Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

PORK AND PORCELAIN
luxury commodity, aesthetic interests beautifully combined detachment from the
claims of practical life with advertisement of financial success, requiring as they
do both money and the time made possible by money.
Philanthropy
The process by which the modern practice of art was put together took a long
time, and followed different paths in different places. In France, for over a hundred
years the world center of art in its modern form, the state played a central
role. Beginning with the transformation of the royal palace of the Louvre into a
public museum in 1793, the revolutionary government carried on the responsibility
for culture initiated by the ancien régime—an undertaking continued, with
significant changes, by the sequence of regimes until the present time. Similarly,
a program of museum building was an important element in Prussia’s claim to
be at the center of an emerging German nation. In the United States, by contrast,
the institutionalization of art was largely left to private citizens. Hence
there more than elsewhere private philanthropy played a leading part.
This was a consequence of the absence of a strong, unified American state
before the Civil War, and of continuing division and conflict among the industrialists
and financiers who were the masters of the nation that war produced. If it
is true, as I have suggested above, that the modern practice of the fine arts serves
inter alia to represent the claim to legitimacy of those who rule the social system
that produced it, it is to be expected that the formation of artistic institutions
would share the history of other institutions of class rule. As Alan Wallach has
expressed the point, in the United States “the bourgeoisie’s inability, during the
postwar period, to create a national art institution comparable to the Louvre or
the London National Gallery reveals the extent to which elite factionalism
remained a persistent feature of American political and cultural life.” 2 It was not
until 1939 that the United States acquired a National Gallery, and even then
this came to begin with as a massive gift to the nation from a wealthy individual,
Andrew Mellon.
Thus the creation of an institutional structure for the arts in the United States
remained for a long time the work primarily of private citizens. Leading examples
are the groups of worthies who brought into existence the Boston Museum
of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and—perhaps the
single most spectacular case—Henry Lee Higginson’s founding and long-time
business. A fine winning bid could facilitate entry into a club or salon frequented by
leaders of finance or industry, and so perhaps to partnership with them.
“Les Ventes aux enchères d’art américain au milieu du XIXe siècle,” in L. B. Dorléac
(ed.), Le Commerce de l’art de la Renaissance à nos jours (Paris: La Manufacture, 1992)
2 Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on Art Museums in the United States (University of Massachusetts
Press, 1999), p. 10.
108