بي ينال قدرت: ميدان رقابت هنرمندان نقاش

Biennale of the Power: An arena for competition among Painting Artists

the present study examines competition among modernist painters for symbolic, social, economic and cultural capitals within the past 50 years and has tried to reveal how political and social developments along with actions and fractions, have affected arenas of competition for power in the field of painting, as well as stateʹs power realm. This article has employed the artistic arena theory by Pierre Bourdieu and its main hypothesis is that when there is an agreement on art theory and the definition of art for different arenas of art and the state, the main competition will push to cultural capitals and this will culminate in the creation of art works with higher quality. When there is no such integrity between these two arenas, completion will be directed to other capitals which have more clear definitions and there is a higher level of agreement on them. Symbolic and social capitals are among these. To examine this hypothesis, painting biennale were studied and it was revealed that order and composition of placement of works in the hall of exhibition, along with the order and composition of these works in the catalogues of each biennale had relation with developments in power arenas of plastic art works, as well as power arenas outside this realm. Final conclusion is that in the in the decades of 1340ʹs and first half of 1350ʹs and during Khatamiʹs administration, there has been a consensus between the state (the big supporter) and modernist artists on the artistic rules and this was the reason for increasing the importance of cultural capital in comparison with other kinds of capitals.