Art And Commerce - Foundation For Economic Education

Business Activity Promotes Art Creation

Dr. Dodsworth is Assistant Professor of Art History at Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York, and Director of Seminars at FEE.

Today we are aware of the presence of the arts in our society in a broader way than ever before, and we have commerce to thank for it. Business, in response to the desires of consumers, has created reproductions and adaptations of works of fine art that surround us. Few of us are without at least one or two prints of famous works; images from the history of art grace objects of all kinds, down to the workaday tee shirt. The beautiful photography which illustrates commercial art engenders a sensitivity to images in the ordinary observer.

Artists themselves are less than thankful for the presence of the business community in their lives, believing that commerce is a corrupt and discriminatory agent set on repressing free expression. In fact, it works the other way. It is because of business that artists are free to follow their creative muses in any direction they desire. Commerce and the activities of the business community have fostered a higher standard of living and increased leisure time; in short, an atmosphere conducive to the development of all varieties of visual expression, no matter how bizarre. Ultimately this is of benefit to all creators of art. Artists often confuse an inability to make a living in the mode of their choice with the concept of a concerted attempt to repress artistic expression in general. While it is true that only a tiny minority of “fine artists” can support their families with their craft, many more men and women of talent direct their creative energies into extremely productive and lucrative careers in the commercial arts.

Contrary to what most people may think, it was always this way. Artists have always been part of a service industry, creating objects that were part of the daily environment of everyone. From ancient times onward, art has been considered an essential element of life as opposed to a luxury good. There was formerly less of a division between the commercial application of artistic ability and the “fine arts.”

“Fine Art” versus “Commercial Art”

Artists nowadays look down upon those of their ranks who have chosen to work in the commercial arts. This snobbery is ultimately the legacy of the self-promotional efforts of the “divine” Michelangelo, who acted the ultimate prima donna in the creation of his own cult of artist-as-superstar. Somehow artists now think it is a betrayal of one’s artistic gifts to use those abilities in the service of the society’s needs for the mass application of visual expression. But really this is no different from the fulfillment of a contract specification provided by a patron, just as Pope Julius II hired Michelangelo to decorate his chapel ceiling in a particular way. The result is “fine art” by twentieth-century definitions, but at the time it was hardly different from our modern concept of “commercial art.” And one can scarcely deny the creative genius of the painter in his application of his talents to the specific project.

One reason that the modern concept of “fine art” vs. “commercial art” has developed is that the marketing systems that disseminate art are different today than in times past. The museum is a relatively recent phenomenon, and even it itself has changed its relationship to the public in the last twenty years. Art which originally was created to occupy positions in private homes, or to decorate temples and churches, has been removed from its intended setting and placed in a display mode, as if on an altar for worship. The motives of the artist in creating the pieces suddenly took on a different cast; the idea of the piece as product executed for patron for a specific place and purpose has been erased, and instead the work is seen as an expression of the personal vision of the artist.

Working artists blame museums and art galleries for their troubles in making a living, claiming that there are discriminatory practices in the showing of works, that juries of shows are corrupt, and that gallery owners and media critics are in each others’ pockets. What is less commonly recognized is that the museum and the gallery system are actually responsible for the success of all artists in general, by raising the social standard of artists to the level of professional; this is in sharp contrast to the Renaissance concept of the artist as artisan (rather like our attitude to, say, plumbers today). By popularizing art in the form of prints, books, postcards, and reproductions, the museum and gallery business have fostered a desire on the part of the public to own art, and even to own original works of art. Surely many artists who do prosper do so because of this heightened awareness.

In addition, the promotion of the “block-buster exhibition,” such as the “Treasures of Tutankhamen” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City several years ago, has helped to nurture an awareness of art on the part of the public. The museum’s role in this regard is not unlike that of a medieval cathedral, whose exterior, decorated with images of saints and religious stories, would have provided both entertainment and education for the great mass of illiterate peasantry.

Medieval cathedrals, however, differed from modern museums in that they were financed by the Church. The modern museum is funded by a mixture of corporate and private donations with a liberal helping of state monies. Unlike the medieval churchgoer, who paid his share of the church expenses out of his pocket directly, the museum visitor pays for his enjoyment of the art works voluntarily at the time of his actual visit (in discretionary funds) and involuntarily, in amounts which he cannot control, from money he pays the government in the form of taxes. Thus we are all forced to support the activities of public museums, whether we visit them or not.

