Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

PORK AND PORCELAIN
Business culture
The developments I have sketched have naturally had an effect on the conceptualization
and practice of art. A hundred years ago Joseph C. Choate, speaking
for the Metropolitan Museum at the opening of that institution’s new building in
Central Park, urged New York’s millionaires
to convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery,
the rude ores of commerce into sculptured marble, and railroad shares
and mining stocks—things which perish without the using, and which
in the next financial panic shall surely shrivel like parched scrolls—into
the glorified canvas of the world’s masters . . . ours is the higher ambition
to convert your useless gold into things of living beauty that shall
be a joy to a whole people for a thousand years. 20
At the present time the conception of art Choate expressed, while still in force, is
seemingly on the decline. A striking manifestation of this is the tendency in the
work of artists, critics, historians, and collectors to accept, with whatever irony,
the coexistence of the commercial character of art with its aspiration to transcendence,
or even the former’s dominance over the latter. 21 On the corporate
side, cultural giving, “more than a passive product of business success,” is now
hopefully “used to stimulate income as well,” so that corporations “are moving
toward a ‘more market-driven strategic-management, bottom-line approach to
philanthropy,’ report two company observers, ‘to obtain a tangible return for
their contributions.’” 22 To an extent, this more openly commercial attitude to
the arts perhaps reflects capitalism’s overcoming of its former sense of inferiority
with respect to the social order it replaced, and its forthright celebration of
market-certified success. The introduction to a recent volume of essays on public
funding of the arts conveys the new vision of the relation between culture and
commerce when it asserts that “business and culture are two integral, interdependent
systems that are part and parcel of a thriving community.” 23
The two systems are hardly equals. Le business oblige, but culture must beg. For
most artists, philanthropy represents a welcome income supplement, an element
in the career-regulating art system, and a sign of the low valuation of artistic
production that accompanies the claims of its spiritual importance. In the words
of painter Sidney Tillim, “it can be argued that government, corporate, and
20 Quoted in Calvin Tompkins, Merchants and Masterpieces (New York: Dutton, 1973), pp. 21–4.
21 For a survey of contemporary artists’ explorations of the relationship between art and commerce,
see Katy Siegel and Paul Mattick, Money (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003).
22 Michael Useem, “Corporate support for culture and the arts,” in M. J. Wyszomirski and
P. Clubb (eds), The Costs of Culture: Patterns and Prospects of Private Arts Patronage (New York: American
Council for the Arts, 1989), pp. 48, 45.
23 A. Levitt, Jr, “Introduction” to Benedict, Public Money, p. 23.
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