The relations between art and commerce often appear overwhelmingly skewed in favor of nonaesthetic considerations. There is a sense that the powerful forces embodied in modern commercial enterprises subvert or contaminate aesthetic practices and products (particularly through effects on funding and the art market). Indeed, in one version of the high culture model, the artistic field has been presented as an autonomous universe of belief, a kind of coin de folie or corner of madness all its own, divorced from politics and economics by its very nature (Bordieu 1980 and 1993, 164). Few go as far as Pierre Borurdieu does in maintaining that the fundamental law of the artistic (or literary) fields is disinterestedness, the inverse of the law of economic exchange, (Bourdieu 1993, 164). Nonetheless, the insistence on oppositions between commercial enterprises and the arts has tended to obscure the power that artistic values have at times exercised in relations between these different areas of cultural practice. The development of a group of new art materials in twentieth century North America provides an example of the complex interplay of theories of art, other ideologies, economic preoccupations, and more general historical processes in innovative cultural production of interest for both art and commerce.

CONTENTS
Artistic discourse and art materials: the artist vs. artisans.
Technical innovation and modernism.
Modern paint and socialist ideals: Siqueiros and Mexican Muralists in the .
Art materials and new deal art projects: State intervention and the institutionalization of painting materials.
Science serving the arts in the postwar period: research institutes.
Pioneers in synthetic paintmaking for artists.
Conclusion.