WEBVTT

NOTE The Economics of Painting: Patronage vs. the Market

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Let's get started. The audience is out there and the internet is waiting.

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I have placed on this table the supplementary bibliography, I promised.

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I already have supplements to the supplement in mind and I'll give them to Pat Barnett online and we'll post it that way,

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but that will give you some more books to track down.

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This morning we're speaking about painting, and this afternoon we'll speak about music, and tonight's film at seven o'clock here will be Amadeus.

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A little bit more on Mozart for us, and a film that actually deals with the issue of patronage versus the market in very interesting ways.

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Okay, let's turn now to painting. I'll begin by paraphrasing an ad. Your gold retirement watch, $879. Your wife's diamond wedding ring, $29,800. A Rembrandt, priceless. For all else, there's MasterCard.

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It's really interesting, we have this notion about paintings that they are priceless.

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Well, recently at auction, a painting by Gustav Klimt came on the market that was priceless.

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It sold for $135 million to Robert Lauder of the Neuer Gallery in New York.

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So here it was, this priceless climp, you know, billed as the last great climp that would ever come on the market, priceless, and it turned out to have a price, $135 million dollars, Rembrandt, thought of as priceless.

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I remember the big deal, I think it was 1962 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought Rembrandt's Aristotle, Conoplin, The Bust of Homer.

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I think it was $2.3 million then, and that was the largest price ever paid for an old master painting.

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That is, I mean, that would be about $20 million today given inflation.

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I just checked a Rubens painting sold in 2002 for $76 million, and that was at that time the highest old master price.

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So paintings do have prices, despite the fact that we call them priceless.

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You know, I was thinking to myself, when the Klimt sold, and it's not, in my opinion, it's not even a particularly good Klimt,

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and especially it's not a characteristic Klimt, to me it's a relatively ordinary portrait by Klimt.

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I was trying to think what would La Demoiselle's D'Avignon by Picasso sell for if this thing went for $135 million?

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I then checked and when the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought Demoiselle's D'Avignon, which many people think is the greatest,

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most characteristic painting of the 20th century and the one that created modern art.

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They bought it in 1939 for $28,000.

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Now, again, that was a lot more than that would be, you know, at least $300,000 today.

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The last time it had a price on it was $28,000.

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Paintings are part of markets, despite our desire to call them priceless.

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And in fact, I've found that the scholarship on painting is much more sympathetic to markets than any other form of cultural scholarship I've found.

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Much more so than scholarship on music, certainly more so than scholarship on literature.

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I find it very hard to find any scholarship on literature or music that's actually sympathetic to the market as a cultural force.

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That's why Tyre Cowan's book is so important and his chapter on painting, I think, is the best chapter in the book.

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book, but one reason it is so good is that's the one area where he's able to draw upon

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established scholarship in the field of art history that recognizes the importance of

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markets to painting.

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I'll be referring to Svetlana Alper's book, which is called Rembrandt's Enterprise, and

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And I've been surprised to see a number of books in our history for which entrepreneur

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is not a dirty word. Alpers calls Rembrandt an entrepreneur, a book that I've placed on

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the supplementary bibliography. Michael Fitzgerald's Making Modernism, Picasso and the Creation

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of the Market for 20th Century Art, calls Picasso an entrepreneur. Cowan lists in his

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notes a book titled something like Michelangelo is Entrepreneur so this seems

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to be a field where the scholars are willing to recognize that there's

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something to be said for markets so in the way my job this morning is the

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easiest of all that and it is interesting that you do hear about the

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The prices of paintings, in the way that you don't hear so much about how much money Mozart made on a symphony, or how much Dickens made on a novel,

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you do hear about that, but prices seem to be featured paintings, in part because paintings are unique objects,

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and therefore there's this kind of fetish about owning the one unique painting

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and people get really excited over the prices paid for them.

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So, although in general I've been talking about the sort of anti-commercial prejudice of most cultural criticism,

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it's still there in a lot of art history, but less so.

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I saw and increasingly I see art historians willing to talk about how markets support artists and especially to talk about the positive role that businessmen play in the lives of artists.

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This Fitzgerald book is basically a kind of celebration of Picasso's art dealers and how much they did to make his art possible.

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And Fitzgerald makes the point that Picasso did very flattering drawings of his art dealers.

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They don't have one eye pointed one way and the other eye pointed the other way.

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And they're not split into cubist planes and so on. They're nice, attractive portraits of his art dealers.

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And Fitzgerald says, you know, Picasso knew who's bread to butter, and it was his art dealers, like Paul Rosenberg.

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and he points out that these dealers helped promote Picasso. They arranged first in private galleries, exhibitions and then talked major museums, ultimately the Museum of Modern Art, into staging exhibitions for Picasso and he shows how the art dealers served as middlemen in the classic entrepreneurial sense.

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They let the world know about Picasso, but they also let Picasso know about the world.

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That is, they were telling him what his clients wanted.

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And they helped make Picasso the success he was.

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And by the way, you know, I was talking about the myth of the starving artist.

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You know, Picasso died a billionaire.

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And when a billion dollars was still a lot of money,

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You know, again, we have this notion that Picasso, he must have been a star of the arts.

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He was quite wealthy early in his career and made sure to stay that way and grow wealthier

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and wealthier.

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And he ended up a kind of brand name, in fact, his name is merchandised by his heirs.

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So he is in some ways the greatest 20th century painter and certainly the archetype of the

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and yet he turns out to have been a fully commercial figure and art is that way all the way back and so I want to trace, as Cowan does, the origins of European painting and show how it was involved in the development of capitalism all along.

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So, it's very interesting that the two renaissances in painting in Italy and the low countries correspond to the commercial flowering of Europe starting in the late Middle Ages.

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That is, if you look at where the great traditions of European painting begin, it's in what's now Italy and what's now roughly Belgium.

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Now, in fact, it's misleading to talk about these nations in connection with these developments because they didn't exist at this time.

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There was no Italy in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries.

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In fact, there was no Italy as a nation until the late 19th century.

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And similarly, there was no Belgium at this time.

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There was, in fact, just a set of cities in what's now Italy

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and a set of cities in what's now Belgium and the Netherlands,

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the so-called low countries.

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That's what, in fact, Netherlands,

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Peter Lenden means in German, the low countries, and that in itself is significant, because these cities were basically in existence for commerce, they were cities as opposed to kingdoms or empires, because they were, their life was a life of commerce.

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We're talking about places like Florence, in what's now Italy, like Venice, and then places like Bruges and Antwerp, ultimately Amsterdam, but a whole series of cities, again, up in what's now Belgium and the Netherlands.

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And as Cowen points out, it's really these cities that are the origin of painting as we know it.

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And they are the great commercial cities of their time.

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They were in a way bordered by great powers.

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France on one side and the Holy Roman Empire on the other.

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What would now roughly be called Germany, but then was a kind of loose confederation of German states under a feudal lord, the Holy Roman Emperor.

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And it's very interesting that the great painting we think of developed not in these massive political entities,

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in the Middle East, again, France or the Holy Roman Empire, but in these effectively you could call them city states, but really it's best just to call them cities, which were great trading centers and also the centers of manufacturing and the beginnings of modern banking and everything we associate with capitalism.

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Venice was the great trading center with the Ottoman Empire then, and in general in the East.

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Florence was a center of manufacture, all sorts of arsenal work.

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And Antwerp at that time was the great port of Northern Europe, later lost that role to Amsterdam.

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But again, there was a great deal of the beginnings of industry in this part of Northern Europe, and in fact, it's this commercial environment that helped jumpstart what we think of as the Italian Renaissance in art and the Northern Renaissance in art.

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and for a number of reasons. Again, we're talking about the economic basis as a necessary condition for art.

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There are many ways in which painting requires a certain level of economic development.

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Just as we talked about the theater requiring London having reached a certain economic level in Shakespeare's day.

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in Shakespeare's day, painting requires certain base materials.

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You need, for example, paint.

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And paint is a relatively expensive substance.

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And indeed, as with everything else we're going to talk about, one of the great achievements

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of capitalism was eventually to make paint cheap, as you can find out at Wal-Mart.

