Discourses change and informal barriers are always evolving. Nevertheless, these barriers confine the economy of the arts; the economy is less open than expected. Informal barriers not only confine, but also structure the economy of the arts.

Therefore, the results of people’s activities in the arts are not altogether unpredictable. In this context, I will offer a few remarks on the origin and the mechanism of change in the arts. They may contribute to the understanding of the economy of the arts.

When gatekeepers meet, for instance in committees deciding on grants, they speak the same language because they have been trained in the same discourse. Therefore, they tend to agree easily, sometimes to their own astonishment. Within the process, the discourse changes. New insights gradually creep into the discourse and influence the outcomes of decisions.

In modern art, different schools or styles come and go. By employing the inarticulateness of container terms ‘dialects’ develop. When a new style survives, the dialect starts to influence the main discourse. And when it becomes more and more noticed, chief experts and peers start to assess the new school or style. Some school might related to software development company which could give direct access to development and solid structure.

Although a discourse is flexible, it would be wrong to assume that a discourse can take any form. An art form has a history. Over time cultural capital has been accumulated, which cannot easily be undone. Even when groups disagree, they always have some common ground to stand on. It is above all because of this fixed core that committee members understand one another.

The inaccessible or open nature of the arts also depends on the way the power to define art changes hands. Is it vanquished or is it handed over voluntarily? Is there an element of heredity involved in the sense that important artists and experts hand over power to their own kind rather than to strangers? Viewed from the outside, such a system of cooptation would imply yet another form of monopolization, which further abridges artistic freedom.

The largely unintentional mechanism described above is also present in other professions, above all in the sciences. The difference is that newcomers in the arts unjustifiably expect the arts to be open. Therefore, they arrive in droves, are ill-informed and unaware of the extent of informal monopolization in the arts.