From time to time we are given a new book that so vividly illuminates the intellectual ground we stand on that it instantly acquires the status of an emblematic event. As far as the study of art history is concerned—and more particularly, what has gone wrong with it—I believe we have now been given such a book in Professor Svetlana Alpers’s Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Professor Alpers is one of the leading representatives of the kind of art history that now dominates the profession, and is widely recognized as an academic eminence of considerable power and influence. Occupying a senior position on the art history faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, she is the author of an earlier and much-praised study of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, The Art of Describing (1983), and serves as an editor of two academic journals, Representations and The Raritan Review. She is also, I believe, an adviser to the Getty operations that now play such a conspicuous role in the funding of art historical research. She has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the recipient of numerous other fellowships and awards. Rembrandt’s Enterprise is itself based on the Mary Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College in 1985—though, as we shall see, it was the more academic rather than the political parts of the book that were mainly vouchsafed to the audience at Bryn Mawr.
Clearly, we have in Professor Alpers one of the brightest stars now traversing the academic firmament. This makes it all the more imperative that we understand the nature of her enterprise, which I believe to be a wholly destructive one. To understand what she has set out to accomplish in this book, it is essential, however, that we have some sense of the intellectual situation of which Rembrandt’s Enterprise is so important an expression. Only then will it be possible to see why her book is indeed an emblematic event—emblematic, that is, of the catastrophe that has overtaken not only the study of art history but much else that we prize in the life of the mind.
Is it an exaggeration to speak of a catastrophe in these matters? I think not. For it is one of the truly horrifying characteristics of the present age that so many of its most gifted scholars and intellectuals—especially in the fields of art history and literary study—are nowadays almost exclusively engaged in systematic and politically inspired demolition projects. In this respect they differ so greatly from even the most critical and contentious of their predecessors as to constitute a separate profession. To say that they no longer belong to the tradition of humanistic study is hardly sufficient to describe what it is they are actually doing, for it is precisely this humanistic tradition and its accomplishments that all their intellectual energies are mobilized to “deconstruct”—which is to say, destroy. They may, perforce, still feel themselves obliged—as Professor Alpers does in her study of Rembrandt—to lavish attention upon the achievements which this tradition has elevated to a position of the highest esteem; but if so, it is only for the purpose of nullifying that esteem and placing those accomplishments in question.
It needs to be emphasized that there is much more involved in this phenomenon than a mere revision of received opinion. The greatest scholarship, like the greatest criticism, has always had a revisionist effect upon our thinking, for new research and new ideas in any field of study are bound sooner or later to dislodge established beliefs, topple entrenched intellectual authority, and introduce new interpretations and judgments. It is one of the purposes of new knowledge, after all, to alter our understanding, and it is all the more to be welcomed when it puts us more deeply in touch with the spirit as well as the substance of the objects of our study.
The academic projects I speak of, however, are different in purpose and in spirit from the scholarship and criticism of the past. It is the unmistakable goal of this new learning (as I suppose it must be called) not to bring us a deeper appreciation of the achievements of the past but, on the contrary, to discredit them in some fundamental way and thereby render the whole idea of achievement—in art or in anything else having to do with aesthetic or moral distinction—highly suspect if not indeed completely fraudulent.
Projects of this kind may take a variety of forms—or, as they say in the academy, may employ a variety of methodologies—but fundamental to all of them is the attempt to make the study of art a branch of the social sciences. By effecting this change of intellectual venue, these scholars hope (as they see it) to demystify their subject, strip it of its claims to any sort of aesthetic or spiritual achievement, and thus reduce it to a level where it is no longer to be differentiated from any other form of material culture. The very idea that a work of art may be thought to transcend the material conditions of its creation is an anathema to this new learning, which is rigidly deterministic in its entire outlook on art and life. The particular mode of determinism deemed most appropriate to the subject under study will vary, of course, according to the special ideological goals to which the study is tethered. The feminists and “gender” specialists will naturally favor a purely biological determinism; the Marxists (of whatever stripe) will similarly favor a purely economic or “class” determinism; and so on, as the emergence of sundry hybrid or crossover ideologies prompts the creation of ever new methodological instruments. But the fundamental goal remains the same: art must be categorically removed from the realm of aesthetics and placed firmly in a realm where the only legitimate questions are those that can be asked about the material—which is to say, the political and economic—conditions of its production.
