Arts in Eighteenth-Century France

My research examines how economic concepts diffused beyond debates about the economy itself to shape discussions about the arts in eighteenth-century France. In an age not yet divided by academic disciplines, lively arguments about free trade, state intervention, and the debt crisis in pre-Revolutionary France did not remain contained in one sphere of the intellectual world. The same newspapers and writers who reported on the latest pamphlets about the grain trade also weighed the virtues of dueling opera composers and discussed exhibitions of paintings. In this project, I analyze how Enlightenment-era writers drew on economic concepts in discussing the arts, focusing on the changing meanings of the concept of ‘competition’. The France-Stanford Visiting Junior Scholar Fellowship will allow me to work in archives in Paris, where I will investigate legal battles in which arts institutions sought to defend their monopoly privileges against new competitors whose existence was often justified with arguments from the free trade debates. This will serve as my starting point for a broader interdisciplinary history of discourses of competition in the arts, a subject with continuing relevance for the present, as the arts and humanities are increasingly pressed to explain their relevance in economic terms.