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That is, by the, Cowan talks about this, by the middle of the 19th century, paint was

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available cheap enough so that anybody could now become a painter.

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But when painting begins, in the modern sense, in the 14th and 15th centuries, paint was

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a relatively expensive substance, so you couldn't find it except in relatively well-developed

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of Cities, economically. Moreover, artists needed customers, and customers with money

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to spend on something as frivolous as art. The medieval peasant, sitting in his hovel,

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was not wondering about putting up a painting. He might have loved to improve the look of

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is helpful, but it was not an option. Again, we're talking about the process Aristotle

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calls our attention to, that you have to achieve a certain level of self-sufficiency, take

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care of the basic economic needs of life, and then you can start worrying about buying

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paintings. And that's what started to happen in cities like Florence and Venice, as you

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When you started to develop a wealthy merchant class, and so painting begins in an environment

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that's a combination of patronage and market, and in fact is one of the areas where it's

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very difficult to make the distinction.

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That is, much of the support for painting in places like Venice and Florence was probably

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best described as patronage, above all from the church.

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And that's why so much of Renaissance painting is on religious subjects.

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One of the prime ways artists got the means they needed to live and the means they needed

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to Paint was from finance from the church.

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But even there it's a little complicated because in many cases what you have are called donor

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paintings where an individual has paid for a painting to hang in the church.

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And these paintings, I'm sure you've seen some of them, they're rather amusing because

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you know they're usually a picture like of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and then there's

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two little figures at the bottom, and it's Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so who paid for the painting.

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And they're put in the painting as part of the deal. And there's a very characteristic

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of a lot of Italian Renaissance paintings that they take that form. So what is that?

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Is that patronage? Is it customers? Because Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so did pay for that painting.

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See what I mean when I say that the line is a little difficult to draw here. And similarly,

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You know, you want to say that the Renaissance is the great age of aristocratic patronage and painting, and that's certainly true.

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But many of those aristocrats, one generation earlier, were just merchants.

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And so it's very hard to say whether they're just customers paying for these paintings.

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Certainly, in the Northern Renaissance, with what's often, you know, Flemish painting,

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again, there's a lot of its religious, but a lot of it is portraits of middle-class merchants.

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Van Eyck's famous Arnolfini Wedding, which is in the National Gallery in London,

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that's a portrait of an Italian merchant and his wife.

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and is that patronages and customers, with the northern painters, it's an even more commercial environment than in the Italian cities.

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So what we're basically talking about here again is that the thing that patronage and the market have in common, that taste was involved.

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It's very hard to draw the line between artisan and what we now call artist in the Renaissance.

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A man like Ben Valuto Cellini, for example, made beautiful objects of art.

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I mean, his most famous piece is a salt cellar.

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It's in the Christus Art Museum in Vienna.

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That's one of the great artworks of the Renaissance.

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But it's just a salt cellar.

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It's incredibly fancy. It's got a lot of gold in it and ivory and stuff.

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But the point to see is that at this time,

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artists didn't think of themselves as fine artists

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The issue of tapestries is very good to illustrate this, because, again, most museums that they hang tapestries do it in a wing of decorative arts.

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You know, they're kind of glorified carpets, as museums treat them, you know, they're woven, they're a carpet you hang up on the wall.

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And by the way, during the Renaissance, people hung carpets up on the walls. They would bring them in from the Ottoman lands, and they were very beautiful.

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And painters would sometimes paint carpets. Some carpets are named after the painters that painted them.

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It's a famous thing called the Crivelli carpet, because Carl Crivelli used to paint this kind of carpet in his paintings.

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Anyway, tapestries, which now are kind of thought of as the stepchildren of Renaissance art, they were the big thing in their day.

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Tapestries were the peak of Renaissance art in their day.

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They were much more valuable than paintings, and much more valued than paintings.

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and Paintings. It's kind of an irony because they faded. People didn't realize that. You

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have to understand when people were trying out various mediums at this time, they didn't

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know really how they would last. The shift to oil painting from tempera painting was with

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a view, it allowed new effects in painting, but also the artist hoped that it would last

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And that's better, and that's turned out to be true, and oil painting turned out to be a fabulous medium, and when they're cleaned up and restored, oil paintings from the 1400s can look absolutely spectacular.

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Whereas I always found tapestries very disappointing, because they're so faded.

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Now, it happens that my view of tapestries changed when I was in Sweden.

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There's a place called Skålkastra Castle, not far from Stockholm.

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It was built in the 17th century by one of these Swedish soldiers of fortune, Count Rangel.

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I think it was his name who made a fortune off in the Thirty Years' War.

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And he started building this castle. He went bankrupt for some reason and never finished it.

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and he ordered these beautiful tapestries but they were left in the basement unrolled in what was essentially a deep freeze because we're talking about Sweden here and they were finally unrolled in this century and they are in mint condition and so you can see what a tapestry looked like before it faded and they're absolutely spectacular and you realize why people went breathless when they saw

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and so on these tapestries that are introduced there because they have colors that are as vivid as oil paintings and so it's very interesting tapestry weaving was a huge industry in the lowlands centered in places like Ruth and Antwerp I mean it was you know and it was like it was like the Silicon Valley of tapestry weaving was in that area it wasn't till the revolt of

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against the house works that the whole industry was basically destroyed and shifted elsewhere, but for a long time it was one of the chief bases of the economy of that area, the cities, and tapestries were so important because they were portable, and you especially had these war courts, someone like Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, he always moved around, and what he loved

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was having these tapestries which you could roll up, take with them, set up your new court, put up the tapestries, and suddenly you had this beautiful court.

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And the monarchs of Europe then outdid each other, who had the best tapestries.

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And, I mean, they spent spectacular sums of money on these tapestries.

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I mean, the figure, again, it's hard to translate in modern terms, but like, you know, for the Holy Roman Empire,

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Half the budget was for defense, half the budget was for tapestries.

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I'm exaggerating that, but that's the level of spending that was involved.

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These tapestries would take hundreds of workers working for two years to produce one of these things.

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And the people we think of as the great painters today would do the models for the tapestry.

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They're called cartoons. This is very misleading.

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But if you want to see some of the greatest artworks in the world, go see the Raphael cartoons in London.

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They're not as well known as they should be. They're in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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They are, I think, seven drawings of four great tapestries ordered by the Vatican.

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The Vatican, and they've kept their color. The tapestries, which ones in Dresden, ones in Madrid, I think, and several in the Vatican, they don't look anywhere near as good.

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Again, it's an irony. Usually cartoons were just thrown away. These were preserved. They are maybe Raphael's greatest works. Anyway, but that's the level of people we're talking about.

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You wanted to do a tapestry, but you got a great artist to essentially do the model that they then copied into the weaving.

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And the best place to see great tapestries in the United States is the Rocky Museum.

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The Philadelphia Fine Arts Museum has a great set of tapestries,

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I mentioned tapestries because you know we're talking about rugs here and you know we can you know that's just some commercial and again it was the center of an industry probably the biggest industry in the lowlands at that time but these things were incredibly beautiful they involved the greatest artistic talents of the

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And so what are we talking about? Is this an industry or is it the fine arts?

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Well, what I'm getting at is that distinction was not being made then.

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And so when we look at the beginnings of painting and even figures like Raphael,

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they were very much involved in a commercial market.

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market. I mean, later on Goya spent much of his career producing the models for

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wallpaper. And if you go to the Prado in Madrid, there's a whole room full of

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Goya's wallpaper. And that's how he made his money, basically designing wallpaper,

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which was a, you know, a great invention of the 18th century. Instead of bringing

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You're an artist, you paint your walls, you bought this ready-made wallpaper, which was designed by Goya.

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You can see, you couldn't afford to hire Goya to come and paint your walls, but Goya could do a design, which would then be reproduced by wallpaper.

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It was still pretty expensive stuff, but Spanish nobility, of which there's a great deal, they could all have Goya-designed wallpaper in their homes.

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The connection between capitalism and the fine arts, as we call them, has always been finding ways that you can market the designs of artists, lithographs, for example.