In the field of art history, this movement—in which Professor Alpers plays a major role—now commands the greatest academic prestige and the greatest academic patronage. Books by its leading practitioners and their many acolytes flow from the presses—especially the university presses—in ever greater numbers, and academic appointments are governed by its followers with a degree of control that old-time union leaders would have every reason to envy. The movement’s hegemony—to borrow the atrocious term that is so often on the lips of its representatives—is becoming so nearly complete that newcomers to the field can no longer hope to have much of a career in art history if they are so rash as to register their dissent from its fundamental premises. Young art historians—and many who are no longer young—now face the choice of joining the herd or seeking employment elsewhere (meaning, of course, outside the academy). Under the circumstances, it is no exaggeration at all to speak of a catastrophe.
It is one of Professor Alpers’s distinctions as a writer to make this fateful turn in the outlook of art history—and indeed, in the whole notion of what art is—sound at times as if it were a weighty and even disinterested enterprise. Less obviously strident than many of her political colleagues and often more diligent in her research, she is remarkably adept at mimicking the tone of the old-style scholar when it serves her purpose, and thus at giving us the impression—at first glance, anyway—that there is nothing of the vulgar ideologue to be found in her arduous historical labors. The learned references accumulate with the requisite density, and there is even a show of civility (of a sort) toward one or another of her illustrious predecessors. Writing, for example, about Julius Held’s assertion that Rembrandt’s is “the work of a man who never compromised, who never permitted himself to be burdened with a chain of honor, and fiercely maintained both the integrity of his art and his freedom as a man,” Professor Alpers observes (characteristically) that “this is not wrong, but the terms which are brought together here are unexamined.” What she means is that they are not sufficiently political, and she then hastens to apply her own, more explicitly political terms to the question at issue here, which is Rembrandt’s “individualism” and which is said in her account, not surprisingly, to be “a function of the economic system in which he lived.”
Rembrandt’s Enterprise is not a long book. The text consists of only 122 pages divided into four chapters, and there are 32 pages of notes. But it sometimes reads like a long book while one is trying—especially in the first three chapters—to figure out exactly where it is going and to what purpose. The observation I have quoted about Rembrandt’s individualism, for instance, does not turn up until page 114, in Chapter IV, which is entitled “Freedom, Art, and Money”; and by that time, of course, we know where we stand—or rather, where Professor Alpers has been standing from the beginning. (The reference to Rembrandt as a man who “loved only three things: his freedom, art, and money,” comes from J. B. Descamps’s La Vie des Peintres Flamandes, Allemands et Hollandois, published in Paris in the eighteenth century.) But in the first three chapters of Rembrandt’s Enterprise, though they are not without some interesting observations on the life of art in Rembrandt’s time and on his own working methods, the gravamen of the argument is often elusive. As one makes one’s way through the twists and turns of these first three chapters, one more and more has the sense of an indictment being drawn up, and while there is never any question in one’s mind that the culprit—namely Rembrandt—will be found guilty, the crime with which he is to be charged nonetheless remains obscure for pages at a time. It is only in Chapter IV that it is openly stated. Interestingly, it was this Chapter IV, which contains the substance of Professor Alpers’s political charge, that was omitted from the Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr. Which leads one to wonder what it was that the students in the audience at Bryn Mawr understood Professor Alpers to be talking about.
It must be said, too, that as a writer Professor Alpers has an extremely irritating habit of setting out to make a point, or at least of inducing the illusion that a point is about to be established by means of all the learned references that are set before us with such a showy display of erudition, and then, without the point ever really being made, of looking back on what she has been saying as if an irrefutable conclusion had been reached. This rhetorical strategy, if it can be called that, has the effect of rendering a good deal of the scholarship in the book either completely redundant or simply pedantic. Certainly much of it, though not without interest, proves to be irrelevant to her principal theme. But as we don’t know for certain what the principal theme is until we get to that crucial fourth chapter, we are left to savor the erudition for its own sake—which is harmless, I suppose, even though it suggests that Professor Alpers is not primarily a thinker at all but a pedant who is dependent upon ideology for the substance of whatever thought she wishes to convey. It is, in any case, only when she comes to make an ideological point that her writing acquires an unmistakable clarity.
