Volume 31, Number 19 · December 6, 1984
On Art and Money
By Robert Hughes
The twin figures of the art impresario and the art star, performing for a large audience, have been with us since the eighteenth century. It was in Georgian times that dealers started to matter—emerging as people who exerted a real force on taste, as distinct from mere anti-quarians serving the existing taste of patrons. At the same time, English and American artists, envying the huge entrepreneurial success of men like Rubens, craving status, longing to be set free from the condition of mere craftsmen, began organizing themselves and their market: their instrument was the Royal Academy, led first by an Englishman, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and second by an American, Benjamin West. Today's relationships between art and money wind back to the time of Burlington House, and the north and south poles of an artist's attitude to the market were summed up in two eighteenth-century utterances. 'Where any view of money exists,' wrote William Blake, Sir Joshua's dogged but powerless enemy, 'art cannot be carried on.' On the other side, Samuel Johnson was just as categorical. 'No man but a blockhead,' he said, 'ever wrote, except for money.'
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