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One thing I discovered in tracking Picasso's career, Picasso never met a form of mechanical reproduction he did not like.

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His dream was not just to sell a painting, but to sell a thousand reproductions of that painting.

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And at one point he discovers ceramics, and they explain to him,

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well you've designed it and we can reproduce it and we can sell it as a Picasso.

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And he said, I'm a ceramicist.

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And it's really quite remarkable, but you know, that's what keeps these artists going.

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and makes it possible for them to pursue their career is that the market finds ways to make money that way.

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And again, the alternative to that is having to kiss up to an individual patron or just do religious paintings all the time.

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The very idea of a painting was a commercial gimmick. We're so used to it that we don't realize someone had to think this up.

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Why do we have paintings from ancient Rome? Well, we uncovered Pompeii and we found these wall paintings.

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and indeed that's the fundamental form of painting, painting walls, it goes back to the caves of Lascaux

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and my original example of the artist and the first artist and the mangleton, there's people painted on walls

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and modern words called frescoing and there are many, many great examples of wall painting

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We're ceiling painting, Sistine Chapel, the walls are painted, the ceilings are frescoed, and frescoes are magnificent.

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The problem is, supposing the Pope wants to move, he did it once to France.

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He can't take the Sistine Chapel ceiling with him, he can't take the walls with him.

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There were certain limits to frustrating. Moreover, if you're going to paint the Sistine Chapel, you've got only one customer, the Pope.

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You can't take bids on the Sistine Chapel ceiling because only one person owns the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

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So somebody got the idea of a painting. Originally it was on a piece of wood. The Italians came up with the idea of painting on canvas.

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But the idea of a painting is it's portable and you can paint it for somebody, if you paint somebody's wall and he doesn't like it, you can't say, well, I'll sell your wall to someone else.

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But if you paint a painting and let's say the client doesn't like it, you can sell it to someone else. This is just a painting. Rembrandt did that all the time.

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It's actually the threat he had against customers who didn't like his work.

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They'll sell it to someone else.

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If it's a portrait of you, I'll call it a portrait of King Saul and sell it to someone else.

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So the idea of just a painting, a painting on a piece of wood, laying on a piece of canvas,

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that was a great commercial development and opened up tremendous freedom to artists.

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Again, help them start to get free of individual patrons and create a market.

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And it really was in the low countries, the Flemish area, and then later in what's now the Netherlands, that painters started to paint just paintings and then marketed them.

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Again, even in the Italian Renaissance, there's such a connection between the painter and his client as first.

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You're painting for a given church and you have to give them what they want. You're painting for a given noble. Painting is portrait. How can you sell the portrait of someone to someone else?

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Well, it's in the northern countries that painters start to get the idea, well, I'll just do a painting and then I'll sell it at a fair.

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and you start to get painting, dealers in painting and so on

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and that becomes incredible in the 17th century in the Netherlands

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the output of Dutch painters is simply staggering

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I'm an absolute museum addict and I've been to virtually every major museum in the United States and to many of the ones in Europe

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And you know, you go to any major museum, and you know, if you're lucky there's one Caravaggio, maybe you can find a couple of raffians, and then you walk into the Dutch rooms, and endless Hobemas, and endless van Ruisdels, and these Dutch landscapes, I mean, I'm frankly sick of them, I'm sure they're very good individually.

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in the 17th century, you could go into a relatively ordinary person's house in Holland, and they owned a painting.

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These guys were incredible at producing these numbers of paintings.

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And at that point, it really is, again, typically catalyst, Alpers points out in the book on Rembrandt,

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that it was stunning to people in Europe, starting in the 17th century,

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You could go into a relatively ordinary person's house in Holland and they owned a painting.

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And you know it was by Obama upon Ruesdale, you know maybe a Vermeer Rembrandt for that matter.

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But you know it's so typical, capitalism takes luxuries and it makes them affordable to larger and larger audiences.

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And the Dutch art market is a perfect example of that.

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And it has certain negative consequences. I do feel there's almost a kind of standardization in some of these Dutch landscapes.

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It's why I get somewhat bored with it. But again, one of the reasons these painters could succeed is because of division of labor.

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People became specialists. There's this Dutch artist, Saradam, who painted church interiors.

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The reason they could turn out so many of these is because they had become specialists.

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The first time you see an Abraham painting, you say, wow, that's really impressive, and after a while you realize he was turning these things out, but fine, it meant that middle class people in the 17th century and 18th century could own an Abraham or a Sardinian, and now almost any museum can own an Abraham.

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Almost any museum can open them as well.

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And so that is an example of how painting is so much involved in market activities, as we understand them.

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All of these are ways that artists began to be able to make a living as artists, and again, not be dependent on specific patrons.

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in the Renaissance that our modern notion of the artist emerges. These artists did not like being mere artisans or craftsmen.

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In fact, one of the interesting things to see is, art begins as very much, painting begins, as very much a creature of the late medieval guilds, like labor unions, and in fact you had to be a member of a guild in these cities to be a painter, and like all labor unions, these guilds were restrictive, they set prices, they set all sorts of limits on what you do, and many of these

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Painters chafed under those restrictions, and it really was a big deal, the gradual emancipation of individual artists from the guilds, Rembrandt, Albers traces that in Rembrandt's career, it's actually kind of weird when you study this in the Dutch painting guilds, you have to price your paintings by the hour, you charge per the hour for painting them,

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This is kind of a strange embodiment of the labor theory of value.

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And Rembrandt didn't like that.

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You can see that he painted quickly.

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Those great fluid Rembrandt crossroads.

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Or Franz Hals, who could do with painting so quickly.

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They broke free of that.

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They gave up the advantages of being in the guild for what they saw as the greater advantages of being independent artists.

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And it's really in the course of the Renaissance that the notion emerges that the painter is not a craftsman, he's not an artisan, he's a divinely inspired creator.

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You see that in Giorgio Passari's Lives of the Artist.

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Giorgio Passari was himself a painter and a rather skilled one, but he's really now most famous for having written these series of biographies,

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He's the one who effectively creates the myth of Leonardo, creates the myth of Michelangelo.

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What he's always trying to show is that these painters, they're not just mere craftsmen,

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they're not workmen, they are divinely inspired artists, great creators.

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He tells the stories of their lives to show their independence, and Leonardo's refusal to kowtow to his potential patrons, and Michelangelo's refusal to kowtow to his potential patrons.

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Really, the origins of the modern idea of the creative arts can be traced back to Vasari, a very interesting and important figure for that reason.

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But as Carol points out, the only reason these artists could become independent is because of a market that gave them increasing options.

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Again, you can say, in economic terms, painting went from being a buyer's market to being a seller's market in the course of the Renaissance.

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And so it's actually the shrewdness of people like Michelangelo as businessmen that allowed them to stand up to patrons, even to so powerful patrons as the Catholic Church, and Vatican specifically.

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So, again and again in the history of art we see illustrated how ordinary basic economic principles are at work in the very high cultural principles we most admire.

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Let me take the example of Rubens, Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish painter of the 17th century.

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I have to confess, I personally don't particularly like Rubens' paintings, but I have to recognize the man was a genius.

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and as a sheer painter, I mean the energy and brilliance of color, it is extraordinary, I just, I guess I don't like fat people, being one myself I don't like to look at fat people so much for paintings, but, but, but, but, and Rubens' output is again simply staggering and it is very easy to get overwhelmed by it and say, oh another Rubens

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And then you hit something like the Marie de' Medici paintings in Louvre, or I just saw one of the paintings of his second wife in Vienna, and you know, you're just overwhelmed with the power of the painting.

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And he was the most successful painter of his day, possibly the most financially successful painter of all time.

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Although Picasso would be a rival claimant to that. It's very difficult to translate 17th century money into 20th century money.

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Well, one can say that Rubens made enough money this day to buy himself a castle.

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Literally.

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He was a very shrewd businessman.

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And long before Andy Warhol, Rubens had a factory, a painting factory.

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And the reason we have so many Rubens paintings today is he didn't paint them. His workshop produced them.

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And it's not just like capitalist production. It is an example of capitalist production.

