Art and commerce in Great-Britain XVIIIth-XXIst centuries

International conference
organized by the research group ACE at Rennes 2 University

April 23d and 24th, 2009

For now more than three centuries, the art and the commercial activities of
the British Isles have been more or less harmoniously bound together.
Indeed, it was precisely at a time when, just after the Glorious
Revolution, a large middle-class audience suddenly became consumers of
culture, that an actual vernacular artistic and visual tradition was born
in Great Britain. The growing individualization of British art was made
possible during the XVIIIth century thanks to a prosperous economy which
was largely due to the country\'s intense commercial activity, clearly
setting the practices of the English and Scottish apart from that of their
European counterparts.

The very beginning of the XVIIIth century saw the rise of an organized
trading system for British art with the use of go-betweens, or even of
merchants, while before that, it had been against the law to import foreign
paintings and transactions had been scant, with buyers and artists usually
dealing directly together.

The period saw figures like Andrew Hay and Samuel Paris emerge, along with
the development of a bidding system and of a network of auction houses.
While a royal academy of painting and sculpture was long in the making and
only opened in 1768, and in the absence of aristocratic patronage to match
that of their French and Italian neighbours, British artists had to deal
with a bourgeois clientele whose attitude to money was still fraught with
age-old anxieties.

As David Solkin has shown in his book Painting for Money, it is the very
nature of this new market which gave rise to new genres, among them
Conversation Pieces, ambiguously positioned between genre painting and
group portraits. For all the theoretical support of the Academy, history
painting carried on being dismissed by buyers thirsty for sensationalist
gothic pictures and pre-raphaelite genre scenes.

The new ways in which artworks were commercialised progressively came to
have an influence on the way they were produced, reproduction and
photoengraving having been developed in order to circulate some of the
works and to provide the artists with an income (which in the case of
William Hogarth proved to be quite comfortable.) This allowed the artists
themselves to join the ranks of the middle-class and to become respected
professionals with structured careers. Eventually, the finish and technical
niceties of many 18th century paintings were influenced by the anticipation
of these modes of dissemination.

Victorian genre painting largely owed its popularity to the tastes and
buying power of a new class of avid collectors which came to prominence at
the turn of the century. These merchants and entrepreneurs, newly-enriched
by the Industrial Revolution, untrained in classical art history and too
busy to take the Grand Tour started investing their assets in art
collections. While doing so, they shunned old Masters, put off by the risk
of gambling their money on one of the many fakes forged at the time, in
favour of living artists painting accessible everyday subjects. The tastes
of this new moneyed class, anxious for respectability and imbued with
family values and a protestant work ethic encouraged story-telling in
religious and domestic subjects, attention to detail and the small-scale
format of canvases intended to improve the minds of viewers in the comfort
of their own homes. The accusation of philistinism levelled by Roger Fry in
the early XXth century at a British audience incapable of appreciating
French post-impressionism was inherited precisely from the commercial
preoccupations of the British art world. This stigma held fast until the
end of the XXth century, only to be compounded by a marked condescension
for the parochialism of a national art overshadowed by its American
counterpart.

Today\'s context is one in which the internationalisation of the
contemporary art world can be seen as both a by-product of and a mirror
held to today\'s globalized commodity culture. In 2007, Damien Hirst
therefore decided to capitalize on this duality of today\'s art, both for
himself and for the sake of the British scene. His diamond-encrusted skull,
For the Love of God was sold to an investment group for £50 million, thus
becoming the most expensive contemporary art work in the world and making
British art a force to be reckoned with.

http://www.uhb.fr/jsp/fiche_actualite.jsp?STNAV=&RUBNAV=&CODE=1220620523885&LANGUE=0&RH=PAGELIBRE

Program

Thursday, April 23d
8.30 Registration
9.00 Opening address by Jean Emile Gombert, Head of Rennes 2 University's
Research Board

