16 - Peter Greenaway’s Artist-Entrepreneurs

Summary

Abstract

This chapter considers the relationship between art, commerce, and artistic entrepreneurship in film through the case of Peter Greenaway's “Dutch Masters” films Nightwatching (2007) and Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012). Drawing on theoretical work on affective labor, precarity, and entrepreneurial subjectivity in the new creative industries – and more broadly in contemporary public spheres, – it analyzes the eponymous character of Goltzius and the Pelican Company as a “virtuoso” figure whose performance of himself in the cultural marketplace holds an ineradicably political potential, related to his deployment of theatricality and language. In the context of Greenaway's cinema, this leads to reflection on how Goltzius encodes its engagement with artistic entrepreneurship in what is here called an aesthetic of “virtuosic remediation.”

Keywords: Peter Greenaway, affective labor, creative entrepreneurship, remediation, virtuosity

This chapter considers the relationship between art, commerce, and creative labor in the cultural marketplace, as depicted in Peter Greenaway's “Dutch Masters” films Nightwatching (2007) and Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), and secondarily in the spin-off mockumentary Rembrandt's J’Accuse (2008). I pursue this inquiry in the context of a broader interest in how Greenaway's films engage with the (artistic and political) public sphere, for a historical imaginary of publicness is present in many of his features and inflects how themes of democracy and public freedom, artisthood and creative entrepreneurship are taken up and interrelated. In one perspective, the films in the “Dutch Masters” series would seem to be thematically continuous with earlier features in Greenaway's oeuvre, most notably The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), in that they foreground the contractual element that binds artist-entrepreneurs to structures of power and patronage in which they might get enmeshed and lose (artistic) control. In what follows, however, it will be argued that the “Dutch Masters” films also form a new departure as they invite analysis of the pressures placed on subjectivity when the imperative to “be creative” is generalized to extend from artistic or aesthetic labor to immaterial and affective labor in a large, encompassing sense. The point is to show how, in so doing, the films probe the ways in which “art” and “business” slide into each other in the present cultural juncture.