Abstract
The development of art marketing as a new field of management occurs in a context of great confusion as to what constitutes the very definition of art, one aspect of this confusion being nothing else but the confusion between art and marketing itself. This confusion leads to conflicts between those who consider that art should be defined by a clear aesthetic criterion and those who accept the absence of such a criterion as a legitimate consequence of the principle of freedom which applies both to the creation of the artist and to the taste of the public. This state of confusion does not seem to be experienced in the same way in France where it has tended to be considered as a symptom of crisis in the world of art and in the United States where it has raised as a dominant force in contemporary art. Hence the confusion of art and marketing varies as a function of time (as shown by the emergence of a new field of management) and of space (as shown by the comparison of the French and American cases). It will be proposed that it is possible to account for these historical fluctuation thanks to an institutional approach based on the notion of system of legitimacy. We shall propose the essentially dynamic institutional foundations of modernity leading to the proliferation of innovations which consequences are ever more difficult to anticipate as a reason why, in America, philosophers coming from the analytic tradition found it meaningful to address questions such as “What is art” (Arthur Danto) or “When is there art” (Nelson Goodman”) expressing the need to go beyond pragmatism as expressed by John Dewey’s Art as Experience to promote a positive attitude towards contemporary art, while, in France confusion between art and marketing has been commonly considered negatively as the sign of the triumph of the most radical form of rhetoric, i.e. sophism.
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Notes
According to Lawrence W. Levine (1990) this distinction established itself in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.
This paradox goes as follows: if I say I lie, do I lie or do I say the truth? If I lie, it means I say the truth and if I say the truth, it means I lie.
We may note that this proposition echoes the first sentence of John Dewey’s The Quest for certainty (1929) New York, Minton, Balch and Company: “Man who lives in a world of hazards is compelled to seek for security.”
It may be noted that this definition up to that point is conform to that given by Talcott Parsons. (Talcott Parsons on Institutions and Social Evolution, Selected writing, 1982, University of Chicago Press) society being defined by the existence of a system of shared symbols.
It is important to stress that it has been rightly argued that artists have always used the means of marketing. This point has been developed very extensively and convincingly by Pierre Guillet de Monthoux in his seminal book The Art Firm, Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical Marketing, (2004, Stanford University Press). This raises two questions: first the issue of the difference between the use of marketing techniques and the confusion between “fine arts” and marketing, second the issue of the degree of institutionalization of marketing as a formal field of knowledge, which may explain why, while marketing techniques can be said to have been used de facto, nobody ever had the idea to describe them as such before late into the twentieth century.
What Kant calls “the free play of understanding and imagination” (Kant 1987)
This domination has been described in great detail in Jeanne Laurent (1981) i Arts et Pouvoir en France de 1793 à 1981: hitoire d’une démission, Université de saint Etienne, 1983
id. .p 65 “Le dessin est. l’honnêteté de l’art…dessinez,dessinez toujours, avec vos yeux quand vous ne pouvez le faire avec un crayon.
Rubens et Van Dick peuvent plaire aux yeux, mais ils trompent; ils sont d’une mauvaise école coloriste, de l’école du mensonge”
Classical economic theory stands with respect to Newtonian physics, as Critique of Practical Reason stands to Critique of Pure Reason.
Actually Adam Smith taught Rhetoric for some 15 year which seems contrary to our arguments. However the fact that he asked David Hume to destroy his lectures on rhetoric seems to confirm that he did not consider rhetoric worthy of pertaining to his complete works. We may note that he did not ask the same treatment for his history of astronomy. Adam Smith (1983) Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith/IV.
It is worth noting that this correspond to the importance given to Rubens, compared to the quasi absence of any reference to Poussin, who was Ingres’heroe. This seems to echoe the seventeenth century quarrel relative to status of color in painting, a quarrel which links with the history of ideas has been exposed in the most illuminating manner by Jacqueline Lichtenstein in (1993) Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age”. University of California Press
See Santa Clara County v. Southern pacific Raylways 1886.
Historical validity of such a connection can be found in “Positivit Republic: Augute Comte and the reconstruction of American liberalism” 1865–1920., (Harp, 2010)
According to the article of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy relative to Dewey’s Political Philosophy, Dewey “… was a leading critic from the left of Roosevelt’s New Deal while at the same time opposing Soviet communism and its western apologists”.
On this topic see the Thurman Arnold, The folklore of capitalism, Yale University Press, 1938
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Laufer, R. Uncertainty, Art and Marketing - Searching for the Invisible Hand. Philosophy of Management 16, 217–240 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-017-0063-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-017-0063-0