent "from outside powers." 37 After Aristotle, the concept of autonomy developed, mainly by the Cynics and the Stoics who put emphasis on the human being's capacity to act without external influence. 38 Moving further along in modern Western philosophy, it is Immanuel Kant's understanding of autonomy that since the late 18th century has had the greatest influence on philosophy, aesthetics and on the modern concept of art. 39 This despite, as we will get to, the fact that it is debatable whether it really was Kant who philosophically ascribed art the autonomy it has gained in modernity.
But what then is Kant's concept of autonomy? Essential to Kant is the will's autonomy as a condition for acting morally. Furthermore, and while Kantian autonomy might be seen as a version of what the Stoics term 'self-sufficiency', Kant's understanding of autonomy differs in two basic ways. Firstly, in that it is human reason itself that posits the conditions for thinking, and secondly that these conditions are not based on anything external, for example an idea about "the good", but only on itself. 40 Autonomy is thus the potential to govern oneself according to laws that are posited by the human being itself. Kant developed this understanding of autonomy from a critique of several, at his time, already existing positions. For example, he believed that the Wolffian conception of morality was wrong in that it was based on heteronomous principles. Instead, he wanted to develop a moral philosophy based on the principle of autonomy and self-determination. 41 While before the 1800s, morality was mainly seen as subordinate to something else, Kant changed the terrain entirely by ascribing self-determination-that is, autonomy-to morality. "He alone was proposing a truly revolutionary rethinking of morality. He held that we are self-governing because we are autonomous." 42 Central to Kant then is that freedom is not about specific goals but rather refers to the capacity to act morally from universal and objective rules instituted by human reason. This appears with much clarity in The Metaphysics of Morals from 1797 where he writes that an autonomous will is a will that ascribes to itself its own law, in contradistinction to a heteronomous will that is determined by a law governed by the object. An autonomous will must, so to speak, choose its own autonomy. This is why, parenthetically, Kant's understanding of the autonomy of the will as fundamental for a universal morality has been questioned by many, for example by Hegel and Nietzsche, mainly for being an unattainable ideal. 45 What is indisputable however, is that it has had a central role in the development of modern liberal demo cracies. It is also incontestable that the modern thought of art as self-determining reso- This is also noted in an anthology on the philosophical history of the concept of autonomy in which the authors write that Kant's idea of aesthetics and the beautiful has been wrongly attributed as the basis for the modern notion of the autonomy of art, and that this is due to the fact that Kant actually focused on natural rather than artistic beauty. Kant's "focus on natural beauty, and his tendency to privilege it above artistic beauty, makes him a somewhat imperfect fit for accounts that depict Critique of the Power of Judgment as the high tide of the development of the autonomy of art." 48 A further problem with tracing Kant's aesthetic judgment to an idea of autonomous art is that, unlike the practical will (as committed art, which as art is necessarily detached from reality, because it negates its difference from reality; l'art pour l'art because through its absolutization it denies even the indissoluble connection to reality that is contained in art's autonomy as its polemical a priori. The tension in which art has had its life up to the most recent period vanishes between these two poles. 55 As Adorno notes here, art for art's sake is based on the idea that the self-determining function of art (its autonomy) depends on its total separation from society. However, such art exists only in metaphysics and does not reflect modern art, which is based precisely on a relation to, and at the same time-through its artistic form-a separation from life. Art arises for Adorno in the dialectical tension between the two. The self-understanding of 'l'art pour l'art' is that it takes Kant's idea of the disinterested spectator and turns it into a dogma, an aesthetic separatism. But this understanding is not only wrong in a philosophical sense through its sloppy readings of Kant. It is also a historically inaccurate understanding of how this idea could have emerged. As an idea, one can think of art as separate from morality, religion and labour. But as a historico-philosophical critical argument it does not hold. For example, and this is rarely emphasised, l'art pour l'art poets and writers like Gautier and Baudelaire could not make a living by producing only for the free market. Their poetry, unlike their news and entertainment journalism, which many of them worked on in parallel, did not sell in the same way as other literature. In other words, they were dependent on other productive work and/or funding from family or other sources. L'art pour l'art worked with a concept of freedom that was idealistic in one sense since this artistic freedom could only be produced and consumed by a certain class of society, and not by everyone. What is needed is a concept of art's autonomy where self-determination becomes a universal principle, just as Kant formulated it. This condition, however, is not to be found in any of the above traditions. Schiller's idea of the autonomy of art-in which freedom is reflected-is that it is the form of art that creates it. The difference between the appearance of autonomy in an art object and other objects is form. The consequence of this is that, for Schiller, only artistic beauty, as opposed to beautiful buildings or natural beauty such as trees, is truly free. 59 As Bernstein puts it in his introduction to Schiller's letters: "The specifically aesthetic appearing of an object, the experience of an object as beautiful, is the experience of it as possessing an excess of form, and in virtue of this excess soliciting an aesthetic rather than an explanatory response." 