What, then, is the charge that Professor Alpers is so concerned to make in this book? What, in fact, is Rembrandt’s “enterprise” claimed to have been?
The very word Enterprise in the book’s title alerts us, of course, to the fact that we are to regard Rembrandt as first and foremost an entrepreneur, and the book’s subtitle, The Studio and the Market, underscores the extent to which we are being invited on this occasion to consider Rembrandt’s art primarily as a business. But there is more to Professor Alpers’s charge than a mere description of the artist’s role in marketing his pictures. She would certainly not want to be seen as one of those “vulgar” Marxists who see nothing in an artist’s work but its economic function—although, in fact, when one has penetrated Professor Alpers’s new-style academic jargon (Rembrandt’s studio is described as “enabling,” etc.) and waded through the 258 footnotes, it is quite apparent that her argument turns out to be far more dependent upon such crude Marxist formulations than she could ever bring herself to acknowledge.
It is in the very last paragraph of Chapter III that Professor Alpers gives us a first, brief, tantalizing glimpse of the case she means to bring against the artist she is writing about. (How frustrating it must have been for the Bryn Mawr audience to have the Mary Flexner Lectures conclude on a note that, in truth, marks their real beginning!) Writing in this chapter about The Jewish Bride, long considered one of Rembrandt’s greatest works, she takes up the matter of the “universality” that has been traditionally attributed to so many of the artist’s greatest works, and sets about the task of deconstructing the term. It isn’t a true universality that can be claimed for The Jewish Bride, according to Professor Alpers, but only an “effect of universality” (her emphasis), and she then explains how this artificial “effect” is achieved:
He makes a portrait more than a portrait by elevating the genre. [This, by the way, is not said in admiration.] But this effect of universality is achieved by masking or hiding the economic and social basis of the transaction between the painter and his sitters.
The suggestion of “individuality” in Rembrandt’s subjects is likewise said to be something “imposed on them” by the “master’s domination” of them. “One might say,” she writes, “that rather than serving [his patrons], Rembrandt exercises his authority over them,” and since we all know that for writers like Professor Alpers authority is always to be considered a very bad thing, this too figures in the indictment. Thus she concludes Chapter III with the following analysis:
The nineteenth century credited Rembrandt with being uniquely in touch with something true about the individual human state. I would put it differently. It was something stranger and more unsettling. Rembrandt was not the discoverer, but one of the inventors of that individual state. And so his late works became a touchstone for what western culture, from his day until our own, has taken as the irreducible uniqueness of the individual.1
When we turn to Chapter IV of Rembrandt’s Enterprise, we are bluntly informed that Rembrandt was “a man of the market,” and this is intended to mean something more than the mere fact that he sold his paintings for money. And it is not meant to mean anything good, of course. The fact that Rembrandt achieved both a personal and artistic freedom by means of the market is taken by Professor Alpers to be crucial to the indictment she draws up against him.
He had a “propensity to truck, barter and exchange,” in Adam Smith’s famous phrase [writes Professor Alpers], and to make works suitable to such transactions. As a master in the studio he made himself a free individual, not beholden to patrons. But he was beholden instead to the market—or more specifically to the identification that he made between two representations of value, art and money.
In Professor Alpers’s view, the market economy provided Rembrandt with his “models or definitions of self and art,” and the market itself is said to have marked “the establishment of a system of representation.” (It is at this point in the argument that Professor Alpers effects a marriage of sorts between the crude Marxist formulations that lie at the heart of her analysis and the familiar twaddle of poststructuralist academic jargon.) Since it was from the market that Rembrandt is alleged to have derived his “models or definitions of self and art,” and the market was itself “a system of representation,” it is no longer a mystery as to where Professor Alpers’s argument is going. “Rembrandt was also a maker of representations,” she writes, “hence the appropriateness of his making art into a commodity to be exchanged in a marketplace so perceived.” And then, just in case we are in danger of missing the point, she writes: “One can say of this artist what Adam Smith said of mankind, ‘Every man thus lives by exchanging or becomes in some measure a merchant.’” The next paragraph begins: “Let us consider Rembrandt’s paintings as commodities . . .”