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If you go to as many museums as I do, you get used to seeing, on a label of painting, studio Rubens, or Rubens workshop.

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And what they're saying, and you see that for all sorts of painters, not just Rubens, get to it a bit, it's now a big deal with Rembrandt as well.

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That is, we have this myth of the solitary genius, again, one of the books I put on the original bibliography was Jack Stillinger's

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Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary Genius. It's a nice way of crystallizing the issue.

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And, you know, since the Romantic period actually going all the way back to the Sari,

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We have this idea that a painting is the unique product of a single creative genius and his vision.

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And again, there's a lot of truth to that, because paintings by different artists look very different.

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And some of them are very good, some of them are very bad.

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Some of them are supernally good and so on.

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But there's a bit of an illusion here, and Rubens is a great example of it.

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Rubens had a workshop. He had a lot of young artists around him who he worked with. It's very hard to tell now, given Rubens' painting, who painted what.

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We have, in his case, an enormous number of sketches for his paintings, which then got translated into paintings.

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What he would do is he worked incredibly quickly.

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He would sketch in a model for a huge painting and then turn it over to his factory, to his workshop,

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and have the students paint the big painting, the big finished painting.

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He would quickly sketch out what it should look like, and I'm talking about a deposition from the cross, or a crucifixion scene, or maybe a scene of the apotheosis into heaven of some royal aristocrat or something.

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And then his workshop would execute the painting based on his model.

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And then, what he would do is come in and finish it, you know, he'd do the eyes, you know, something really special, come in and say, well you guys don't know how to do the eyes, come on, I'll do the eyes, I'll finish it.

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Now, how do you badge your painting like that? I mean, he sold them as Rubens paintings.

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Now, the joke of it is, these two-bit assistants working for them were people like Anthony Van Dyck, Peter Bruegel, Frank Snipes, these people that went on to be great painters in their own right.

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So, it's like when people complain about being taught by TAs in college, not by professors.

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You know, he was once a TA. You know, I say, you know, these, these kids, they're going to go on and become professors someday. They were apprentice professors. You know, your TA may be better than your professor. Someday he may well be more famous than any professor.

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Is the painting so bad if Rubens designed it and Bandai executed it?

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And if that's another case of division of labor, Rubens' studio had specialists.

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If you needed flowers for the painting, he brought in Peter Bruegel, who was great at flowers.

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If you needed animals, he brought in Franz Snyders.

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Again, it's this principle we think of art as having to be the product of a single genius, and it often is, and I don't want to deny, you know, Michelangelo painted the whole of the Sistine and Chapel ceiling and so on.

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That's fairly well documented. But there are examples where a painting is not just created by one person, and it's not worse for that reason.

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You know, it's like Henry Ford in production. You know, somebody puts in the carburetor and gets really good at putting in carburetors.

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And another guy does the axle or something. Well, Rubens really had a factory. It was really mass production because there were specialists turning things out.

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And, you know, there are these great debates now about any given Rubens painting. I mean, how much did he paint himself?

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One of the ironies now is many, when you go to museums, they have usually a disproportionate number of Rubens sketches up.

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Because many artisans value the sketches more than the finished paintings because they can say the sketch, that's really by Rubens.

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He did the sketches himself. The painting, they're not so sure how much of it he did.

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and they were often seen, you'll see, you'll read the notes, you know, there's more feeling, vibrancy of color in the original sketch, which is by Rubens.

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I don't know if that's true or not, but it just shows you again the, the fetishization of the single artist.

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The sketch is more valuable than the finished painting because the sketch is truly by Rubens and the finished painting we don't know.

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The 21 paintings of Marie de Medici in the Louvre are just staggering. They are so big, and there's 21 of them, and they are so beautiful.

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Even I have to like them. I just was in Vienna, and the Custis d'Arches Museum has this huge collection of Rubens.

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The new Lichtenstein Museum has a whole room full of Rubens. The output is just staggering.

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And one thing you can say, I mean, he created a style in vulgar contemporary terms, we would say he created a brand.

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He created an adjective, Rubenesque. I guess you all know what I mean when I say something like that.

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Rubenesque is a fab, voluptuous woman. We know what that means.

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And what that means is that it really is like creating a brand, so that people were buying, in effect, a Ruben-esque painting.

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They were not necessarily getting a Ruben's original, and they knew that, but they knew what they were getting, and it looked good.

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In some ways, it didn't matter to these people who had done the painting, as long as it looked like a Ruben's.

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and you can say that was Rubens' great achievement.

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I mean, you can recognize the Rubens from a mile away,

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except you don't know if it's by Rubens.

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That is, you know, if you go into any big museum,

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you know what a Rubens painting looks like.

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And they're so big, usually, you can't see them from a mile away.

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You say, oh, that's the Rubens room.

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And you get it in the notes, we'll say, well, you know,

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this was half done by Van Dyke and so on.

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As for, if you look at Van Dyck's career, his early paintings look like Rubin's paintings,

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and it takes him a while to develop his own style, which frankly is inferior to Rubin's in my view.

339
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But again, this is an example of a basic economic principle, division of labor, and it's in work in Rembrandt as well,

340
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I've read a lot of Alvar's book. Alvar's book is excellent for tracing the issue in Rembrandt's career.

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He, too, had a studio, a workshop, and he trained the finest Dutch painters of his generation.

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Gerard Doux, Goerd Flink. Gerard Doux was actually more famous than Rembrandt at the time,

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and his paintings commanded greater prices at the time. He was, in fact, a very talented artist.

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So, what I'm getting at here, again, we see that art is an example of social collaboration in a market environment.

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And again, try to picture how a Marxist would describe to you one of these workshops.

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It would become the Rubin Sweatshop, the Red Rand Sweatshop.

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It would be a case of exploitation against someone who was negative about capitalism would talk about this.

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You'd say how Rubens exploited Van Dyck.

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Van Dyck did the painting, but Rubens got the credit and probably got most of the money.

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Well, why was Van Dyck in the Rubens sweatshop?

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Was there slavery, legal slavery, in 17th century Flanders that Rubens could force Van Dyck to work for? No.

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Why did Van Dyck come to that workshop? He wanted to learn how to paint.

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And Rubens was the greatest painter in Europe at the time.

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And no doubt Rubens was making more money off these paintings of Van Dyck,

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and I put up with that and I just put up with it but you know he stayed there because he was learning how to paint by working for this guy Rubens developing his craft and sure enough he left rather quickly and I forget he spent all that much time in Rubens workshop and he went off eventually went to England became one of the wealthiest painters in his world he painted portraits of the English aristocracy you cannot go to one of these English

356
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I was very happy to discover his early paintings on the side of Rubens, but, you know, here's

357
00:52:31.620 --> 00:52:40.100
a case where, you know, typical good effect of a market environment.

358
00:52:40.100 --> 00:53:10.100
Rubens and van Dyck do a deal, you know, you work in my workshop, you know, I'll get the credit for the painting and most of the money, but you know, I'll teach you what I know, and then you'll go off and start your own business, and that's what happened, and you know, again, look at the sort of the negative portion of this, you would say, the customers are jipped, they thought they were getting a Rubens, but they're really getting a van Dyck, you know,

359
00:53:10.100 --> 00:53:13.380
and Van Dyck's getting jet because he should be getting a lot of money for it.

360
00:53:13.380 --> 00:53:16.980
It's a market transaction. In fact, everybody benefits.

361
00:53:16.980 --> 00:53:21.060
Van Dyck wouldn't have it become an artist and becomes a famous one himself.

362
00:53:21.060 --> 00:53:25.060
Rubens makes a lot of money. He would make a lot of money from this.

363
00:53:25.060 --> 00:53:29.500
But people can have a Rubens in their home.

364
00:53:29.500 --> 00:53:34.100
You know, if Rubens had a paint, every Rubens painting we have,

365
00:53:34.100 --> 00:53:39.180
we wouldn't have all the Rubens paintings we have today.

