How do seemingly disparate arenas of Enlightenment philosophy, economic theories, boudoir etiquette, literary styles, and artistic modes coincide in the late eighteenth century?

In this poetic essay on the evolution of the idea of luxury and art, Rémy Saisselin uses precise, witty examples to describe the development of our modern taste, ultimately the successor of the more spiritual and grand baroque goût. His analysis both illuminates and distinguishes between eighteenth-century and modern varieties of conspicuous consumption.

This persuasive discourse depicts the rise of luxe as an escape from ennui and shows how, for the first time in European history, a large class of wealthy, leisured people emerged to make art, luxury, and the avoidance of boredom its preoccupation. Saisselin provides an original and lucid picture of the first phases in the emergence of a specifically bourgeois taste. (Amazon.com)

Rémy G. Saisselin is Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the University of Rochester. He is the author of The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (1984) and The Literary Enterprise in Eighteenth-Century France (1979).

Read The Enlightenment Against the Baroque: Economics and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century Online

Hardcover: 164 pages
Author: Rémy G. Saisselin
Publisher: University of California Press (November 11, 1992)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520072952
ISBN-13: 978-0520072954

Introduction:

In his Art as Experience , John Dewey calls Dr. Johnson a philistine and questions the sacrosanct aesthetics of Kant. This assessment makes it possible for us to see the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century in terms other than those which have long prevailed in aesthetics, in art history, and in literary history.

In aesthetics, on the standard view, everything led to Kant; in art history, everything presumably moved from the Rococo to the French Revolution; in literature, everything moved from French classicism or English neoclassicism to romanticism. Everything, as the politicians so often say, was thus moving forward . Likewise in economics: everything moved toward Adam Smith and free trade. Significantly, too, it was during the eighteenth century that aesthetics, art history, and economics became autonomous disciplines, while in literature the canons of the nineteenth century were coming into being.

Is it possible that this nearly parallel rise of aesthetics and economics was not pure chance but somehow represents a linked development, the result of some cause external to both aesthetics and economics? Perhaps Kant was not the last word in aesthetics, and art historians have been as much bewitched by language as have philosophers.

Take the preposition to when put between the two terms Rococo and Revolution . The three words epitomize an interpretation not only of history but of art history, which can be illustrated by the order of pictures in books or of art works in a museum exhibition. One reads or moves from "rococo" pictures and artefacts to the pictures and artefacts of the Revolution. Art moves. Art develops. ...

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