Preliminary Programme

Wed 11 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 12 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.00 - 18.30

Fri 13 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 14 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 11 April 2012 8.30 - 10.30
J-1 MAT08 Material Culture and Social Identities
Main Building: G466
Network: Material and Consumer Culture Chair: Harm Nijboer
Organizers: - Discussants: -
Cecilia Bjorken-Nyberg : "My Home is My Factory": Lady Pianists and Working-Class Discipline
The picture of the bourgeois woman seated at the piano is a familiar one. It has been reproduced in countless paintings, photographs and fictional accounts. Piano playing was one of the accomplishments to be displayed by the nineteenth-century young lady in the private sphere. Today we tend to regard this ... (Show more)
The picture of the bourgeois woman seated at the piano is a familiar one. It has been reproduced in countless paintings, photographs and fictional accounts. Piano playing was one of the accomplishments to be displayed by the nineteenth-century young lady in the private sphere. Today we tend to regard this woman as a decorative relic, who was engaged in an unsystematic leisure activity, victimised by lacking career opportunities and far removed from the realities of industrial life in mid-nineteenth-century England. In fact, her pleasant music-making could be considered the antithesis of factory discipline, according to which time was strictly regulated by the demands of making a profit. During long working hours in the factory, the mechanistic principle disciplined the body; the movement of hands and legs, for instance, was subject to surveillance. As late as the early twentieth century, Havelock Ellis described how foremen were encouraged to monitor young women seated at sewing machines in order to prevent sexual excitement as a result of the wrong positioning of their legs. In comparison, solitary music-making in a secluded home appears to be the very epitome of harmony and freedom.

However, I argue that the similarities between female factory workers and amateur lady pianists were greater than our construction of the Victorian period may lead us to believe. Factory discipline was implemented in bourgeois homes all over England. The standard piano practise for young women restricted physical freedom to such an extent that, like factory workers, they were fettered to a machine, the pianoforte. This mechanisation of music was established through the musical institution of the conservatory. Due to the emergence of conservatories all over Europe, the virtuoso became the norm for all pianists. The repertoire was standardised as was the recommended hours of practise. Thus, the distinction previously made between a professional pianist and an amateur disappeared.

In addition, the more sophisticated the pianoforte became, the more it turned into a machine that had to be controlled. More often than not, though, the woman was controlled by the machine. Hand gymnastics was introduced as one means of preparing the fingers for the machine-like activity of performing almost impossible pianistic feats without wasting any time. Thus engaged in the virtuoso factory at home, the lady pianist would have no time for such potentially subversive activities as day-dreaming. Ironically, not until piano playing was in actual fact mechanised due to the launching of the player piano, were women freed from their musical servitude. In 1901 they had access to 6,000 music rolls, which they could operate at their own liberty without previous practise. What is more, while doing so they were at leisure to make the music accompany their own thoughts and desires. (Show less)

Angela Jager : Cheap, Gaudy and Spectacular. The Mass Market for History Painting in the Dutch Golden Age
This paper will explore the consumption and production of popular seventeenth-century history painting at the lower end of the Amsterdam art market. It is a persistent misunderstanding that text-based paintings with subjects from the bible, mythology and history (history painting) in the Dutch Golden Age only appealed to the intellectual ... (Show more)
This paper will explore the consumption and production of popular seventeenth-century history painting at the lower end of the Amsterdam art market. It is a persistent misunderstanding that text-based paintings with subjects from the bible, mythology and history (history painting) in the Dutch Golden Age only appealed to the intellectual and wealthy elite. Seventeenth-century probate inventories show that there were numbers of painters and art-dealers that worked exclusively in the lower end of the Amsterdam art market with a supply of relatively cheap mass-produced history paintings. These paintings (‘works-by-the-dozen’ or produced ‘on the galley’, as they were called) have never been subjected to a study. An initial experiment demonstrates that the subjects portrayed in this popular segment are, compared to the high-quality end of the market, often spectacular, entertaining and violent. The painters working in this end of the art market did not follow and imitate the stylistic and iconographic trends the successful painters had introduced, but used a recognizable style and inventions of their own. What can the difference in preferences for subjects and styles tell us? And who owned these paintings: did all the buyers of these paintings belong to the lower or middle class, and if not, what does this mean? To answer these questions an art historical analysis of styles and subjects will be combined with a sociological analysis of consumer preferences. (Show less)

Elizabeth Kim : The Market Bubble and Julian Schnabel: A Case Study of the Structure of the 1980s Art Boom and Bust
The 1980s international contemporary art market is often characterized as a bubble. With the emergence of new types of paintings popular in the marketplace dubbed 'New-Expressionism,' and the institutionalization of contemporary art sales in auction houses, the prices for art escalated to peaks in the late 80s and the early ... (Show more)
The 1980s international contemporary art market is often characterized as a bubble. With the emergence of new types of paintings popular in the marketplace dubbed 'New-Expressionism,' and the institutionalization of contemporary art sales in auction houses, the prices for art escalated to peaks in the late 80s and the early 90s and crashed shortly thereafter. In this paper, the market for American artist Julian Schnabel's art will be used as a case study to analyze the social mechanisms behind the bubble. The focus of the research is mostly the New York art market, but it touches upon the market's international dimensions as well. The sudden rise and fall of esteem and prices will be examined using the sociological theories on institutional fads and collective behaviour of sociologist Joel Best, and by using economist Robert Shiller's theories of market bubbles. Further, the social relationships and the art world system structure will be explained using sociologist Olav Velthuis and Tamar Yogev's respective studies (2003 and 2010) on contemporary art markets. Using these theories, along with the basic assumption that there are two different systems of values operating within the arts as explained by Pierre Bourdieu, this research proposes that there were two overlapping stages to the bubble. First, there was a rise and fall of interest in Schnabel's art among art insiders, then of the same among the general public, which translated to a bubble in the auction market. Art criticisms, newspaper articles, exhibition and auction catalogues, and auction prices are used to understand the relationship between various social processes and the movement of prices in the late 20th century art market. (Show less)



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