Aestheticizing Techniques of Commerce

Jochen Schulte-Sasse "Afterward" to Jay Caplan. Framed Narratives: Diderot's Geneology of the Beholder.

The mechanical arts in particlar [sic] were soon to be excluded from the realm of the so-called beautiful arts because their skills turned out to be commercially exploitable in the course of the industrial revolution. For one of the structuring principles of the institutionalization of a separate aesthetic realm was the resistance of those arts delimited as "beautiful" to commercial utilization. As Martin Fontius has pointed out, the development of a generalized notion of art and the emergence of a new discipline — aesthetics — dealing with art in general coincide not just accidentally with the emergence of technology as a science and institutionalized discipline: "the monopolization of the concept of technic on the one hand corresponded to an aestheticization of the concept of art on the other."

How like an institution is a marketplace?

And so for day 235
06.08.2007