Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

ART AND MONEY
human history (and indeed of that of the cosmos itself) as cyclical. 16 With the
advance of the eighteenth century, however, the idea of degeneracy comes to be
associated with specific aspects of modernization intrinsic to the rise of a market
economy, commonly associated at the time with the concept of “luxury.”
The critique of luxury, as symptomatic of the worship of money for its own
sake rather than as an instrument of social well-being, was itself a well-worn classical
theme (as Voltaire observed, “luxury has been railed at for two thousand
years in verse and in prose” although “it has always been loved”). 17 Aristotle’s
contrast of oikonomia, the proper ordering of the household, with chrematismos, concern
with the making of money, was still present within the conceptual structure,
as well as the name, of the “political economy” of the eighteenth century. Similarly,
Horace’s complaint that “when once this corroding lust for profit has
infected our minds, can we hope for poems to be written that are worth . . . storing
away in cases of polished cypress?” provided a theme for that period’s writers
on art. 18 It was expressed in various forms, as a function of differing historical
contexts as well as of the particular interests of different writers, who drew the
line between the commerce needed to provide a social basis for the arts and the
excessive love of luxury that corrupts, in different ways; its presence, despite the
fundamental differences that distinguish eighteenth-century discourses of art
from more recent ones, is a sign of the continuity of those discourses.
16 To mention the sources most important for modern European thinkers: Plato expounds a doctrine
of cyclical creation and destruction of the world in the Statesman, among other places;
Aristotle states as a commonplace in the Metaphysics (1074b.II) that the arts and sciences have
many times been lost and regained (see also Politics, 1264a.I, and De caelo, 270b.19). Polybius’s
account of history as a cycle of kinds of government was revived in Italy by Villani, Guicciardini,
and Machiavelli (the last an important source for later versions of the idea); for a discussion
in reference to the eighteenth century, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975).
17 Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, tr. Peter Gay (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 367.
18 Horace, On the Art of Poetry, in Classical Literary Criticism, tr. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1965), p. 90. In the words of another Latin text central to the education of an
eighteenth-century person of letters, Longinus’s On the Sublime, “the love of money, that insatiable
craving from which we all now suffer, and the love of pleasure make us their slaves . . . the
love of money being a disease that makes us petty-minded” (Classical Literary Criticism, p. 157).
On classical expressions of the conflict of art and money, see Gregory Nagy, “The ‘professional
muse’ and models of prestige in Ancient Greece,” Cultural Critique 12 (1989): pp. 131–43; and
Leonard Woodbury, “Pindar and the mercenary muse: Isthmian 2.1–13,” Transactions of the American
Philological Association, 99 (1968), pp. 521–42. For the distinction between money-making and
the ends properly aimed at by the exercise of crafts, see Plato, Republic, 345c ff.; and Aristotle,
Politics, I.9. On the contrast between oikonomia and “economy,” in the modern sense, see the
discussion in Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1978), Chapter 5.
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