 Oliver, thank you very much for coming here today and giving me an opportunity to talk to you about your book. The book, A Delicate Matter, is about French art of the 18th century, the period that in your own words fundamentally altered the relationship between art, time and value. The heart of this transformation is the concept of delicacy that is associated with both personal refinement and material instability. Could you please talk more about these ideas and other ideas of the book? Thank you, Nina, for reading the book and for inviting me to do this conversation. I think it helps to say a little bit about how I arrived at the topic of the book. You know, I'm an art historian but my undergraduate education was in studio art, primarily painting and printmaking, and that background still informs how I go about doing art historical research. Most of my research projects involve in some way artists, materials and techniques. And this project began about 10 years ago when I was struck by the prevalence of fragile and materially unstable works of art made by painters and sculptors in 18th century France. You can think here, for example, of pastel portraits, pastel is a notoriously fragile medium, vulnerable to touch and vibration or small scale terracotta sculpture, which artists often exploited to demonstrate their handling of very fine forms that were quite fragile to handle. So the question at the start of the project was really why these types of objects became popular in 18th century France. And in the course of my research, it became clear that the reason for artists making these works and for collectors buying them really has to do with a transformation in the art market and the emergence of a consumer culture within 18th century France. Now consumer culture supports the production of these fragile objects in a couple of ways. First off, a key factor is this idea of delicacy that you mentioned. Now through the 17th century, delicacy had been understood as a personal attribute, a sensitivity to finely made objects, finely made experiences. Delicacy was an attribute of the person. This was really important within 17th century court culture. So to be delicate was to be somebody who had a sensitivity to these subtle experiences. But the growth of consumer culture in the late 17th and early 18th centuries added this other form of delicacy in supporting the production of objects that materialized delicacy. So think about, for example, lace cravats or porcelain tea sets. And you actually see in the dictionary definitions of delicacy a transformation that occurs right around the beginning of the 18th century where the idea of delicacy as a personal quality, a kind of sensitivity now in the 18th century coexists with delicacy as this material quality, this fragility. And this was one way that the market supported the production of fragile objects. Now the other way that the emergence of consumer culture supported the creation of ephemeral commodities was this new temporality that we associate with fashion. So fashion prioritizes novelty and keeping up with what's the latest trend. And it incentivizes therefore the creation of objects not necessarily for their physical longevity. You have makers of luxury objects who are often sacrificing durability in the favor of making objects sometimes more cheaply and with less concern for their solidity. So consumer culture creates this tension in the idea of delicacy between on the one hand delicacy as this highly refined sensibility and then on the other hand delicacy as the debased low fragility of the flimsy commercial product. And that tension creates particular problems for artists during this time because artists on the one hand they they need to make money and so they need to participate in this economy that is moving towards more fragile objects. On the other hand artists are very self-conscious about their image and they don't want to be seen as lowly craftspeople. Artists had for centuries been working to elevate their status above the category of the mere tradesperson. And in the 18th century what we find is artists trying to navigate these these new conditions trying on the one hand to capitalize on the commercial fascination with delicacy but on the other hand trying to avoid being accused of just making ephemeral commodities. While France wasn't the only country in the 18th century interested in fashion and consumer culture French obsession with delicacy was distinctive and that term social meaning became central to France's identity. Why France? This is the time when France became the epitome of high culture and refined taste that remains so influential during the next two centuries and to a lesser extent exist today. Yeah it's a great question because as you say ephemeral consumption wasn't unique to France. 18th century England also saw a consumer revolution with increasing desire for ephemeral commodities. However the French preoccupation with delicacy is distinctive and the reason for that really has to do with this context of port culture where going back into the 17th century delicacy had been central not only to a certain way of being within port society but it was central to French identity to the French self-conception as a nation that was devoted to a certain a certain something as je ne sais pas a type of sophistication and refinement that French people particularly within the upper echelons of society saw as distinctively French and that wasn't just the French who saw French identity as being tied to delicacy. You find English commentators from this time for instance the English poet 17th century English poet John Dryden talks on several occasions about how delicacy is a key word by which the French distinguish themselves. So this helps explain why the commercialization of delicacy in fragile consumer goods becomes such a fraught issue within France because the emergence of these ephemeral consumer goods threatened to degrade and debase something that was so central to French self-conception Now art as I've said was left in an uncertain position as a result of these changes but are also provided in some ways a way of resolving this dilemma because as artists sought to claim that the types of fragile objects they were making were different from other types of ephemeral consumer goods they created