The Cultural Establishment and its Critics

Abstract

Abstract Franz Kugler, a merchant’s son from Stettin, established his scholarly reputation with influential works on Greek sculpture, European painting, and Prussian history. In 1835, when he was just twenty-seven, he became a professor at the Academy of Art in Berlin; eight years later he took charge of artistic affairs in the Prussian Ministry of Culture. In 1847 Kugler wrote an essay on art as an administrative concern in which he called for a series of state-initiated cultural programmes, including the creation of art schools, passage of copyright laws, establishment of awards for creative achievement, construction of museums and monuments, and the renovation or preservation of important historical buildings. ‘Just as science is designed to make people spiritually free,’ Kugler argued, ‘art gives them the mark of spiritual nobility. Therefore since one of the government’s duties is to further and direct the education of the Volk, this duty must include art as well as science.’ But, while Kugler saw the need for state initiative in the promotion of art, he also recognized that another, no less powerful force was at work; in addition to being an object of ‘administrative concern’, art was also an object of what he called ‘mercantile speculation’. Kugler found nothing wrong with this: ‘a fresh, mobile commerce’ belonged to a well-developed national existence and had its place in the realm of artistic production. But Kugler, like many German liberals, feared that commerce might lead to chaos and corruption, so he advocated a variety of governmental measures to preserve art’s purity and honour from ‘the remorseless drive of speculation’.The state and the market, the two fundamental forces at work in nineteenth-century social development, provided the institutional matrix for nineteenth-century culture.