But what was it that Rembrandt was actually selling in the market—besides his paintings, that is? He was selling what Professor Alpers is fond of calling “the individuality ‘effect,’” and this is said to be “a function of the economic system in which [Rembrandt] lived and in which he played such an active part.” There then follows this remarkable passage:
It was in Rembrandt’s time that the individual came to be defined in what were then new, economic terms. Those familiar words from the American declaration of human rights, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” are a reworking of Locke’s “life, liberty and estate” which constituted his definition of property: “By Property I must be understood . . . to mean that Property which Men have in their Persons as well as Goods.” On this view, to be an individual is defined by the right to property. And the most essential property right of each man, and hence the grounding of this notion of the individual, curious though it might sound put in this form, is the right to property in one’s own person. Freedom, then, is defined as proprietorship in and of one’s own person and capacities. It is the proprietorial quality of this notion of the individual to which I wish to call attention. It was Rembrandt who made this the center of his art—the center, even, of Art.
In reading this passage, it is important to understand—it does, admittedly, take some effort—that Professor Alpers is not lavishing any praise on either Rembrandt or liberty or the concept of the individual. Far from it. She is concerned to unmask the true nature of Rembrandt’s enterprise. And what was that? Well, he stands charged with having commodified himself by virtue of having painted and marketed his own self-portraits. On page 118 we are finally given Professor Alpers’s definitive judgment on the great self-portraits: “Rembrandt was an entrepreneur of the self.”
All through the reading and rereading of this last, ghastly chapter of Rembrandt’s Enterprise, I was overcome with a sense of having read it, or something very like it, before. It is a feeling one often has in reading the “new” art historians, and the new literary scholars, too. No matter what their subject, and no matter how “original” their treatment of it, there is a political scenario that tends to repeat itself over and over again, endlessly striking the same notes and leading to the same conclusions. In the case of Rembrandt’s Enterprise, however, it wasn’t of another art historian that (I came to realize) I was being reminded. It was of that eminent Marxist literary theorist and academic, Professor Fredric Jameson. At the risk of depressing the readers of this article even more than I already have, I want to quote the relevant passage from Professor Jameson’s essay on “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”—which, as a matter of fact, I have quoted once before in The New Criterion2 but which I must return to once again because it explains so much about the nature of Professor Alpers’s enterprise.
The great modernisms [Professor Jameson wrote] were . . . predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body. But this means that the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style.
Yet today [we] . . . are all exploring the notion that that kind of individualism and personal identity is a thing of the past; that the old individual or individualist subject is “dead”; and that one might even describe the concept of the unique individual and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideological. There are in fact two positions on all this, one of which is more radical than the other. The first one is content to say: yes, once upon a time, in the classic age of competitive capitalism, in the heyday of the nuclear family and the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic social class, there was such a thing as individualism, as individual subjects. But today, in the age of corporate capitalism, of the so-called organization man, of bureaucracies in business as well as in the state, of demographic explosion—today, that older bourgeois individual subject no longer exists.
Then there is a second position, the more radical of the two, what one might call the poststructuralist position. It adds: not only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth; it never really existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of that type. Rather, this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification which sought to persuade people that they “had” individual subjects and possessed this unique personal identity.
Professor Alpers does not tell us which of these “positions” she is espousing in Rembrandt’s Enterprise. I suspect it is the first—but then it hardly matters. The point is, it is this political interpretation of the concept of the individual and of Rembrandt’s role in fostering it that Rembrandt’s Enterprise is really about. This, anyway, is its manifest subject. But I think the book is also to be taken as a political allegory about the relation of art to life in our time as well. Indeed, the more one thinks about Rembrandt’s Enterprise, the more Professor Alpers’s “Rembrandt” comes to resemble an artist like Andy Warhol, the most successful “entrepreneur of the self ” in the art of our own era. Rembrandt as Warhol: such is the fate of even the greatest art when it is so categorically removed from the realm of aesthetics and made to do duty as just another counter in the dialectic of material culture. Such, too, is the dismal fate of art history when the study of art is no longer its primary concern.
[1988]
Footnotes
1. One notes with interest the lower-case “w” in this reference to “western” culture. Are we to take this as Professor Alpers’s contribution to the current debate over the place to be accorded to courses in Western civilization in the liberal arts curriculum? It would seem so.
2. See “Modernism and Its Enemies” in The New Criterion, March 1986.