60 It is thus through this explicit connection between art and the autonomous will in Schiller's letters that it is in Schiller, rather than in Kant's third Critique, that autonomous art as art "gets its first philosophical definition". 61 As we will see, Schiller's emphasis on the form of the artwork, as central to art's autonomy and the way it reflects its freedom, plays a crucial role in how thinkers subsequently develop this notion of art's autonomy. This is particularly evident in the texts of the early so-called Jena Romantics such as Novalis, Fichte and Schlegel. 62 But here, an emphasis on the autonomy of art through its form occurs not primarily through the concept of form but rather through the idea of 'self-reflection'. Walter Benjamin is one of those who has written about the importance of self-reflection in the Jena Romantics' understanding of art and their critique of art. With Fichte, for example, Benjamin writes, "reflection" is "the reflection of a form. Yet what distinguishes the Benjaminian understanding from the autonomy of art from l'art pour l'art is that just as, through its form, art for Benjamin is seen as autonomous (as is the case also for art-for-art's sake), at the same time this freedom is understood by Benjamin in relation to the transformation brought about by capitalist modernity, which has also to some extent given art this freedom. This is perhaps most evident in Benjamin's Arcades Project, written between 1927 and 1940, in which he moves through the capitalist metropolis of Paris, where usable objects become dazzling goods in shop windows. Paris is also a city in which the literary salon becomes the "dialectical reversal / Last refuge of the commodity." 64 Art becomes art then for Benjamin through its dialectical turning point in relation to the commodity form in that it is determined by commodity production yet is not identical with it. Similar to how the advocates of l'art pour l'art argued that art must be separated from fraudulent industrial capitalism, Benjamin also saw art as separate from capitalist production. However, unlike the defenders of l'art-pour-l'art, he did not see it as essentially separate, but rather argued that art stood in a historico-philosophical dialectical relationship to the capitalist production of goods.

A CRITICAL CONCEPT OF ART'S AUTONOMY
But if Benjamin, following in the footsteps of Schiller and the Jena Romantics, placed the self-reflective autonomous work at the heart of Europe's modern capitalist centre, it was Benjamin's colleague from the Frankfurt Institute, Adorno, who primarily developed this idea of the specific status of autonomous art as a commodity in modern capitalist society. In the late 1960s, he stated in his Aesthetic Theory that art is a social fact, a so-called 'fait social'. "Art's double character-its autonomy and fait socialis expressed over and again in the palpable dependencies and conflicts between the two spheres. We have seen how artistic freedom is described in the report This Is How Free Art Is as an ideal in which art's own creative processes should be self-determining, both in terms of content and organisation. This is in line with Kant's idea of the autonomy of the will, which follows its own laws. While an unattainable ideal it should nevertheless always be strived towards. This is also how we should understand the role of the artwork's form as Schiller and Adorno or Wilde, for that matter, account for it. The report also reveals that this ideal of autonomy is politically constituted by the 'arm's length principle'. This principle, as we have discussed, is used to prevent political attempts to control art, to make it useful for specific purposes or allow it to carry a message-as, for example, several municipalities in Sweden have tried to do and as authoritarian regimes have done historically and still do. The report thus testifies firstly that the arm's length principle implies an understanding of art and the market as social-historical rather than natural.
Secondly, with examples from the municipalities of Sölvesborg (governed by the Sweden Democrats) and Nacka (governed by the conservative party Moderaterna), the report shows how vital it is for art that the principle of 'arm's length' should be upheld. Without it, there is no free-or let's say, autonomous-art. In short, the report seeks more autonomy for art and culture, both in terms of organisation and content. And this idea of the autonomy of art, which we find in the report, is very similar to Keynes' idea of art in the sense that art is perceived as free and for its own sake in the spirit of l'art pour l'art, but which nevertheless becomes free through political control rather than by being placed on a market.