366
00:53:39.180 --> 00:54:09.180
And again, it's a kind of market solution. There's not enough Rubens to go around, and so he develops a factory to churn out more Rubens, because the market can bear it, and you know, here's the interesting point, they're all Rubens paintings, and now our historians get all worked up over this issue, is it or isn't really a Rubens, but you know, my feeling is, if it walks like a Rubens, it talks like a Rubens,

367
00:54:09.180 --> 00:54:11.180
It looks like a Rubens. It's a Rubens.

368
00:54:11.180 --> 00:54:14.180
I mean, if you're talking about having something in your living room that you want to look at,

369
00:54:14.180 --> 00:54:18.180
and it's beautiful, these paintings are all beautiful.

370
00:54:18.180 --> 00:54:20.180
Again, they're not quite to my taste.

371
00:54:20.180 --> 00:54:23.180
Give me Carl Kervelli any day.

372
00:54:23.180 --> 00:54:28.180
But, you know, this is what I'm trying to say.

373
00:54:28.180 --> 00:54:32.180
It's a complex market transaction in which, in fact, everybody benefits,

374
00:54:32.180 --> 00:54:38.180
and you know that because everybody has voluntarily entered into the transaction.

375
00:54:38.180 --> 00:54:49.180
Same with Rembrandt. This is now a very controversial example in our history.

376
00:54:49.180 --> 00:54:59.180
In the past 20 years, 20, 30 years, the number of Rembrandts in the world has dwindled.

377
00:54:59.180 --> 00:55:04.180
Very significant. I think it's gone from about 700 to 400.

378
00:55:04.180 --> 00:55:08.180
The Rembrandt Project

379
00:55:34.180 --> 00:55:52.180
He was training a whole generation of artists and they learned to paint like him.

380
00:55:52.180 --> 00:56:01.180
It turns out some of Rembrandt's self-portraits are by his students.

381
00:56:01.180 --> 00:56:10.180
And you know, they are frankly indistinguishable because for years they've hung in museums as Rembrandt's self-portrait by Rembrandt.

382
00:56:10.180 --> 00:56:20.180
And you know, it's exactly the same principle. These young artists knew that Rembrandt was great.

383
00:56:20.180 --> 00:56:25.180
They came and worked with them. They learned their craft by working for them.

384
00:56:25.180 --> 00:56:40.180
And many of them went on to quite successful careers, actually more successful financially than Rembrandt and Jared Dew, I think he was called a quink, made more money at the time.

385
00:56:40.180 --> 00:56:50.180
And Alpers gives a great defense of this, the name of her book is Rembrandt's Enterprise, The Studio and the Market.

386
00:56:50.180 --> 00:56:56.180
and it's one of the few books of cultural criticism I see, where the market is not a dirty word in this book.

387
00:56:56.180 --> 00:57:03.180
She sees that Rembrandt was working for a market, and she sees it as his way of getting independent patronage.

388
00:57:03.180 --> 00:57:11.180
She shows that as late as the 17th century in Holland, some artists were still trying to become court painters.

389
00:57:11.180 --> 00:57:18.180
In fact, some of Rembrandt's students became court painters somewhere with an annual salary.

390
00:57:18.180 --> 00:57:35.180
But Rembrandt painted for the market. He did portraits, but in many cases, you know, when the client didn't like the portrait, he just repackaged it and sold it to someone else in a different form.

391
00:57:35.180 --> 00:57:46.180
It's actually just, when you study it, Aristotle common-played the Bust of Homer, which went for $2.3 million in 1962.

392
00:57:46.180 --> 00:57:53.180
It was ordered by someone in Sicily, and it was delivered. The guy didn't like it. He sent it back. It's not finished.

393
00:57:53.180 --> 00:57:59.180
He had to work on it some more. And the reverend said, for 500 guilders, I'll work on it some more.

394
00:57:59.180 --> 00:58:08.180
And I think the guy paid that, but he didn't take the companion picture of Alexander that Rembrandt was supposed to do for him.

395
00:58:08.180 --> 00:58:21.180
So Alvarez is very good on tracing these basically market transactions, and essentially argues that Rembrandt too created a kind of style, a kind of brand,

396
00:58:21.180 --> 00:58:28.180
So that we know what a Rembrandt picture looks like, we just don't know if it's by Rembrandt.

397
00:58:28.180 --> 00:58:35.180
And really, I don't know if any of you have been following this, but some of the decommissionings have been spectacular.

398
00:58:35.180 --> 00:58:45.180
Above all, the man with the golden helmet, which is my favorite Rembrandt, is now universally said not to be by Rembrandt.

399
00:58:45.180 --> 00:58:54.180
by Rembrandt. It's the one that's in the Berlin Museum, what used to be the Dahlheim collections now in the New Museum in Berlin.

400
00:58:54.180 --> 00:59:02.180
I've got a picture of it here. You know, if I was a cool lecturer, I'd put up a slide here, but I'm sure you've all seen it.

401
00:59:02.180 --> 00:59:08.180
It's the man with the golden helmet. I've got a picture of it if anyone wants to see it afterwards.

402
00:59:08.180 --> 00:59:23.880
You know, this was one of the defining Rembrandt pictures, and you know, Albers quotes, you know, famous artisans going on and on about how we see the essence of Rembrandt,

403
00:59:23.880 --> 00:59:34.880
The special proving melancholy of the figure, all the weight of western psyche, the incredible brushstrokes of the impasto and all.

404
00:59:34.880 --> 00:59:42.880
And now they're saying, I don't quite know how this Rembrandt project comes up with these answers.

405
00:59:42.880 --> 00:59:49.880
You know, I cling to the idea that that's a Rembrandt. That's my favorite Rembrandt.

406
00:59:49.880 --> 01:00:00.880
The Polish writer in the Frick Museum in New York has been bouncing back and forth as to what, again, the latest word I gather is that it is by Rembrandt, but for years they're saying that it's not by Rembrandt.

407
01:00:00.880 --> 01:00:12.880
I mean, you go around museums in the world today, you will often see a picture and you can see two holes where the label has been removed because it used to say, you know, so and so, by Rembrandt.

408
01:00:12.880 --> 01:00:18.880
And now there's this little card that says, you know, School of Rembrandt or unknown artists associated with Rembrandt.

409
01:00:18.880 --> 01:00:29.880
So, one of Rembrandt's pupils was this man named Govert Flinck, and I decided he's one of the great painters in history.

410
01:00:29.880 --> 01:00:39.880
You've never heard of him, I'm guessing, but an unusual number of the paintings that are now said not to be by Rembrandt are said to be by Govert Flinck.

411
01:00:39.880 --> 01:00:42.880
So I think Govert Flinck should be a famous painter.

412
01:00:42.880 --> 01:00:47.880
And my favorite example, any of you heard of the Isabelle Stewart's garden of robbery?

413
01:00:47.880 --> 01:00:52.880
It's one of the worst painting thefts in history.

414
01:00:52.880 --> 01:00:58.880
It's a museum in Boston area, a very fine museum.

415
01:00:58.880 --> 01:01:06.880
And they were robbed of a Vermeer, I mean that's tragic because there's only about 40 Vermeers in the world,

416
01:01:06.880 --> 01:01:09.880
robbed of a Vermeer and a Rembrandt.

417
01:01:09.880 --> 01:01:20.880
and, you know, these paintings are priceless, the Vermeer especially, and it's years, they've still never been able to recover that, but when you see reports, no one talks about it.

418
01:01:20.880 --> 01:01:34.880
The third painting stolen was by Goldford Flink, and it's hard to believe that rank amateurs did this robbery, although it turned out the museum had no security system at the time.

419
01:01:34.880 --> 01:01:43.360
but I'm just picturing these guys getting into the garter there's a Titian painting of Europa

420
01:01:43.360 --> 01:01:49.920
that's considered the great masterpiece of the museum and personally I don't think it's so great

421
01:01:49.920 --> 01:01:54.480
but I've heard people say it's the greatest old master painting in America but they didn't steal

422
01:01:54.480 --> 01:02:01.200
that and I'm looking at picturing these amateur thieves going through this museum and saying

423
01:02:01.200 --> 01:02:30.200
And let's take that Vermeer thing, and let's take that Rembrandt, I heard a Vermeer, I heard a Rembrandt, oh, and there's another Rembrandt, let's take that, it's Goherd Flick, it was already identified as Goherd Flick, so the thieves can't tell the difference, Goherd Flick is a great painter, Goherd, I would like to think the man with the golden helmet is by him, but anyway,

424
01:02:31.200 --> 01:02:42.200
It's an interesting issue that Austrian economists can latch on to this question about what is the value of a painting.

