The Author, Art and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics

In 1800, Heinrich von Kleist visited a lending library in Würzburg and issued a report on the state of reading in Germany at the time. Requesting “a few good books . . . perhaps something by Wieland . . . or by Schiller, Goethe,” he was told that he would not be likely to find such works on the shelves. “Are all these books out?” he inquired, pleased at the good taste of the library’s patrons. “Not exactly,” replied the librarian, who proceeded to inform Kleist that his library did not carry such books. “Then what sort of books have you got here along all these walls?” the author asked quizzically. “Romances of chivalry, those and nothing else,” asserted the librarian, “To the right those with ghosts, to the left without ghosts, according to taste.”

The German reading public, it seems, just wasn’t reading works by the likes of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Kleist, but was much more interested in sensational ghost stories. What, given these circumstances, was a “high culture” author to do as his/her books piled up unsold in boxes at the press? As Martha Woodmansee shows in her very insightful and elegantly written account of the history of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, The Author, Art, and the Market, they set out to exorcise these ghosts from the sphere of “true” or “fine” art. Turning to the material conditions that underlie and prompt the re-evaluation of art by these theorists, Woodmansee details this process of theoretical exorcism and, in effect, conjures up the ghosts that eighteenth-century aestheticians sought to banish, bringing them back to haunt the philosophers and their theories.

The book’s first chapter, “The Interests in Disinterestedness,” traces the history of aesthetic theory from Moses Mendelssohn to Karl Philipp Moritz. Mendelssohn, writing in mid-century, argued that the singular purpose of a work of art was to have an effect on its audience and hence ought to be evaluated by its ability to move us. Three decades later Mendelssohn’s pupil, Moritz, broke away from his teacher’s enormously influential theories, removing art from the constraints of affectivity to which it had been subjected and arguing instead for its existence sui generis, responsible only for being a “coherent harmonious whole” (quoted on p. 18). Woodmansee explains this remarkable shift from Mendelssohn’s theory of artistic instrumentality to Moritz’s theory of artistic autonomy through an examination of the “far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century” (p. 32). As literature entered the marketplace, the public was found to favor ghost stories over “demanding” writers, and the instrumentalist theory of art worked to justify the wrong works: there were simply “too many readers . . . reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with altogether the wrong results” (p. 90). Moritz responds to this problem by “rescuing” art from the market and making a virtue of necessity: bad sales become the hallmark of “good” art. His “theology of art,” which adopted Pietist tactics to encourage reflective meditation on difficult texts, thus offered demanding writers “a very powerful set of concepts with which to address the predicament in which they found themselves” (p. 32), turning a defeat in the marketplace into a victory in the aesthetic realm—the “fine” arts were now precisely those that did not have a big impact on the public.

Having traced the impact of the newly developed marketplace on the definition of art, Woodmansee turns in her second chapter to an examination of its impact on the development of the modern concept of the author. As writers moved from an aristocratic patronage system to a democratic market-based system, attempting for the first time to earn a living on their own as professionals, they found the legal foundation necessary for this shift not yet in place. Germany had not yet developed a concept of intellectual property and, consequently, book piracy...