Journal of Cultural Economics 22: 4347, 1998. 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Classic Article reprint series

Roger Fry: Art and Commerce

Introduction
CRAUFURD D. GOODWIN
Duke University, Department of Economics, Durhan, North Carolina 277080097, U.S.A.

Roger Fry (18661934) was at various times art critic, historian, painter, journalist, aesthetician, museum curator, advisor to government, and entrepreneur in the art world as gallery operator, consultant to collectors and modest speculator (Spalding, 1980 and Woolf [1940], 1976). He is perhaps remembered best as organizer of the two Postimpressionist art exhibitions in London in 1910 and 1912 that introduced Cezanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, Picasso, and other radical painters to the English speaking world, as the proprietor of the Omega Workshops (19131919), and as a core member of the Bloomsbury Group, that informal community of artists and intellectuals that included, among others, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes. Fry was a remarkable polymath, a modern Renaissance man. He was trained as a scientist and received a double rst in natural sciences at Cambridge. But he spent his career in the arts. He had insatiable curiosity, and he could not resist plunging into with gusto, and writing condently about, any subject that caught his fancy in the arts, humanities, applied science, architecture, and the social and behavioral sciences from the poems of Mallerm to the psychoanalysis of Freud. He maintained ties with Cambridge over his lifetime but he was never a conventional academic. Nor did he write for a scholarly audience. His more than 650 publicaitons are mainly short articles and pamphlets written rather hastily and sometimes republished in collections (Laing, 1979). These must be assembled and organized topically by the reader to gain a sense of Frys overall position on any subject. When this is done, however, it can be seen that often Frys work is systematic and lled with insights that are relevant still to modern theory and practice. Since most of Frys career was involved with one part or another of the art market it is not surprising that he wrote extensively about it. He seems to have had little contact with the professional economics of his time beyond an acquaintance perhaps with Mills Principles, the works of Ruskin on political economy,

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and whatever he may have picked up from his close acquaintance with Keynes. Frys writings on the art market reveal his intimate acquaintance with details of market phenomena and with nuances of events that would have been lost on less sophisticated observers. Fry was distinctive among his Bloomsbury friends for applying the methods of science as he understood them to all aspects of life, including the arts and humanities. He searched for generalizations that could be used to explain facts that intrigued him. But he was always careful to employ theory as hypothetical only and subject to test and modication on the evidence. He was fascinated by the very nature of science, and he speculated that it might be closely akin to the creative arts as part of the imaginative life of human beings, following disciplinary rules, by and large, but at the same time advancing in ways that could not be fully understood. Frys reections on the art market began in the 1890s and continued until his death in 1934. Understandably he began his explorations on the supply side where he was himself prominently invloved. What, he asked, made artists create art? Here he took inspiration from Sir Joshua Reynolds Discourses to the Royal Academy which he introduced in a new edition in 1905 (Fry, 1905). Reynolds suggested that principles of order and reason as against caprice and accident should be discoverable to explain the creative imagination. Frys own rst attempt to illuminate these principles of order and reason was An Essay in Aesthetics (1909), reprinted in his collection of essays Vision and Design (Fry, 1920) and probably his best known work. There, and in subsequent writings, Fry suggested that human experience could be divided into two parts: the actual life where biological and instinctive needs and responses prevailed, and an imaginative life where different stimuli operated, notably the love of truth and beauty. The motivation that drove artists on, and the pleasure that they gave to themselves and others, seemed to Fry to be fundamentally different from the utility and disutility that lay beyond calculations and decisions made in labor and consumer goods markets. Fry took from Leo Tolstoy the idea that art is not about the production and exchange of goods that yield utility but about the communication of emotion (Tolstoy [1896], 1960). The motivating force was not pecuniary but was a mysterious aesthetic impulse somewhat akin to, and perhaps derived from, Thorstein Veblens instinct of workmanship (Veblen [1899], 1979). In Frys own terms an artist rst experienced a vision, and then transformed this vision into a design that was an effective vehicle for the communication of aesthetic emotion. He suggested rst, following the Harvard aesthetician Denman Ross, that design, embodying proper attention to both order and variety, was more important than the content of a work of art in determining its effectiveness at communication. Later he accepted the need for a proper balance between form and content. Fry maintained that in any society at any one time there are few artists with the innate capacity to communicate aesthetic emotion successfully and with the impulse to do so. Society had the responsibility to itself to make certain that these