a class of ephemeral commodities that was ostensibly purified elevated above the the mere flumsiness of any other disposable product and this then by the end of the 18th century offers a kind of redemption of delicacy a way for France to maintain itself conception as a place devoted to highly sophisticated ways of being even after the portly conception of delicacy starts to lose its relevance art becomes a new vessel for this this understanding of France as a place that is distinctively sensitive to to a fine way of creating a fine way of being I think to the extent that France is still thought of as a beacon of artistic and cultural achievement and and refinement I think those associations go all the way back to the artist I'm talking about here in the 18th century Can we say that 18th century pastelists were in a way predecessors of impressionists if not in materials then in the attempts to grasp fleeting moments of life in the most visual effortless manner absolutely I I do and in fact actually materially too you say maybe if not materially but actually the material of pastel the medium of pastel actually has a revival in the hands of impressionists after the medium fell somewhat out of favor in the early 19th century the impressionists again adopted diga for example was a master of pastel I think your question also speaks to a broader issue which is the extent to which some of the the cultural achievements of 19th century french artists are they anticipated by what takes place in the 18th century to what extent does the 18th century actually represent the origin of a lot of forms of artistic creation and expression that we associate with with more modern artists and that's actually a big focus of what I'm trying to do in the book because I think for art historians who talk about the emergence of modern art often that origin point is located in the middle of the 19th century and for instance if if an art historian were to give a brief lecture about the beginnings of modern art that art historian might start by setting Baudelaire's classic essay the painter of modern life in which Baudelaire says that the essence of modernity is the transitory the fleeting the contingent that's a mid 19th century essay really foundational for our conception of what makes modern art modern and yet those qualities the transitory the fleeting the contingent those are absolutely qualities that define the pastelis in my book but define the ceramicist in my book and I think part of what the book shows is that the things that we say define modern art can be found all the way back in the 18th century and I think this goes beyond just starting the story earlier saying okay let's begin the narrative in the 18th century rather than the 19th century it's also about the causes behind artists taking up those qualities so if you begin the story in the 19th century you would typically say that that exploration of fleetingness comes with the emergence of an artistic avant-garde that rejects the traditions of the academy it's a position of opposition to to the canon to tradition to the institutions that had long governed art but actually in this 18th century context we find that a lot of those qualities of an engagement with fleetingness transience ephemerality they come not so much from an effort to attack tradition and and artistic institutions but they come really from the emergence of commercial modernity they they come from the expansion of the art market and more generally art being absorbed within the larger system of consumer capitalism so this is a long way of answering your question about whether 18th century pastelists are connected to impressionists but I think it gets at deeper issues which is really where where do those defining aspects of modern art a preoccupation with the transient the contingent the ephemeral where and when do they originate and I'm making the case that you have to go back to the commercial conditions that govern 18th century art what is the legacy of 18th century art in our days and do its ideas continue to interest and intrigue contemporary artists yeah absolutely I think it's a big legacy and the the fact that 18th century art still interests contemporary artists in some ways that's not a novel insight that art historians have long observed that there are contemporary artists who look back to the Rococo for stylistic inspiration we might think here of an artist like Jeff Koons or or Yinka Shonavare whose work takes the aesthetic maximalism of of the Rococo and and stylistically explores it for me the legacy of 18th century art goes deeper than just style it's really about the relationship between the market and the temporality of art so it's really a structural transformation that is at the heart of the legacy of 18th century art and all of the artists in my book have come to the realization over the course of the 18th century that transients can be commodified that it's possible to to take a precarious ephemeral unstable object and and and make money off of it now the idea that transients can be commodified we know that that's something that contemporary artists are still very much aware of them performance artists installation artists who work with the Kang and ephemeral materials that's very much present in our own time but I think less commonly recognized is the way artists all the way back to the 18th century were exploring this idea and a lot has changed from the 18th century to today I mean ephemeral performance or or installation is made in a very different context in many ways I mean this is now an age of the experience economy where people are trying to escape the virtual lives of a of a screen mediated world and they want to go to ephemeral performances which they can then post on social media so I don't mean to say that it's exactly the same as it was in the 18th century but at a deeper level many of the the systemic factors that led to the creation of these unstable objects in the 18th century remain very much present at the most basic level artists are still competing in a competitive economy for public attention and it's that at temporal pressure that it puts on artists the the new temporal consciousness that emerges with consumer capitalism that to me is the bigger legacy of 18th century art one that we're still grappling with today