Art and historical economics

We try to place a pleasant weekend in context.

The weekend before last our consultants attended the annual Alexandria Art Fair, in which several blocks of King Street are closed to traffic and given over to booths displaying the various products of artists.  There are painters, of course, of myriad types and tendencies; some sculptors; more jewelry-makers than we remember in previous years; photographers, digital and otherwise; workers in many media.  The weather was fine, a boon to the artists (cold and rain discourages visitors, even if it does no actual damage to the art).  Those we talked to were in good spirits, over and above the animation one normally sees in someone discoursing on their passion.

Our tutoring consultant was trying to place the event within the context of beginning Economics, which (as we’ve noted) he has studied this past summer in order to help his students.  Thinking in terms of the history of Europe, though the model is applicable much more generally, an annual fair such as this is an early Medieval development.  Just about all communities in the three-digit years were self-sufficient.  Food and other necessities were produced and consumed within walking distance.  The village blacksmith, cooper, carpenter or other artisan took care of what the individual farm did not make itself.  It was only when society on the larger scale became more stable that people could think of traveling a long distance to sell things for which there wasn’t sufficient market locally, and the glass-blower, ribbon-maker and weaver of fine fabrics took to the road.  Here we are, then: traveling artists looking for non-local buyers.

What is the next economic step?  Well, with the rise of cities there had to be a more permanent market even for necessities, since bourgeois didn’t have the space or time to keep cows or grow wheat.  And there are indeed permanent art markets in Alexandria, notably at the Torpedo Factory, and nearby in DC.  Indeed, it’s a good bet that the artists on King Street last weekend each has a web page from which even a distant buyer can choose objects, quite a modern economic development.  In terms of historical economics, the Art Fair is clearly anachronistic, a throwback to less developed times.

But, as any economist will tell you, the broad picture of a beginning economics text is highly simplified.  It assumes that soybeans are always and everywhere soybeans, and even that fine silks are all interchangeable. But art is individual.  What one artists produces is different from another; even the three painters at the Art Fair doing more or less traditional still-lifes could not be mistaken for each other.

And the images on a computer screen could not really do justice to the actual paintings.  There remains the need for a physical market in goods that have to be experienced, felt, held, seen in person in order to be properly judged.

As well as for the things you were not looking for. . .