425
01:02:42.200 --> 01:02:50.200
And you see here that so much of our sense of the value of a painting is governed by this myth of the solitary genius.

426
01:02:50.200 --> 01:02:58.200
I'll tell you, when the Rembrandt Project comes in and tells you your Rembrandt is not by Rembrandt, its value plummets.

427
01:02:58.200 --> 01:03:06.800
I mean, you know, one day you got a $20 million painting, next day, I don't know what, you got a $200,000 painting at best.

428
01:03:06.800 --> 01:03:16.000
I don't know what a Govert Flink goes for these days, but, you know, it's very interesting to think about this as a theoretical question,

429
01:03:16.000 --> 01:03:24.500
and again, one which we as Austrian economists, if that's what we are, who embrace the subjective theory of value, I have to deal with it.

430
01:03:24.500 --> 01:03:30.500
That is, it seems to me a painting should be valued for the painting.

431
01:03:30.500 --> 01:03:37.300
And if people thought for years the man with the golden helmet is a great masterpiece,

432
01:03:37.300 --> 01:03:44.300
it isn't any less so because someone has now said reparative in painting.

433
01:03:44.300 --> 01:03:54.400
It is interesting, you know, there's a kind of correlation between this author-based thinking about paintings

434
01:03:54.400 --> 01:03:56.600
and the labor theory of value.

435
01:03:56.600 --> 01:03:58.720
And it is interesting to discover that

436
01:03:58.720 --> 01:04:01.240
in the Dutch guilds of the 17th century

437
01:04:01.240 --> 01:04:03.760
painters actually charmed by the number of hours

438
01:04:03.760 --> 01:04:06.800
they put in the painting.

439
01:04:06.800 --> 01:04:11.200
The labor theory of value, which was not developed by Marx, but by Smith and Cardiff

440
01:04:11.200 --> 01:04:12.800
as a teacher in class at McDonald's,

441
01:04:12.800 --> 01:04:14.640
it's always struck me as a professor,

442
01:04:14.640 --> 01:04:18.200
you know, just absurd, how anyone could come up with the labor theory of value.

443
01:04:18.200 --> 01:04:22.040
Because the labor theory of value is actually the student's theory of value.

444
01:04:22.040 --> 01:04:24.040
And any professor should know I'm ridiculous.

445
01:04:24.040 --> 01:04:31.040
The labor theory of value is, why did you give me a C on that paper? I worked so hard on it!

446
01:04:31.040 --> 01:04:36.040
And every professor knows the answer to that. I gave you a C because the paper is worth a C!

447
01:04:36.040 --> 01:04:39.040
And it doesn't matter how much you worked on it.

448
01:04:39.040 --> 01:04:43.040
And, you know, there goes the labor theory of value down the drain.

449
01:04:43.040 --> 01:04:49.040
But it's rather interesting that if you go back to Smith and Ricardo,

450
01:04:49.040 --> 01:04:53.040
They understood that this was a very raw conception.

451
01:04:53.040 --> 01:04:58.040
They always excluded paintings explicitly.

452
01:04:58.040 --> 01:05:01.040
You can find footnotes.

453
01:05:01.040 --> 01:05:08.040
I forget if it's a Smith or a Carr report, but there are some exceptions, and one of them is old master paintings.

454
01:05:08.040 --> 01:05:15.040
They knew you couldn't estimate the value of the painting on how much time went into it.

455
01:05:15.040 --> 01:05:32.040
Because, you know, if Rubens and I were put in a room and start painting, and, you know, we're each given an hour, the result would be very different in value of what that painting was to...anyway.

456
01:05:32.040 --> 01:05:48.040
And it's interesting that, as I recall, I'm almost certain of the fact that there's an explicit exclusion of paintings, or what they call one-of-a-kind items they talk about, how well it doesn't apply here.

457
01:05:48.040 --> 01:06:04.040
And yet, in a strange way, the labor theory of value has come back in this effort to center the value of the painting from just people's subjective appreciation of it.

458
01:06:04.040 --> 01:06:11.040
You know, frankly, what we, the Austrians, would say is the value of the painting is what the market determines for it.

459
01:06:11.040 --> 01:06:15.040
So, right now, that cliff painting, its value is 135 million dollars.

460
01:06:15.040 --> 01:06:22.040
There's a paragraph in Alper's book that's pure Austrian economics and subjective theory of value.

461
01:06:22.040 --> 01:06:29.040
She sees this as a triumph of Rembrandt, that he was willing to let the market judge his paintings.

462
01:06:29.040 --> 01:06:37.040
She sees this as a great liberation, that the painting allowed people to bid on his paintings.

463
01:06:37.040 --> 01:06:40.040
Rembrandt was a great collector of paintings himself.

464
01:06:40.040 --> 01:06:47.040
He would bid off the price on some painting, just in general, to increase the level of prices of paintings.

465
01:06:47.040 --> 01:06:51.040
It's actually a shrewd policy on its part.

466
01:06:51.040 --> 01:06:54.040
But you see, it's a really interesting question.

467
01:06:54.040 --> 01:07:02.040
Why should the painting's value change if our opinion of who painted it changed?

468
01:07:02.040 --> 01:07:07.040
But this is, you know, a total obsession in the art world now.

469
01:07:07.040 --> 01:07:23.040
And again, largely a product of the 19th century, you know, many paintings have only been associated with an artist's name in the 20th century by art historians.

470
01:07:23.040 --> 01:07:31.040
The great royal patrons, aristocratic patrons, they bought a painting because they liked it.

471
01:07:31.040 --> 01:07:40.040
Something like, you know, to me the greatest single painting in the world is the Prado Deposition, sent to me by Roger van der Weyden.

472
01:07:40.040 --> 01:07:50.040
It's a staggering painting, but it wasn't identified by van der Weyden until 140 years after it was painted.

473
01:07:50.040 --> 01:07:56.040
And, you know, Philip II of Spain said, wow, I love that painting, I've got to have it.

474
01:07:56.040 --> 01:07:59.040
He wasn't saying I'm collecting van der Weyden.

475
01:07:59.040 --> 01:08:07.040
They said, I love that painting. That's why we have a hard time identifying a lot of painters now.

476
01:08:07.040 --> 01:08:14.040
Their history is not all that clear, and for centuries no one cared who painted it.

477
01:08:14.040 --> 01:08:22.040
They just thought the painting was beautiful. It's with the romantic period that you start to get this obsession with the solitary genius.

478
01:08:22.040 --> 01:08:37.040
Rembrandt becomes one of the emblematic figures of that and the Rembrandt market booms in the course of the 19th century because there's this fascination with Rembrandt and who painted what.

479
01:08:37.040 --> 01:08:49.040
But as we see now, it's all very complicated. My favorite example of how weird this can be, well, let me begin with this, there's the whole issue of forgery in painting.

480
01:08:49.040 --> 01:08:58.040
Now, in most cases with these Rembrandts, they're claiming that they're from this workshop and the works of our students.

481
01:08:58.040 --> 01:09:06.040
You know, the tests show that the dating is correct, that the paintings can be dated to Rembrandt's lifetime.

482
01:09:06.040 --> 01:09:11.040
That's where I get puzzled, is how they can figure out who painted it.

483
01:09:11.040 --> 01:09:21.040
And Alpers raises the question, you know, sometimes they say, this painting is so perfect, it can't be by Rembrandt.

484
01:09:21.040 --> 01:09:27.040
Because he would have introduced a little complication and a little smudge here and he wouldn't have made it so finished.

485
01:09:27.040 --> 01:09:32.040
And other times they'll say, you know, the painting is so perfect, it must be by Rembrandt, it can't be by a student.

