Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

ART AND MONEY
complaint about the rise of speculation in the art market and its deleterious effect
on artistic quality. The growth and differentiation of the art public disrupted at
once the supremacy in matters of taste of earlier aristocratic collectors, the influence
(and paid advisory services) of critic-connoisseurs, and the commercial
success of painting in the grand style, while initiating the rise of the art dealer as a
key figure in the movement of taste and directing that movement toward the
dominance of landscape and genre painting in the later nineteenth century.
Kzrysztof Pomian suggests that the shift in interest from Italian and Italianate
painting on grand classical, biblical, and national-historical themes to Dutch and
Flemish genre painting involved a change of the focus of judgment from the
norms spelled out by such writers as Reynolds and Diderot to questions of attribution,
in which picture merchants themselves had the upper hand. However,
Pomian stresses, this victory of attribution over art-theoretical judgment was confined
to the market, outside which aesthetics managed to maintain its supremacy:
In these places a victory for neoclassicism and a return in strength of
the Italians was gathering force, at the very moment when the “little
Flemish and Dutch paintings” triumphed in the market. And it was in
these places that the new type of connoisseur, who would dethrone the
merchant, was formed: the art critic and art historian. 56
Illusions of disinterest
Along with art history and criticism, the advent of aesthetics—above all in
Germany, where Baumgarten first gave the field its name—both reflected the
emerging practice of production and enjoyment of the fine arts as increasingly
detached from their earlier functional contexts, and played a role in the
definition of this practice as conceptually opposed to trade. This can be seen, for
instance, in the “reading debate” carried on by German writers at the century’s
end, when the growing demand for “light” reading matter—poetry based on
popular forms, as well as periodicals and gothic and romance novels, many
directed specifically at female readers—rapidly outran that for philosophically
uplifting texts. This development was viewed by “serious” writers, themselves
increasingly dependent on the market for a living, as a sign of cultural
degeneration due to the commercial orientation of literary production. The
challenge posed by the appeal of Trivialliteratur had an important influence on
the formulation of aesthetic theory, strengthening the emphasis on architectonic
structure, on aesthetic distance, on originality in composition, and on the
56 Pomian, “Marchands, connaisseurs, curieux,” p. 194. On English collecting of Dutch pictures
after the 1740s, see Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1983), pp. 61–2, 121–3; and Pears, The Discovery of Painting, pp. 161–9.
39