The recent sale of an invisible statue for £13,000 is symptomatic of the thoroughgoing financialization of our economy. Investors have become ever more obsessed with the symbols of economic reality and less concerned with underlying economic facts. Essay
What we refer to as Hellenization or Romanization in the ancient world may well be the first examples of the phenomenon we now call globalization. Essay
Wood seeks to produce the paradox of an American Gothic, to combine the best of the New and the Old Worlds--a synthesis he found adumbrated in the quaint house that inspired the painting and led to its name. Essay
Wagner, for all his faults, his reprehensible behavior, and his contemptible beliefs, made a unique contribution to the world of music and expanded our awareness of the range of the human soul’s possibilities. Essay
The seemingly innocuous occasion of commemorating the 500th anniversary of the death of the great painter Hieronymus Bosch touched off a battle of museums. Essay
Vermeer did not acquire his reputation as one of the great masters until the second half of the 19th century, when the Romantic idea of genius had triumphed. Essay
The art market is the best understood form of commercial artistic creation. The importance of the studio system. Case studies include Michelangelo and Rubens. Answer to the riddle: “When is a Rembrandt not a Rembrandt?” Lecture 3
Modernist hostility to the marketplace. The return to patronage and the turn to the academy and government funding. Case studies include Ezra Pound and James Joyce, with some attention to modernist painting and music. Lecture 6
