The material that I located on the web relevant to Marketing Modernism offered some interesting histories and some insightful accounts of historical developments. Initially I found a useful starting point through the account of Oskar Bätschmann’s, The Artist in the Modern World; The Conflict between Market and Self-Expression, in an article written for the Arts Journal by David Carrier. This article raised some central issues concerning the relationship between the practise and history of art and the business of art. The very title of Bätschmann’s book suggests an uneasy alliance between the values ascribed to art and the modern marketing of its products.
The discovery of a web site detailing the Amory Show held in New York in 1913, provided an excellent account of an early modernist exhibition that undertook new and controversial steps to market the works of modern European and American artists establishing a break not only from the traditions of exhibition processes of the Salon but also the accepted practises of exhibition promotion. The link between art and the emerging world of industrial and commercial culture was an apparent desire on the part of the promoters to engage with popular forms of promotion, replicating those used for circus and Wild West entertainments. This engagement with popular cultural forms suggests that the artists’ had a vision of modernism as a new democratic art form that could be inserted into a broader arena that would include design and mass marketing.
Another interesting linkage with the emergent commercial culture of the mass market was found in an account of the work of the Futurist promoter, Marinetti. This essay titled, Modernist Marketing;Marinetti as Publisher, by Claudia Salaris focussed on Marinetti’s role in the publishing business, however, it was not unrelated to his overall Futurist project that included the promotion of Futurist art by an adaptation of popular marketing techniques.
Further worthwhile accounts of the modernist marketing phenomena were located through the Project Muse on-line journals accessible through the Fischer Library. These journals gave interesting twists to the connections between and the development of the market for modernist art. There does appear to be, however, more on the relationship between literature and the market than material directly related to the visual arts.