Introduction

The consumption bf culture: image, object, text

bbo-tho

: Ann Bermingham

3 4
(995-

&.

&at+

'

In a still life painting from the seventeenth century, the Dutch artist Willrm Kalf (161G93) depicts a sumptuous array of precious objects: a Persian carpet covering a marble-topped table; a Ming porcelain bowl; a Venetian glass flagon; a gold-worked nautilus cup; a silver tray and eating utensils (Plate 1.1). Even the foodstulTs - sugar, wine, a half-peeled lemon - a r e luxuries, items imported from abroad or cultivated in hothouses. Should we be tempted to suppose that "consumer society" is a recent phenomenon of the late twentieth, century, the opulence of KalPs pronkslilleuen should give us pause. Such images suggest that the prevailing idea that consumer society is a function of late capitalism (Debord 1967; Jameson 1991) ignores the substantial visual evidence we have from earlier periods that consumption, even conspicuous consumption, has a longrr and more complex history. O u r data comes not only from paintings (and indeed we should be wary of interpreting these too literally) but from the consumer objects themselves that fill our museums, antique shops, and attics and are reassembled in m u s i t i m p e r i 6 d T o o F a n d in "living history" environments such as nial Williamsburg. I n the seventeenth century still life paintings like Kalf's were common household objects in the Netherlands. They could be bought for as little as one or two guilders or as much as six or seven (Schama 1988: 319). Dutch still life paintings are not only reflections of wealth but reflections on wealth by a society transformed through a rising tidc of capital. They reminded their owners of the transitory nature of earthly pleasures and the vanity of their own newly acquired riches. Yet they did so in a visual language that was itself a lour de force of sensuosity and highly polished craftsmanship, thus intensifying the appeal of the very objects they warned against (Schama 1993: 484-5). I n eighteenth-century France Netherlandish art was esteemed and Dutch and Flemish still lifes, portraits, and landscapes were collected. This activity of buying and selling paintings is the subject of a signboard painted by Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) for the shop of his friend, thc art dealer Edme-Fransois Gersaint (Plate 1.2). The painting was one of Watteau's last works, begun six or seven months before his death in