The perceived antagonism between aesthetics, cultural production and the econ-omy remains a topic of research with a growing number of studies by scholars such as Marc Shell, Mark C. Taylor and Peter De Bolla. Essential to the work of all of these scholars is the historic purview that takes into account the mo-ment at which the relationship between art and money was called into question.
Peter De Bolla, for example, locates the roots of the popular notion that art and money must necessarily occupy separate spheres in the movements and events to which we collectively refer as the beginnings of western modernity. Important-ly, the seeds of this modernity were sown in the financial revolution that began in the seventeenth century and resulted in modern banking, along with the in-vention and development of various instruments of credit. These same instru-ments produced a surplus of wealth and fuelled the other revolutions that occur-red in the eighteenth century, which, in turn, in one way or another, all contributed to class mobility. Thus, the increased wealth available to new seg-ments of the population through the extension of credit and the availability of
See John Geddes, <http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/21/are-we-over-this-yet/>.
See John Geddes, <http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/21/are-we-over-this-yet/>.
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various financial constructions such as mortgages, suddenly made it possible for members of the merchant classes to secure titles through means such as the mar-riage market, aided by their new-found ability to acquire wealth through various forms of credit and entrepreneurship. The result was the class of parvenus de-picted in so very many eighteenth-century works of fiction such asTom Jones (1749) orManon Lescaut(1731), and works of art such as Hogarth’sMarriage à la Mode(1743–1745).
While the financial revolution rendered the financial surplus facilitating so-cial mobility, it equally gave rise to markets in goods through which the class-conscious bourgeoisie were able to demonstrate their superior tastes. The need to communicate the suitability of one’s station in life through the acquisition of tasteful goods got satisfied in any number of ways, including the purchase of inexpensive “sketches” of valuable paintings, a practice and a word that Fig. 1:William Hogarth,Marriage à la Mode, Panel 1,“The Marriage Settlement,”1743.
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would eventually morph into the contemporary expression,“kitsch.”³ Likewise, a booming market in cheap prints and copies of famous sculptures and paintings expanded alongside the financial revolution and was assisted by the new tech-nologies of mass production. As De Bolla explains, by the mid-eighteenth centu-ry, Europe experienced a“growth in the audience for culture [that was] stimulat-ed by greater capacities for reproducing and disseminating” aesthetic objects, and representing a powerful potential leveler of class distinction. The threat of the blurring of class distinctions was further exacerbated by the rise of museums and galleries in which“vulgar”people could rub shoulders with members of the upper classes, who“naturally”possessed more refined aesthetic judgment (De Bolla 2003: 6). Not surprisingly, the potential of such developments to erode class boundaries was the source of considerable paranoia and contributed to a hardening of a line that adherents were eager to define and maintain – a line ostensibly separating refined art from art for the masses.
In eighteenth-century Britain, authors such as Addison, Shaftsbury, and Ri-chardson produced a surfeit of writings on aesthetics, the nature of beauty, and just who might be best positioned to appreciate it. Similarly concerned with the distinction between“high”and“low”or commercial art, Joshua Reynolds, him-self a commercially successful painter, added his voice to Enlightenment dis-courses on taste but from the ambiguous position of owing his popularity and wealth at least partially to the classes he distained. Hence while Reynold’s argu-ments about aesthetics contributed to the notion that high art enjoy popularity only among members of a restricted group of people who had genuine, aristo-cratic claims to refined tastes, he was nevertheless also obliged to appeal to a wider market through his art because a small audience also meant modest finan-cial success. Reynolds, moreover, made his fortune from portrait painting, a genre that takes second last place on a scale of cultural value ranging from his-torical painting to still life and he addressed this consideration by arguing that his work portrayed persons of quality, on a noble scale and in noble settings,
“raised into dignity…in the hands of a Painter of genius”(Reynolds 1997: 197).
Throughout his Discourses on Art therefore, Reynolds’s professional interests force him to draw such fine distinctions, as he meticulously parses the field in order to justify his own undeniable commercial success.
Reynolds contemporary, the popular artist and commercial sign painter William Hogarth, however, took the opposite approach in his contribution to eighteenth-cen-tury aesthetic debates. Having advertised for advance subscriptions to its publica-tion, Hogarth collected his ideas on aesthetics in book form under the titleThe
Anal- On this point, see Giez 1994: 21.
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ysis of Beauty, which also contained popular prints“suitable for framing.”⁴For Ho-garth, the aesthetic value of cultural objects resides neither in the nobility of the subjects depicted, nor in the artist’s lack of commercial interest, but rather in the
“Lines of Beauty”common to all aesthetic objects in varying degrees. Indeed, so confident was Hogarth of his thesis that in the first of the explanatory plates accom-panyingThe Analysis of Beautythe artist illustrates his argument with a sketch of a yard filled with copies of classical statuary.
The statue yard depicted in this illustrative plate was owned by a friend of Hogarth, who specialized in cheap lead knock-offs of famous Classical statues, whose execution was“so monstrously wretched, that one [could] hardly guess at their Originals” (James Ralph, qtd in Paulson 1993: 101). Therefore, while
The book included what Hogarth advertised as“Two Explanatory Prints, serious and comical engraved on large Copper-Plates, fit to frame for Furniture”(See Paulson’s introduction toThe Analysis of Beauty, xvii). The prints out-sold the book and were often purchased without the ac-companying text.
Fig. 2:William Hogarth,The Analysis of Beauty, Plate 1, 1753.
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handily advertising his friend’s shop, Hogarth argued that aesthetic value is grounded in the same Lines of Beauty that structure kitsch, commercial art and canonical art alike. Put differently, rather than calling for a culturally con-structed, class-driven aesthetics that strives to separate art created for its sale value from art made for some higher purpose, Hogarth chose to resolve the aes-thetic debate around Lines of Beauty found everywhere, regardless of the per-ceived status of the respective object.