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few were adequately nourished and encouraged so that thereby they could enrich the vital imaginative life of the people. This led him naturally from the supply side to the demand side of the market, so as to discover who in a modern market economy is likely to engage in the consumption of art. Fry concluded that the demand for art, in contrast to the biologically-driven demands for goods of the actual life, is socially driven. Through history the most important demands had come from the Church. Then, as the role of religion in the imaginative life of mankind declined, monarchical and aristocratic patrons emerged as replacements on the demand side. By the nineteenth century, however, both the Church and the aristocracy were being displaced by wealthy merchants and manufacturers in the art market. Reecting on the signicance of this shift, Fry was led to publish the pamphlet that is reprinted here. In it, following Thorstein Veblen, with whose work he had presumably become familiar during his residence in New York (19051907), he makes a distinction between what really is the market for art, and what most people think of as the market for art but which he calls the market for opifacts, dened as all objects not for direct use but for the gratication of those special feelings and desires, those various forms of ostentation. Works of art are only a subset of the opifacts produced in any society at any time but the proportion of art to opifacts helps to determine the quality of a civilization. Correspondingly the proportion of artists among the makers of opifacts (the opicers) is a critical determinant of human progress. The relations between artists and the larger community of opicers, most of whom were responding only to demands for goods that would demonstrate conspicuous consumption, were often tense. Yet, Fry observed, deceased artists of great distinction were frequently claimed by opicers as their own and canonized. Living artists were seldom celebrated in this way. Beginning with Art and Commerce, published by his friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press (Fry, 1926a), Fry began an extended exploration of the likely consequences of advanced industrial development for the arts. Mass production, he concluded, was likely to have negative effects, because of the discouragement to spontaneity and the high costs of design changes that put designers out of work. The one compensating benet from industrialization for artists that he could discern came from their employment in the creation of advertising materials. With the Church, the aristocracy, and the modern corporation largely irrelevant in the market for genuine art, Fry asked who remained. In a number of publications written around the same time as Art and Commerce, some of which were republished in his collection entitled Transformations (Fry, 1926) he explored this question in some detail. Any demand for art from the state he found to be generally unsatisfactory because government agencies were driven to action by the herd of voters, most of whom had execrable taste. All that remained on the demand side, then, was the middle class which for analytical purposes he divided into three categories: the snobbists who are driven entirely by fashion, men of culture who purchase only works of dead artists certied by scholars to be of high quality,

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and true aesthetes responding to the aesthetic message carried by the work of art. Although the middle-class aesthete was in many places a threatened species, Fry credited it still with providing the necessary impetus for the outpouring of Impressionist and Postimpressionist art in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Frys recommendations for public policy in the art market were modest. He was doubtful of the contributions that public education or museums could make either to the demand or the supply side of the art market. He was resolutely opposed to direct public subsidies to artists on the ground that government would usually pick the wrong ones. Frys most condent recommendation was for improvement in competition in the art market. He insisted upon elimination of corruption and conspiracy in restraint of trade, and he held out high hopes for achieving these goals from the efforts of fearless investigatory art critics such as himself. He favored experimentation with different kinds of economic units for the production and sale of art so as to provide secure employment for artists while recognizing their particular characteristics and human foibles. His own Omega Workshops was a bold experiment of this kind that offered a guaranteed minimum income to participants (Collins, 1983). It required anonymity among the artists so that rents that might accrue could be shared among the entire community and so that artists who came suddenly into fashion would not be corrupted by fame and fortune. Frys observations of the fate of the artist in the new Soviet state (Fry, 1920) only strengthened his conviction that hope for the artist over the long run lay in a democracy with a competitive market economy and a broadly educated and aesthetically-sensitive middle class able to sustain the market demand for art. His own efforts to move British society in this direction included a prominent role with John Maynard Keynes and others in the Contemporary Art Society, which aimed to get ne art widely distributed among the citizenry, and close association with Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the Hogarth Press, an attempt to restore aesthetic values to a publishing industry that seemed to have succumbed almost entirely to mass production. The pamphlet Art and Commerce which follows was not Frys crowning work on the art market. There is no such work. He had no grand research program on this topic in which this could be seen even as a building block. He wrote when he felt like it, inspired by his reading, his conversations, events in his life, and questions he wanted answered. This work, published by his friends the Woolfs, was originally a lecture on posters, which he perceived as an artistic by-product of advertising in a market economy. This essay is more carefully constructed than some of his writings, but note still the mistake in the title of Veblens great work. At least fty of Frys writings contain valuable comment on economic topics. A selection of these works, with an interpretation, will be published later this year by the University of Michigan Press under the title Art and the Market: Roger Fry on the Commerce in Art .

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References
Collins, Judith (1983) The Omega Workshops. Secker and Warburg, London. Fry, Roger (1905) Discourses Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy by Sir Joshua Reynolds, with Introduction and Notes by Roger Fry. Seeley and Co., London. Fry, Roger (1920) Bolshevik Art. Athenaeum (13 August): 216217. Fry, Roger ([1920] 1956) Vision and Design. Meridian, New York. Fry, Roger (1926) Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art. Chatto and Windus, London. Fry, Roger (1926a) Art and Commerce. Hogarth Press, London. Laing, Donald A. (1979) Roger Fry: An Annotated Bibliography of his Published Writings. Garland, New York. Rosenbaum, S. P. (1964) Edwardian Bloomsbury. St Martins Press, New York. Spalding, Frances (1980) Roger Fry: Art and Life. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. Tolstoy, Leo N. ([1896] 1960) What is Art? Liberal Arts Press, Macmillan, New York. Veblen, Thorstein ([1899] 1979) Theory of the Leisure Class. Penguin Books, New York. Woolf, Virginia ([1940] 1976) Robert Fry: A Biography, Harvest edition. Harcourt Brace, New York.