Despite this essentially sober view of the relative autonomy of art, which seems to lie at the heart of the report, one of the major problems with it, and even more so with the subsequent media discussions, is that it nevertheless tends to view art and culture as somewhat disconnected from the society from which it emerged, including the structural changes that the economy, for example, has undergone over the last thirty years. This is not unlike l'art pour l'art's transcendental way of looking at itself, which Adorno despised, as much as he disliked committed art. Both, he argued, failed to understand their double character in society. "Literature that ex ists for the human being, like committed literature but also like the kind of literature the moral philistine wants, betrays the human being by betraying what could help him only if it did not act as though it were doing so." It is the literature and plays of Sartre and Brecht that he mainly targets, thereby rejecting all art that sees itself as socially and politically committed. "But", he continues, "anything that made itself absolute in response, existing only for its own sake, would degenerate into ideology. …" 71 Here Adorno instead criticises l'art pour l'art-art for being equally blind and naive to its own historical existence. An art that does not understand that its autonomy is illusory and must constantly be constituted is therefore, for Adorno, just as unsuccessful as politically committed art.
Adorno's critique of art-for-art's-sake as ideological, as well as his critique of political and engaged art, is mainly evident in the report in what is emphasised as problematic governance incentives and what, in contrast, is naturalised and taken for granted. While much emphasis is placed in the report on cultural policy's attempts to map and promote equality (between genders and between ethnicities) and how this would make art unfree, and on what Adorno would have described as 'engaged' or 'committed art', almost no attention is paid, especially in the media debates that followed, to the parts of the report showing how economic incentives such as growth and business have negatively affected the freedom of art and culture in recent years. Nor is any connection sought between the erosion of municipal finances over the past thirty years, which has had an enormous impact on such things as public libraries and the infrastructure of municipal art centres. The report thus testifies to a naturalisation of the economic and structural changes that have taken place over the past three decades and that have largely impoverished the welfare state that was built up during the same period as cultural policy was developed. Here we see an idea of artistic freedom that ignores the economic and social frameworks that made art free and democratic. It chooses to see the freedom of art as something absolute, as if it was not dependent on the Keynesian welfare state's public libraries and contributions to theatres and independent journals, and so on. In this way, we see an ahistorical idea of artistic freedom, and what is ignored is how it was established in Sweden in the first place. As a defence, the report-and its reception in the subsequent debates-turns to the only known philosophical idea of artistic freedom, namely that of artistic freedom as an absolute in a 19th century allusion to art for art's sake. Benjamin and Adorno were liberals in the sense that they realised that the autonomy of art was an illusion, but a necessary one, in that it did not arise by itself but was the result of historical processes in which art emancipated itself from the Church and the nobility, thereby gaining a market of patrons. Similarly, a cultural policy report must realise that the freedom of culture and art in a welfare state like Sweden has been based on political control, where not only wealthy people have been able to make or take part of art, but anyone can. And that this is part of the ideological and historical material reality on which, in Sweden, the freedom of art has rested since the 1970s. It is in keeping with the specific genre of a report that it does not seek larger and more complex explanations further than the nose can reach. But the questions that the report unwittingly asks are how the freedom of art and culture should be constituted in a state where cultural centres are sold out to private companies and where welfare has been outsourced for thirty years. 72 Should autonomous art and culture be relegated to the market with its patrons in a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist spirit? 73 Or is it the people who should produce and partake in the autonomy of art? Freedom and autonomy by and for a few or by and for all? These are the questions that the report and cultural policy in general are facing today. SOME CONCLUDING WORDS…. where art is understood not only as a commodity, but as a specific commodity, one that is both determined by and independent from capitalist production. Artistic production, Adorno says, is different from capitalist production, and this is reflected in its form.
It is thus something that also gives it the appearance it needs to be art. 74 Keynes takes this further when he sees that, in an economic and political sense, for art to continue with slow production, where the artist must be left to himself, it cannot be left to the 'free market'.
My conclusions are therefore the following. Firstly, it is only on the basis of the second concept of the freedom and relative autonomy of art that we can construct a critical concept of the autonomy of art today and for a future, democratic cultural policy.
Secondly, while the philosophico-historical problem has been that Kantian aesthetics as such has been ascribed as the basis for the autonomy of art, the political problem appears in the elusive fact that autonomy can never be absolute but is always relative. The philosophico-historical challenge is to examine how an idea of the autonomy of art appears in a neoliberal world where the so-called 'free market' increasingly takes over more of what in Keynes' footsteps was seen as part of the social democratic welfare state, an outcome that Keynes believed would create a terrible situation for the free arts. In this sense, the great threat to the free arts does not seem primarily to be the desire for equality to be achieved among those who practice and consume the free arts, but in the fact that art's autonomy and freedom is threatened by the so called "free market".
1 An example of an international debate was when the artist,