Changing Modes of Expression

What further separates us from the past is ‘ that the modes of expression in previous eras were different from today, and had different functions. In ancient Egypt, for example, art was used as a statist device to propagate religion and state authority; as a result, the visual expression of the Egyptians remained extraordinarily static, changing very little over the course of three thousand years. In Greece, with the development of the concept of democracy and individual freedom, we see a corresponding emphasis in sculpture on the movement of the human body, and a celebration of its beauty and individuality. Art was certainly used for the decoration of temples and for political propaganda, but for the first time we see the beginnings of the concept of consumerism and art: wealthy men were interested in acquiring unique works of art to delight their eye, to enjoy in their own homes. Thus arose the surprisingly modern concept of the glamorous artist, a man who was kissed by divine genius, blessed with extraordinary creative gifts. However, those gifts were used to execute works of art which were specifically created to please the patron, either made to order by contract, or designed with a specific kind of buyer in mind.

Ancient Greece, like the Italian Renaissance, was an abundantly creative period for the arts. One cannot help speculating as to how the political structure fostered these riches. Both periods were marked by an intense feeling of competition between independent city-states, which naturally gave rise to the desire for each to outdo his neighbor in the ornamentation of public buildings and in the level of aesthetic sophistication on the part of the wealthy collector. By contrast, painting and sculpture produced in the Soviet Union were notable for their lack of experimentation, their unimaginative repetition of acceptable visual norms, their low level of creativity and interest. With the emergence of the independent republics, perhaps we will see a flourishing of the visual arts.

On the other hand, since the economic development of the United States has some unnerving parallels with the economic development of the later Roman empire, perhaps we will go the other way. The later years of the Roman empire were marred by the exorbitant increase in taxes, resulting in the erosion of the tax base and the concomitant economic depression. Art work in this period is notable for its increasingly abstract qualities, its lack of devotion to realism, its poor quality, and its reduced abundance. Typical of the period is the pre-made sarcophagus, decorated completely except for a blank medallion all ready to receive the “personalized” portrait of the purchaser, just like a modern headstone. Sound familiar?

Artists are interested in making a living just like everyone else, and will direct their energies into other fields of activity when they observe that the economic climate is not conducive to the production of their craft. It takes only a couple of generations of decline for art to lose its technical virtuosity and become slack and flaccid; no one can draw if no one is available to teach drawing.

But the artists who do make a living out of art—either in the commercial field or in the fine arts—are able to do so because of the receptivity of the environment to aesthetic pleasure. In the promotion of art works through the use of prints and similar items, museums are only developing a concept first introduced hundreds of years ago.

The Rise of the Mass Market

With the Renaissance and the development of printing techniques art was able to take on a new mass market appeal. For the first time, inexpensive woodcuts and engravings of religious themes were available to the individual buyers to take home and enjoy in private. This trend was a reflection of wider currents in social development; in Italy this took the form of what is loosely called “humanism,” a cultural movement which sought to secularize Christ and Mary and in the process popularized art. Thanks to the activities of artists like Luca della Robbia, who invented a process to mass produce inexpensive terracotta casts of sculptures, it was suddenly possible for the members of the merchant classes to own works of art comparable in beauty to the masterpieces commissioned by the wealthy. Albrecht Darer, in Germany, made himself rich by the sale of his exquisite prints; today he is revered for his lovely paintings, but it was his activities in satisfying the mass market demand for art that made his fortune.

Such objects as prints for the medieval and Renaissance public are finally becoming respectable subjects for study by professional art historians, who are fortunately beginning to move away from restricting themselves to the study of masterworks. It is not recognized frequently enough that these “masterworks” contain only limited creative expression on the part of the artists; such artists were told what to do and how to do it, by the Church or by the specific patron, and were quite circumscribed in their freedom to move beyond those specified limits. By not acknowledging the commercial aspects of what has been regarded as “fine art,” a premium has been placed on the creative expression of the individual artist, and a condescending attitude toward commercial art has developed.

Occasionally social currents worked to restrict the development of new trends in artistic expression; typically, since the time of the Greeks, the Western world had always sought out the new and exciting as fashionable. Nevertheless, events like the Black Death in 1347 could conspire with social forces to foster an environment antithetical to the experimental; people of the time believed that the disasters of the mid-fourteenth century were a result of divine punishment for the study of the pre-Christian past, causing the retardataire late Gothic movement in art of the second half of the century. It was as if Giotto, with his vision of the classical past, had never existed; and it was nearly eighty years later that painters finally felt free to express their admiration for Roman sculpture, and the Renaissance was born.

But even during the Renaissance those works that we acknowledge to be the creations of pure genius were actually charged with commercial implications and designed with business in mind. Art flourishes most dramatically when it pairs creativity with business acumen; artistic success should be measured not only by the beauty of the work, but by how well it demonstrates a response to the specifics of its creation.