Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

ART AND MONEY
tax farming will lead his nation to luxury indeed, but a luxury meeting the interest
of society and not that of the “fantasy, passion, prejudices, opinions” of
individuals. “Painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, and all the arts grow from the
soil, they are also children of good Ceres; and I answer you that wherever they
originate in that sort of luxury they will flourish and will always flourish.” But
according to Diderot’s historical pessimism, this happy condition cannot last. In
the fragment of a dialogue on luxury, thematically as well as chronologically
related to the 1767 Salon critique, he explains that agriculture itself engenders
commerce, industry, and wealth, leading to social and artistic decadence. His
only solution to this paradox seems a flimsy one, especially given the social
dynamics Diderot believed he saw at work: if the rulers of wealthy nations would
strip from gold its character as representation of merit and abolish the venality
of public office, then the wealthy could have all the palaces, pictures, statues,
fine wines, and beautiful women they want, without claiming the merit of state
functions, and citizens would become enlightened and virtuous. 37
It is luxury based on money, “with which one can buy everything,” which
“becomes the common measure of everything,” and of which one needs ever
more, that “degrades and destroys the fine arts, because the fine arts, their
progress, and their survival require true opulence, and this luxury is only the
fatal mask of a nearly universal poverty, whose development it accelerates and
aggravates.” The arts under these conditions are either subjected to the caprices
of the rich or “abandoned to the mercy of the indigent multitude, which strives,
by poor productions of every sort, to give itself the credit and the look of
wealth.” 38 As Barthélémy decried the invasion of the opera by “workmen and
mercenaries,” so Diderot laments the disruption of social order that results from
the corrosive effect of a money-centered economy:
37 Diderot, Satire contre le luxe, à la manière de Perse (1767?), DPV, vol. 16, p. 555.
38 “Si l’agriculture est la plus favorisée des conditions, les hommes seront entraînés où leur plus
grand intérêt les poussera, et il n’y aura fantaisie, passion, préjugés, opinions qui tiennent . . .
Les peintres, les poètes, les sculpteurs, les musiciens et la foule des arts adjacents naissent de la
terre, ce sont aussi les enfants de la bonne Cérès; et je vous réponds que partout où ils tireront
leur origine de cette sorte de luxe ils fleuriront et fleuriront à jamais . . . L’argent, avec lequel on
peut se procurer tout, devint la mesure commune de tout. Il fallut avoir de l’argent, et quoi
encore? de l’argent . . . c’est celui-là [cette sorte de luxe] qui dégrade et anéantit les beaux-arts,
parce que les beaux-arts, leur progrès et leur durée demandent une opulence réelle, et que ce
luxe-ci n’est que le masque fatal d’une misère presque générale, qu’il accélère et qu’il aggrave
. . . C’est sous une pareille constitution que les beaux-arts n’ont que le rebut des conditions subalternes;
c’est sous un ordre de choses aussi extraordinaire, aussi pervers qu’ils sont subordonnés
à la fantaisie et aux caprices d’une poignée d’hommes riches, ennuyés, fastidieux, dont le goût
est aussi corrompu que les mœurs, ou abandonnés à la merci de la multitude indigente qui s’efforce,
par de mauvaises productions en tout genre, de se donner le crédit et le relief de la
richesse” (Diderot, Salon de 1767, DPV, vol. 16, pp. 62, 161–8).
34