The Artist in the Modern World: The Conflict Between Market and Self-Expression

Rating:
Summary: A Must Read for the serious artist, curator, or collector.
Review: This book is not a casual read: it compliments the reader with painstaking detail and assumes a reasonable level of background knowledge about art and art history. That said, be prepared to have your eyes opened. Batschmann lays out how the decline of court patronage for visual artists made the process of legitimization of new art a conundrum which continues to the present day.
The author uses a chronological structure to point out how the exhibition space has become central to modern art. He addresses complex issues: How much involvement with "marketing" an artist may appear to have with delegitimizing the work in the public's opinion? Is there competition between the artists who make our cultural products and the curators who legitimize them by including or excluding them from shows? (definitely, says Batchmann, and the curators are winning...) What is the importance of installation art?
I am not an academic; and am not qualified to judge the depth or quality of the author's research. But as a visual artist whose work is concerned with the book and language, I read a lot. I rank this book with Sigfried Gideon's "Mechanization Takes Command" and Lewis Mumford's "Technics and Civilization" as being one of the most invigorating works of cultural analysis I have read.