486
01:09:32.040 --> 01:09:36.040
I mean, their criteria seem very inconsistent.

487
01:09:36.040 --> 01:09:46.040
I've gotten pretty suspicious of this full Rembrandt project, I'm definitely not letting them have a look at the Rembrandt I had at home that I had at Wal-Mart last year.

488
01:09:46.040 --> 01:10:01.040
The issue of forgery, of course, is separate, a genuine example of fraud. In some cases, you know, they can tell this painting dates from 1800.

489
01:10:01.040 --> 01:10:04.540
It's not by Rembrandt, it's not by S. Worshaw, it's not by any student.

490
01:10:04.540 --> 01:10:10.440
I mean, that's legitimate to me when the paint is something that was not available until 1800.

491
01:10:10.440 --> 01:10:13.740
Yeah, you can tell me Rembrandt didn't paint that.

492
01:10:13.740 --> 01:10:17.940
But there have been, you know, I don't know what the estimate is,

493
01:10:17.940 --> 01:10:23.140
but I've sometimes heard as high as 20% that of the whole mass of paintings in great museums,

494
01:10:23.140 --> 01:10:25.340
maybe 20% of them were forgeries.

495
01:10:27.340 --> 01:10:29.940
The dirty secret of the whole art world.

496
01:10:31.040 --> 01:10:38.400
And there have been some spectacular examples of forgeries discovered.

497
01:10:38.400 --> 01:10:48.880
But it's kind of, you know, when someone forges a painting, and again, there was this guy, Van Megaren was his name, he could paint Vermeers.

498
01:10:48.880 --> 01:10:59.000
I mean, that is not easy, but he could paint Vermeers that fooled the greatest art historians of Europe, the greatest connoisseurs said it's Vermeer.

499
01:10:59.000 --> 01:11:18.000
And then, you know, people looked at the back of the painting, there was a poster from the Paris subway or something, they knew it couldn't be from the 17th century, but you do want to ask yourself, you know, is it not a great painting, if it looks like a roomier?

500
01:11:18.000 --> 01:11:25.000
The weirdest case, I was telling you about this yesterday, is the great Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico.

501
01:11:25.000 --> 01:11:51.000
de Chirico, he is accused of self forgery. Now what happened in his case, de Chirico is the forerunner of surrealism, period around 1950-1960, he was painting these weird sort of neoclassical paintings of empty cities with classical columns, he's one of my favorite painters.

502
01:11:51.000 --> 01:12:00.360
and you know again tremendous influence on surrealism and then he developed a

503
01:12:00.360 --> 01:12:06.600
later style and some ways became more realistic and started painting on a

504
01:12:06.600 --> 01:12:11.200
self-portrait and stuff and you know what he was famous for was this period

505
01:12:11.200 --> 01:12:16.600
again it's usually called metaphysical period those paintings became very

506
01:12:16.600 --> 01:12:25.600
He was very valuable and by the 30s and 40s he couldn't sell the kinds of paintings he was painting at that point.

507
01:12:25.600 --> 01:12:32.600
So he started painting the same kind of paintings he did in the teens.

508
01:12:32.600 --> 01:12:37.600
To be honest, in some cases he started painting the same paintings he painted in the teens.

509
01:12:37.600 --> 01:12:43.600
And in some cases he even kind of put a date like 1917 on the painting.

510
01:12:43.600 --> 01:13:13.600
1943, but those paintings are considered forgeries. Now this is just amazing to me. I mean there's absolutely no question that Giorgio de Chirico painted those paintings, but people have such this idea of the romantic artist, true to his vision, unconcerned with commerce, that God help de Chirico if he decides to make a few bucks by painting in his own

511
01:13:13.600 --> 01:13:21.600
That's inauthentic. He wasn't painting from the heart, he was just painting to make money.

512
01:13:21.600 --> 01:13:27.600
If you go to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, I walked in there as a year, I was teaching at Davidson College,

513
01:13:27.600 --> 01:13:33.600
in a room full of de Chiragos, and I was in heaven. I said, oh my god, this is as good as the Metropolitan Museum,

514
01:13:33.600 --> 01:13:37.600
the Museum of Modern Arts collection of de Chiragos, and it's all out on display even.

515
01:13:37.600 --> 01:13:51.600
And then I looked at the dates, a little surprised, and I read about it and I said, you know, this stuff's basically junk. This is just de Chirico's self-forgeries. My mind spins at that.

516
01:13:51.600 --> 01:14:04.600
And I guess when he predated the paintings, that was cheating a bit. But if de Chirico painted them, how could they be forgeries? And I don't know what the answer to this is.

517
01:14:04.600 --> 01:14:28.600
Believe me, those paintings sell for nothing compared to an authentic tequila from the teens.

518
01:14:28.600 --> 01:14:33.040
My mind boggles at the idea of self-forgery.

519
01:14:33.040 --> 01:14:46.040
You'll notice it's a product of a kind of anti-commercial ideology, that a painting is only authentic if it was painted out of the heart of the painter.

520
01:14:46.040 --> 01:14:54.040
If somehow he's painting the painting just to make money, it's not authentic.

521
01:14:54.040 --> 01:15:02.040
You know, you would have to get rid of a lot of paintings in museums if you really invoke the principle that if the guy painted it for money,

522
01:15:02.040 --> 01:15:12.040
It wasn't authentic art, because again, you've got to deal with a lot of Rubens, a lot of Rembrandt paintings, and a lot of paintings.

523
01:15:12.040 --> 01:15:21.040
And again, I don't know how to resolve that specific issue, but I raise it because I think it crystallizes for me this question that an Austrian economist would inevitably ask here,

524
01:15:21.040 --> 01:15:35.040
What is the value of the painting? If it pleases you, it's a great painting. You look at it and you say, this has all these aesthetic values.

525
01:15:35.040 --> 01:15:49.040
As, again, people for years said about the man with the golden helmet, how does it change the aesthetic value of the painting to learn that maybe Goldberg Flint painted it or somebody else?

526
01:15:49.040 --> 01:15:58.040
And again, Alpers has a hard time resigning. She says basically that Rembrandt created a style that we call Rembrandt.

527
01:15:58.040 --> 01:16:02.040
And again, you can recognize a Rembrandt from a mile away.

528
01:16:02.040 --> 01:16:07.040
Again, as you're walking through museums, a lot of artists, you have to go up to the label, see what it is.

529
01:16:07.040 --> 01:16:11.040
But people like Rubens Rembrandt, their style is not really recognizable.

530
01:16:11.040 --> 01:16:16.040
What turns out to be surprising is it's not inevitable.

531
01:16:16.040 --> 01:16:25.040
and they were able to train their students to produce paintings that were not only virtually indistinguishable from their paintings

532
01:16:25.040 --> 01:16:32.040
but which have been literally indistinguishable for hundreds of years under very great scrutiny

533
01:16:32.040 --> 01:16:37.040
because all these Rembrandts that were up in the museum, somebody identified them as Rembrandts

534
01:16:37.040 --> 01:16:40.040
and they've been written about in books on Rembrandt

535
01:16:40.040 --> 01:16:48.040
And again, the man with the golden helmet is an extreme example, but we're talking even about self-portraits of Rembrandt that turned out to be by his students.

536
01:16:48.040 --> 01:16:57.040
And again, what I was saying about Rubin's students, Rembrandt's students were not exactly chopped liver.

537
01:16:57.040 --> 01:17:07.040
Gerard Doux, they had a retrospective on him at the National Gallery of Washington, he was a spectacular painter.

538
01:17:07.040 --> 01:17:11.880
and again commercially more successful through Rembrandt and equally famous

539
01:17:11.880 --> 01:17:16.560
with Rembrandt all the way into the 19th century. It's in the late 19th century

540
01:17:16.560 --> 01:17:23.360
that Dew's reputation started to plunge, and Rembrandt's reputation started to rise as

541
01:17:23.360 --> 01:17:28.880
artist-styles based on, you know, these theories of the creative genius started to

542
01:17:28.880 --> 01:17:34.480
reject Dew's paintings are too finished, they're too perfect. I actually was

543
01:17:34.480 --> 01:17:40.480
I was surprised to see how great a painter he was when you put together 50 of his paintings in one exhibit.

