Art and its markets

Abstract

A s sub-disciplines, art history and economic history share certain I characteristics, and in some respects appear to be experiencing similar discontents. Although the former boasts a longer intellectual pedigree, both derived a powerful stimulus from German ideas in the later nineteenth century, while since 1900 the most innovative contributions to each have come from the English-speaking world. The first is concerned with visual culture and the second, in some degree, with material culture. It is on this overlapping territory that their paths intersect before tracing different routes. Since the late 1970s, art historians have concerned themselves less with individual artists, stylistic changes, connoisseurship, and iconography, and have explored more of the social context surrounding the making and use of works of art. The so-called 'new art history', however, represents a series of criticisms of earlier approaches rather than a single point of departure; and, while it opens up certain lines of enquiry which cross the terrain of the economic historian, including the history of the art market, these do not necessarily point towards the material object. Economic and social historians, on the other hand, are becoming more interested than ever in objects and 'the world of goods', a world replete with symbolic meaning. In short, an element of role reversal seems to be at work. During the 1 950s and 1 960s, the engagement of art history with economic history was focused on the changing relationship between the economy, artistic creativity, and the state of the fine arts. It was in 1953 that, in an influential but flawed account of the late medieval Italian economy, Lopez challenged the notion that economic growth and prosperity tend to provide the most favourable environment for investment in the arts. The Italian Renaissance, he suggested, coincided with a long period of economic depression, while the prosperity of the thirteenth century produced no major artistic achievements. Critics of Lopez questioned the reduction of cultural production to a series of investment strategies, not least because the production of new works of art normally contributes only marginally to the total investment needs of the economy.1 The emphasis shifted gradually from investigating the macro to the