This paper maps some of the ontological and methodological concerns incurred by the governmentalization of art and culture that has come about in most advanced liberal societies since WWII. The main argument is that cultural policy forms a new historical ontology constituting a transformed relationship between art and the state. This transformed relationship has profound effects on the “art institution,” loosely defined after Peter Bürger as the apparatuses of production and distribution of the art system but also the historical ideas about what art is and what it should be doing. This transformation has produced a new situation for art and for artists: if print capitalism secured the conception of the artist-genius and the contemplative reader, then today we have the emergence of something new. In the wake of the governmentalization of art we have a landscape on the horizon, one that belabors art with economic, social and quantifiable functions. It is in this context that cultural policy has become a “historical ontology.”