Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

PORK AND PORCELAIN
extent not only by guild (and, later, academic) regulations but by his customer.
The modern artist produces to suit himself (I use this pronoun because this
figure remains by and large defined as male) albeit with the hope of finding
customers.
One can see this transformation of artistic activity in the life of Mozart. What
is notable for his time is not his years of service in the household of the Archbishop
of Salzburg, producing music to order for the court’s needs and dining
with the other servants in the kitchen, but his eventual refusal to play this part
and his attempt to live as an independent entrepreneur, seeking opera commissions
from rulers, to be sure, but also selling tickets to a concert-going public. It
was his early death rather than commercial failure that made him a nineteenthcentury
emblem of the artist’s condition, the contingency of renown and material
success. But already in Mozart’s time we can see how escape from patronage into
the freedom of the market produced a paradoxical uniting of the independence
of the entrepreneurial creator with his dependence on the whims of those who
purchase the luxury goods called art.
From the artist’s side of it, art, as self-directed activity, marks superiority to the
condition of wage labor that defines the lot of the mass of humankind in bourgeois
society. At the same time, engagement in a profession that yields riches, and
even adequate payment, only to a small minority suggests an aristocratic disdain
for trade. The other side of this coin is the rise above mere money-grubbing of
the art-loving businessman (perhaps represented by his wife). As the manufacturers
and financiers of Europe and America bought estates and took up
fox-hunting, so they filled their houses with old furniture, Old Masters, or the art
of their own moment.
Both the novelty and the nature of capitalism impeded the sanctification of
social power by time, which had suggested a divine allocation of preeminence to
the aristocracy. Under modern conditions, only the moral qualities of the individual
could justify privilege. Religious devotion lasted longer in the New World
as a marker of superiority than in the Old, but everywhere, with the rise of the
religion of art, an individual’s taste came to signify his or her fitness to handle
society’s resources. For one thing, appreciation of artworks provided a reconciliation
of opposites, at once embodying strictly bourgeois virtues and transcending
them, since pictures (and objets d’art generally) were good investments as well as
evidence of a superior nature. 1 Most fundamentally, given the nature of art as a
1 This mixture of motives is nicely brought out in Madeleine Fidell-Beaufort’s discussion of the
incitement to art-buying effected by the highly successful 1876 Johnston sale in New York,
which featured important price increases for a number of pictures. “It was clearly the prospect
of a profitable investment that was most attractive” to the new buyers, she notes,
but also the certitude that if the expected profit did not materialize there would at
least be a gain in social prestige . . . [I]t seems clear that auction sales provided an
occasion for buyers to abandon themselves to even more ferocious competition from
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