and stifles development. Freeing the artist from any need to please the
public makes his art more intellectual and less sensual, which for
Nerdrum is a formula for emotional sterility in painting. Over the years,
Nerdrum has come to view the fact that he was rejected by the modern
art establishment as a blessing in disguise. The fact that he seldom
received financial support or other forms of encouragement from the
institutional world of modern art forced him actually to become more
independent in his artistic vision. Fortunately for Nerdrum, he could
make an end run around the modern art establishment and appeal
directly to the commercial public for financial support, especially in the
United States, where the private market for art flourishes.^21 As we have
seen, Nerdrum has been extremely successful commercially, and the
Internet in particular has helped him—or at least his dealers—to make
contact with a broader audience—and market—for his art.
Partisans of modernism might charge that Nerdrum’s attack on the
ideal of the autonomy of art is simply a rationalization for his rank com-
mercialism. But they would be hypocrites to do so. Nerdrum in fact
overstates the isolationism of modernist art and underrates its own com-
mercialism. To be sure, modern artists have been more than willing to
accept all sorts of government funding. But they have been willing to
accept funding from all the traditional sources as well. As a number of
critics have shown, modern artists have even rediscovered or reinvented
patronage as a way of funding themselves, as the mere mention of the
name Peggy Guggenheim is enough to remind us.^22 And modern artists
have found a remarkable variety of ways to market their art commer-
cially. Contrary to what Nerdrum suggests, modernists have in particu-
lar pioneered new forms of the mechanical reproduction of their art
(consider, for example, Picasso’s extremely lucrative foray into the mar-
ket for ceramics—evidently, Picasso never met a form of mechanical
reproduction of art he didn’t like, and the same is even truer of Salvador
Dalí).^23
Modern art has in fact become a big business, and fortunes have
been made by many painters who professed to despise commerce in true
Bohemian fashion. Picasso died a billionaire—perhaps the wealthiest
artist who ever lived—leaving behind a financial empire and virtually a
brand name to his heirs. In economic terms, Nerdrum has been merely
following in the footsteps of his modernist predecessors. Without the
commercial infrastructure of auction houses, galleries, and dealers they
helped to put in place, Nerdrum would not have had the means to mount
his challenge to modernism. Modernists can level many charges against
him, but if they condemn him for commercially exploiting the art mar-20 Paul A. Cantor