David Carrier

The relationship between artistic originality and finance is complex. In the early seventeenth-century many northern artists moved to Rome, which then was prosperous. But by the late eighteenth-century, Paris was an important art center, and Rome a backwater. But then the defeat of France by Prussia in 1871 did not cause the art world to move to Berlin. Degas, who copied Dinner at the Ball by his German contemporary Adolph Menzel, is the greater artist. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the center of the art world was in Paris. Then after World War Two, it moved to Manhattan. To some extent, then, art follows the money, which is why so many Mainland Chinese artists recently have been exhibited in Chelsea.