Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

ART AND MONEY
action taken to turn aside any threat to it, as when aesthetician Arthur Danto
takes Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes to exemplify the very distinction between art
and mundane commercial products questioned by such work. As Pierre Bourdieu
has observed, “Art cannot reveal the truth about art without snatching it
away again by turning the revelation into an artistic event.” 3 This is, of course,
an effect of “art” only as that is the historically situated social practice we know.
This chapter is an attempt to trace the appearance of the ideological opposition
of art and commerce as it emerges in the art writing that both reflected and
helped structure the development and institutionalization of that practice in the
later eighteenth century.
Progress and decline
Despite its distinctive modernity, central to the construction of art we are discussing
here was the reference made in texts and images to an imagined
Antiquity. There was first of all the idea that modern art represented a revival of
the achievements of the Greeks and Romans, after the destruction of culture
during the Dark Ages. The initiating work of art history, Vasari’s Lives of the
Painters of 1550, describes “the attainment of perfection in the arts” in the early
classical period, followed in the later Roman Empire by “their ruin” and then,
at the hands of Cimabue, Giotto, and their successors, “their restoration or, to
put it better still, their rebirth.” Thus “the beginning of the good modern style”
in sculpture was based on Ghiberti’s imitation of “the works of the ancient
Romans, which he studies very carefully (as must anyone who wants to do good
work).” 4 Two centuries later, in a work that fixed the centrality of Hellenic art
for German culture, Winckelmann made the imitation of the Greeks the foundation
of his discussion of the tasks of modern art, declaring that “the only way for
us to become great or, if this be possible, inimitable, is to imitate the ancients.” 5
By this dialectic of “ancient” and “modern” a present-day institution was projected
into the past and so given classic status. The works of the past, despite
being to a great extent unknown, also functioned as standards of value against
which the achievement of the moderns could be measured. According to
Vincenzo Galilei, writing in 1581, the sixteenth-century revival of the art of
music was unable to achieve the level of excellence reached by the ancient
3 Pierre Bourdieu, “The production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods,” in
The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) p. 80. See also, in the
same volume, “The historical genesis of a pure aesthetic,” pp. 241–6.
4 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, tr. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), vol. 1, p. 32,
p. 112; for a stimulating discussion of the circumstance that “an essential element of modernity,
as the Italians conceived it, lay in the worship of antiquity,” see Francis Haskell and Nicholas
Penny, Taste and the Antique (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) (quotation from p. 1).
5 J. J. Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), tr.
E. Heyer and R. C. Norton (La Salle: Open Court, 1987), p. 5.
25