544
01:17:40.480 --> 01:17:49.480
So, we're not talking here, you know, a forgery done in 1800, okay, there, a museum has been gypped.

545
01:17:49.480 --> 01:17:55.480
But, you know, if you ended up with a man with a golden helmet, maybe it's by Golden Flink.

546
01:17:55.480 --> 01:17:58.480
It seems to me it's still a great painting.

547
01:17:58.480 --> 01:18:24.480
You know, really raises this issue of how do we understand painting? Is it all somehow some mythic thing where this individual genius has a unique aura, which he uniquely communicates to this unique painting, or is it, as Alpert claims with Rembrandt, that what's great about these painters is that, again, they create a very distinctive style.

548
01:18:24.480 --> 01:18:37.480
I mean, you can say it makes Rembrandt greater to realize that he created a certain mode, or let's say even a brand of painting, that other painters could imitate.

549
01:18:37.480 --> 01:18:47.480
And again, these are not hacks. When you look at the identifiable independent work of Men Like Dew and Flint, they are great painters.

550
01:18:47.480 --> 01:18:54.480
To me, this doesn't lower Rembrandt in my esteem, it raises these other bankers in my esteem.

551
01:18:54.480 --> 01:19:04.480
And we can recognize that we're dealing with market processes here, we're dealing with a social process,

552
01:19:04.480 --> 01:19:10.480
human associations where people of genius and talent work together.

553
01:19:10.480 --> 01:19:15.480
Again, these students benefited from working with Rembrandt.

554
01:19:15.480 --> 01:19:29.480
Rembrandt, they all did go out on independent use, and again, in some cases made more money than Rembrandt did, and got great fame all day, recuperating some of it now.

555
01:19:29.480 --> 01:19:38.480
So, and against the people that, you know, I'll take the man with the golden helmet, the Berlin Museum doesn't want it because it's not a Rembrandt, I'll take it.

556
01:19:38.480 --> 01:19:47.480
I love that painting all my life and I've been proud to hang it in my living room next to the Rembrandt I just bought from Walmart last week.

557
01:19:47.480 --> 01:20:00.480
So, in this commercial aspect of painting, the fact that it is involved with markets, it is involved with money, it does not contaminate it for me.

558
01:20:00.480 --> 01:20:06.480
That's what I was talking about with Shakespeare yesterday. There's this Marxist bias against money, against commerce.

559
01:20:06.480 --> 01:20:17.480
against Commerce, there's this romantic bias against it and an old aristocratic bias against it that somehow suggests that art is tainted if it's in any way involved with money.

560
01:20:17.480 --> 01:20:27.480
Well, in that case, we got a lot of tainted painting because the history of painting is totally interwoven with the history of commerce and capitalism.

561
01:20:27.480 --> 01:20:47.480
Can you think of any painters or painters whose work is inflated because of their evident lack of attachment to any kind of commercial enterprise?

562
01:20:57.480 --> 01:21:27.480
Dekhouni, Dekhouni, Dekhouni, Dekhouni, Dekhouni,

563
01:21:27.480 --> 01:21:57.480
in the anti-commercial atmosphere of much art criticism,

564
01:21:57.480 --> 01:22:06.480
In fact, the best commercial move of an artist in today's world is to appear anti-commercial, that happens all the time.

565
01:22:12.480 --> 01:22:20.480
What would you say to critics who would point out, isn't it unfortunate that Goya had to design wallpaper attracted from his disability?

566
01:22:20.480 --> 01:22:29.480
And again, I am not... I stressed it in Shakespeare's case. I should have again done it today.

567
01:22:29.480 --> 01:22:39.480
Please always remember that I'm not saying that markets are perfect and that artists aren't uncomfortable with some of the commercial aspects.

568
01:22:39.480 --> 01:22:44.480
I'll come back to this this afternoon and when we do the 19th century novel.

569
01:22:44.480 --> 01:22:51.440
You know, the Prado has the greatest collection of Goya paintings in the world and it just

570
01:22:51.440 --> 01:22:58.160
stagnated room after room. And you can see the man's entire life and his entire artistic

571
01:22:58.160 --> 01:23:05.420
life unfold and my heart sank when I walked into the wallpaper room. I mean, it was painful

572
01:23:05.420 --> 01:23:13.040
to see a man of this genius making wallpaper. It's very pretty. That's the best I can say.

573
01:23:13.040 --> 01:23:20.040
You know, it's Goyer making wallpapers, so it's great wallpaper, but it's wallpaper, it's wallpaper wallpaper.

574
01:23:20.040 --> 01:23:33.040
But, you know, the other thing, when you look at the portraits he did for the royal family, I mean, that's another, you know, that's aristocrat painters, that's equally painful, except for the fact he makes them look like idiots.

575
01:23:33.040 --> 01:23:42.040
And you know he's having his revenge year. His patrons are patronizing him and he really captures.

576
01:23:42.040 --> 01:23:50.040
It's the greatest warning against inbreeding you will ever see is Goya's portraits of the Spanish royal family.

577
01:23:50.040 --> 01:23:58.040
And then you get to the last rooms, these so-called dark paintings, when he was living alone, sort of going insane.

578
01:23:58.040 --> 01:24:03.040
This is one of the greatest paintings I've ever seen.

579
01:24:03.040 --> 01:24:16.040
Goya has a real lesson in seeing every form of financial support for art and what their advantages and disadvantages are.

580
01:24:16.040 --> 01:24:24.040
Making the wallpaper, he made a great living and it allowed him to do the other stuff by doing that.

581
01:24:24.040 --> 01:24:37.040
I really should have re-emphasized as I was doing Shakespeare that every one of these artists who has embraced the market in some form has chafed under it.

582
01:24:37.040 --> 01:24:49.040
Certainly Rembrandt. Rembrandt went bankrupt at one point. Now, in fact, it looks like a Chapter 11 filing with reorganization and he started to work for his son and his wife.

583
01:24:49.040 --> 01:25:04.040
The Great Art Collector and he spent a fortune on paintings. He loved buying other people's paintings and prints and his wonderful old master collector himself.

584
01:25:04.040 --> 01:25:11.040
And as did Rubens, by the way. It's interesting to see some of these great painters made their money painting, because they love buying other people's paintings.

585
01:25:11.040 --> 01:25:18.040
But every one of these people has been frustrated by having to deal with the market.

586
01:25:18.040 --> 01:25:29.040
But, what I'd add, they're also frustrated by having to deal with patrons, and if Rembrandt had to apply to the NEA, I guarantee you he would have found it equally frustrating.

587
01:25:29.040 --> 01:25:40.040
More frustrating is my point. It is frustrating to artists to have to give something in return for being given the means to live and for being given the means to paint, in this case.

588
01:25:40.040 --> 01:25:54.040
But, you know, everyone pays a price for something. I have to grade papers in order to be a professor. I love lecturing, I love teaching. I can't stand grading papers. If I didn't have to grade papers, I'd do what I do for nothing.

589
01:25:54.040 --> 01:26:24.040
Oh God, don't record that for my own department, but, so yeah, you're absolutely right, and Goya is a wonderful example, you know, the Prado, I think, is the greatest painting museum in the world, and one of the reasons is that there's three huge rooms of Goya, and they have, basically, they have his whole life there, and you can just watch it, and I remember feeling this, you know, you turn a corner, and you're in passing,

590
01:26:24.040 --> 01:26:30.120
Pastels, the wallpaper room, and it just, your heart sinks to realize it's the man that

591
01:26:30.120 --> 01:26:36.120
goes on to paint atlas devouring his children and those incredibly dark paintings with the

592
01:26:36.120 --> 01:26:42.600
heavy layers of paint on them, and then you see, you know, for years he was just producing

593
01:26:42.600 --> 01:26:48.560
pastel drawings for wallpaper. They're light gray and pink, and you can just picture your

594
01:26:48.560 --> 01:26:55.560
I think we need to thank you folks, Dr. Bender.