My wife gave me a great surprise birthday trip to Paris recently. It was our first vacation without kids in 3 years. We hired a guide to take us through the Louvre and other parts of the city. We have found local guides to be best way to really understand whatever place we are visiting, and this was no exception. He told us many great stories. One of them was on what drove the explosion of innovation in the fine art market in the late 19th century.
He described that for all of European history, fine art was created by artists who had "sponsors". They financially supported the artist and gave them "assignments" to work on. Because artists were not free to create, the fine art gestalt was more reflective of the sponsors than the artists. Sponsors did not have the creative instincts of the artists themselves, so European fine art was very refined and technically innovative but it was not culturally groundbreaking.
A seeming non-obvious external factor changed all of that. It was the industrialization of Europe and the subsequent rise of the merchant class in the late 1800's. Members of the merchant class had enough money to spend on fine art but not enough money (or did not have the inclination) to be full-time sponsors of artists. Because there was now a market demand for fine art, artists took on the role of entrepreneurs and began the series of groundbreaking innovations that continue today. Innovations of that period consisted of Impressionism, Post-impressionism, Cubism and several others.
Art went from looking like this (Virgin Mary painted by Jan Van Eyck)
To looking like this (the famous Guernica by Picasso depicting his rage over the senseless massacre in the city of Guernica -- it was bombed simply as target practice for the Nazi war machine)
Like any great innovation, the "incumbents" initially dismissed Guernica when it was unveiled at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World's Fair. One critic called it: "a hodgepodge of body parts that any 4 year old could have painted". Yet with the passage of time it has become the art world's most powerful anti-war statement.
Picasso's own words on his creation of Guernica describe it the best, and illustrate how a work like this could never have been created under the old "sponsored art" system.
"A painting is not thought out and settled in advance," said Picasso. "While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it's finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it."
This is all a fascinating illustration in how an entrepreneurial ecosystem can spur creativity, and how often-times non-obvious structural changes can unleash entrepreneurial creative forces.
Could the affect that the rise of the Merchant Class in Western Europe in the late 19th century had on the fine art market be akin to the affect that Google’s release of Adsense had on social media entrepreneurs in the early 21st century? Both created a mechanism for entrepreneurs to get paid for their creativity and subsequently unleashed a torrent of new innovations. Food for thought...
Anyone wish to share the impact that other non-obvious infrastructure changes had on the creation of entrepreneurial markets?
Don't know what is wrong what is rite but i know that every one has there own point of view and same goes to this one
Posted by: New Belstaff Jacket | December 05, 2011 at 10:50 AM