This research project will examine the relationship between aesthetics and the market for artworks. The study will focus on art historical content and analysis and consider the potential associations between the marketability of art and its modernist conception as an avant garde practice. In setting a context for this research the following statement from David Carrier’s essay in the on-line Art Journal, Winter 1998, demonstrates some of the ongoing debates between the idea of art as an autonomous sphere of specialist production and the struggle to correlate its aesthetic value to a marketable commodity. In his review of Oskar Batschmann’s book, A Conflict between the Market and Self-Expression (1998) Carrier makes the following observation.
“What is revelatory about The Artist in the Modern World is how much is learned by treating the history of modernism not in stylistic terms, but as the story of an evolving market in novel commodities. Batschmann’s Gustave Courbet is not a would-be revolutionary but a clever, gifted hustler; in controlling the audience for installations, his Bruce Nauman is a shrewd innovative entrepeneur…..unless we understand how art is sold and promoted, how can we properly grasp its purely aesthetic qualities? Much of the effect of the most recent U.S. art depends on its being presented in upscale galleries – and that would be impossible without the financial resources of successful dealers. “I hate being called an art dealer”, one dealer once said to me. But without several generations of such gifted business people, the U.S. artworld would hardly exist.”
Carrier’s commentary illustrates the difficulty of associating art with commerce. Artists become shameless con men, innovation becomes gimmickry and gallery dealers embarrassed business people shrinking from the very mention of trade. Despite Carrier’s apparent ingenuousness about the role of the market he does have a point, art has to have a market and modernist history illustrates that links between art and commerce go beyond the trading of artworks.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_4_57/ai_53747229
David Carrier’s essay reviewing the book by Batschmann’s book, A conflict between the Market and Self-Expression
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/marketing.htmlA web site detailing a history of the market for modernism looking at the Amory Show (1913) as a model of modernism and the market in the United States.
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/5561.htmlPrinceton University Press on-line shopping web site with details about Robert Jensen’s, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (1996)
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Modernism/Modernity 1.3 (1994) 109-127. ------------------------------------------------------------------------. Marketing Modernism: Marinetti as ...
www.mml.cam.ac.uk/italian/courses/handouts/Salaris.doc - Similar pages
Claudia Salaris (trans. Lawrence Rainey) Marketing Modernism: Marinetti as Publisher, John Hopkins University Press, 1994
An essay detailing Marinetti’s Futurism and his employment of mass marketing techniques to promote his art.