Session 1: Selling and Inventing a British School
Chair: Prof. Marie-Madeleine Martinet, Sorbonne
9.30 Dries Lyna, University of Antwerp. In Search of a British Connection.
London Art Dealers and the Sellout of Flemish Art in the Eighteenth Century
10.00 Bénédicte Miyamoto-Pavot, Paris 7. "Making Pictures Marketable": The
Georgian Invention of a Modern Art Market
10.30 Dr David Humphrey, Royal College of Art, London. "...as for the
Duchess, Well my Dear...": The Social Role of Goldsmiths' Shops in Late
Georgian London

11.00 Break

11.30 Prof. Xavier Cervantes, Toulouse 2. "Vanquish'd and oppress'd at home
by the Invasion of Foreign Luxury": Italian Opera, the Commercialisation of
the Arts and the Luxury Controversy in London during the first half of the
XVIIIth century
12.00 Dr Bärbel Küster, University of Stuttgart. Copies on the Market in
18th Century Britain
12.30 Dr Laurent Châtel, Sorbonne. "The Satire of Commerce in William
Beckford's Writings on Art"

13.00 Lunch

Session 2: The Britishness of the British Art Market
Chair: Dr Sophie Mesplède
14.45 Keynote Speaker: Dr Anne Helmreich, Case Western Reserve University,
Cleveland. Traversing Objects: London and the International Art Market, c.
1850-1914.
15.30 Dr Meredith Paige Davis, New Jersey. On Hogarth's The Battle of the
Pictures
16.00 Julia Skelly, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. Dual
Consumptions: Art and Alcohol in Britain, 1751-1851

16.30 Break

17.00 Guillaume Evrard, University of Edinburgh. "English Pictures are but
Little Known and Esteemed Out of England": The Royal Academy of Arts and
British Visual Arts at the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle
17.30 Dr Cécile Doustaly, Université de Cergy-Pontoise. "What is the use of
such rubbish to our manufacturers?" - The State, Art and Commerce in
Victorian times
18.00 Dr Isabelle Cases, Université Via Domitia, Perpignan. Art, Commerce,
Reconciliation and Renaissance: Manchester as a Case Study

Friday, April 24th
Session 3: Dealers of Modernity
Chair: Prof. Jacques Carré, Sorbonne
9.30 Dr Ignacio Ramos Gay, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain.
Theatrical adaptations from the French and the low culture paradigm
10.00 Dr Grischka Petri, University of Bonn. Whistler Between the British
and French Art Markets
10.30 Dr Patricia de Montfort, University of Glasgow. Exhibitions and the
Late 19th c. Art Market: An Analysis of the Fine Art Society, London

11.00 Break

11.30 Dr Anne-Pascale Bruneau-Rumsey, Paris 10. Patronage and the Modernist
Avant-Garde: Art, Commerce and Roger Fry's Omega Workshops
12.00 Dr Andrew Stephenson, University of East London. From Conscription to
Depression: The Market for Modern British Art in London c. 1916-1930
12.30 Ulrike Weber, Technical University, Berlin. The Design and Industries
Association, D.I.A.: Art and Commerce and the Development of Modernism in
Interwar Great Britain

13.00 Lunch

Session 4 : The Economics of Contemporary British Art
Chair: Dr Charlotte Gould
14.45 Keynote Speaker: Dr Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute, London.
The Selling of Internet Art: Vuk Cosic et al
15.30 Dr Chin-Tao Wu, Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of European and
American Studies, Academia Sinica. The Collector as Phoenix: Can Charles
Saatchi Rise from the Ashes?

16.00 Break

16.30 Uta Protz, EUI Florence. Beautiful Inside my Head Forever: The
Realignment of the Artist and the Art Market in Great Britain at the
Beginning of the 21st Century
17.00 Gabriel Gee, Paris 10. Art Without Commerce in Northern England
1980-2000
17.30 Davy Babel, Paris 7. Tate Modern - The Museum and the Market