Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

ART AND MONEY
of Plato with whom the young Scythian is conversing in an Athens prefigurative
of eighteenth-century Paris. Music has lost its former social use, the encouragement
of virtue, because it “only serves today to give pleasure.” Itself corrupted by
new melodic and harmonic riches, it is no longer capable of inspiring citizenship.
“In our society workmen and mercenaries decide the fate of music. They fill the
theatres; they attend the musical competitions and they set themselves up as
arbiters of taste . . . No, music will never rise again after its fall.” 34
As Diderot wrote in his commentary on the Salon of 1763, although it is individual
genius that makes the arts bloom, “it is the general taste that perfects the
artists.” Less censorious than Rousseau, he suggested on this occasion that the
stimulation of that taste—in France alone among modern nations—by the Salon
had postponed the decadence of painting in that country, perhaps by a hundred
years. But the art of speech was already gone, for “true eloquence appears only
in the context of great public interests . . . To speak well, one must be a tribune
of the people . . . After the loss of liberty, there were no more orators in Athens
or in Rome.” 35
Four years later Diderot opened his survey of the Salon of 1767 with the sad
reflection that the springs of art were being exhausted (“Tout s’épuise”). This he
explained in part by the rise of speculation in art by collectors, for whom as individuals,
rather than the nation, artists were now painting their best works. Most
generally, it is luxury “that degrades great talents, by subjecting them to small
works, and that degrades great subjects by reducing them to scenes of revelry.”
Or, as Diderot was to put it in the Pensées detachées sur la peinture, first drafted ten
years later, “At the moment when the artist thinks of money, he loses his feeling
for beauty.” 36
The Salon de 1767 goes on to take up this theme in greater (physiocratic)
detail, explaining that it is not wealth per se that leads to the downfall of the arts,
but the kind of wealth involved. A prince who favors agriculture over usury and
34 Jean Jacques Barthélémy, Voyages du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (Paris, 1788), pp. 241–69; tr. in P. le
Huray and J. Day (eds), Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 121–9.
35 “C’est le génie d’un seul qui fait éclore les arts; c’est le goût général qui perfectionne les artistes”
(Diderot, Salon de 1763, DPV, vol. 13, p. 340). The meaning of the term le peuple, bearers of le
goût général, used two sentences later is soon clarified. Why were there among the ancients such
great musicians? “C’est que la musique faisait partie de l’éducation générale: on présentait une
lyre à tout enfant bien né.”
36 “N’oubliez pas parmi les obstacles à la perfection et à la durée des beaux-arts, je ne dis pas la
richesse d’un peuple, mais ce luxe qui dégrade les grands talents, en les assujettissant à de petits
ouvrages, et les grands sujets en les réduisant à la bambochade” (Diderot, Salon de 1767, DPV,
vol. 16, p. 62); “Au moment où l’artiste pense à l’argent, il perd le sentiment du beau” (Pensées
détachées sur la peinture [ca. 1776], in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. P. Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1988),
p. 829). For an enlightening discussion of Diderot, “man of the Enlightenment with an acute if
not woeful sense of decadence and degradation,” see A. Becq, “Diderot, historien de l’art?” Dixhuitième
siècle 19 (1987), pp. 421–38.
33