Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

ART AND MONEY
might confuse the honorable rank of Academician with the debased
and mercenary rank of Guild Master. 48
Though great gains were made in the effort to counter this confusion, a multitude
of texts show that the status of the visual arts remained in question
throughout the 1700s. 49 By the end of the century, when art had largely been
redefined as a “liberal” occupation, the system of court commissions that had
structured the high-prestige end of the profession was giving way to production
for a relatively open market. Ideologically as well as practically, the academic
system which had served the liberation of the artist from the medieval guild
structure came into conflict with the extension of the market as a general model
for the linking of production with consumption into cultural fields as well as all
others. 50
This conflict appears, notably, in the lament of many later eighteenth-century
writers over the displacement of the grand by the petit goût, the shift of taste from
history painting to portraits, landscapes, and genre works. The portrait, other
than that of the monarch or other great noble, naturally suggests the self-love of
the individual celebrating his or her wealth and power; often compared to the
multiplication of mirrors in the apartments of the wealthy, it was also the bread
and butter of a multitude of artists. A 1777 article in the Journal de Paris condemned,
along with portraiture, the “low and ignoble” subjects of Flemish
painting, “unfortunately more fashionable than ever with its scenes of revelry.” 51
It might seem that the critical as well as commercial success of Chardin and
Greuze, painters of still life and genre scenes, constitutes an exception to this
rule of official taste. But these artists, lauded in particular by Diderot himself, are
exceptions that prove the rule. Thus Chardin was praised (by Raynal) for the
48 A. de Montaiglon (ed.), Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture
depuis 1648 jusqu’en 1664 (Paris, 1853), vol. 1, pp. 61–2; cit. P. Mainardi, Art and Politics of the
Second Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 1–9. For the seventeenth-century
controversy over the painters’ attempt to raise their status, see T. Crow, Painters and Public Life in
Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), Chapter 1, esp. pp. 25, 31.
49 A useful as well as entertaining survey is offered in Jean Chatelus, Peindre à Paris au XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Jacqueline Chambon, 1991), pp. 125 ff.
50 See the excellent analysis of Annie Becq, “Expositions, peintres et critiques: vers l’image moderne
de l’artiste,” Dix-huitième Siècle 14 (1982), pp. 131–49, esp. pp. 144 ff., which discusses
David’s experiments, in the first years of the nineteenth century, with the public exhibition of his
works for an admission fee, outside the framework of the Salon. It is interesting that David
sought to justify this attempt by reference to earlier English practice in his use of the term “exhibition,”
a word used in France, as opposed to “exposition,” to mean commercial, shop-window
displays. In this David anticipated Courbet, whose “exhibition” of his works in a pavilion outside
the gate of the Exposition universelle of 1855 was another historical pointer toward the
coming of the modern gallery-structured art market (see Patricia Mainardi, “Courbet’s exhibitionism,”
Gazette des beaux-arts, Dec. 1991, pp. 251–66).
51 Chatelus, Peindre à Paris, p. 171.
37