Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art

This book offers a new perspective on the art of the Dutch Golden Age by exploring the interaction between the gift's symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early modern Holland. Gifts of art were pervasive in seventeenth-century Europe and many Dutch artists, like their counterparts elsewhere, embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, art lovers, and other members of their social networks. Rembrandt also created distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange, and both Rembrandt and Vermeer engaged the ethics of the gift to identify their creative labor as motivated by what contemporaries called a love of art

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity

This chapter examines the centrality of gift giving to the developing commercial cultures of early modern Europe and the rise to prominence of works of art, especially paintings, in circuits of gift exchange. Contrary to common assumption, gift giving in the early modern period acquired renewed importance as a mode of negotiating professional, social, and personal ties in a rapidly changing, increasingly commercialized environment. Art also emerged as an essential gift currency for negotiating relationships of patronage and clientage, and highly selfconscious artists increasingly turned to the gift’s symbolic economy to negotiate with patrons and set their transactions apart from ordinary forms of exchange. I probe the interconnections between gifts and art in various overlapping contexts of early modernity.

Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art

This book offers a new perspective on the art of the Dutch Golden Age by exploring the interaction between the gift's symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early modern Holland. Gifts of art were pervasive in seventeenth-century Europe and many Dutch artists, like their counterparts elsewhere, embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, art lovers, and other members of their social networks. Rembrandt also created distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange, and both Rembrandt and Vermeer engaged the ethics of the gift to identify their creative labor as motivated by what contemporaries called a "love of art," not materialistic gain. In the merchant republic's vibrant market for art, networks of gift relations and the anti-economic rhetoric of the gift mingled with the growing dimension of commerce, revealing a unique chapter in the interconnected history of gift giving and art making.

“A Black Future in the Air Industry?”

This essay charts a history of black liberation and complicity in the struggle for economic advancement at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) from the late 1950s into the 1980s. Joining scholars who have explored commercial aviation as a site of black mobility and immobility as well as those who have theorized Black Power's intersections with municipal policymaking, labor organizing, business and community development projects, and affirmative action programs, I examine the spheres of airport employment and entrepreneurialism to show how struggles to overcome social and spatial confinement in the Bay Area were often shaped by the entanglements of heterogeneous actors and systems. Indeed, such efforts at SFO responded to and were made possible by shifting interfaces of public and private capital investment; government action and inaction; the work of local and national networks of business elites, labor organizers, and activists; the efforts of individual black people to make their lives better; and a concomitant symbolic economy regarding the black presence in the Bay Area. As this story concludes in the 1980s, it demonstrates that despite some successes, such struggles had advanced in the Bay Area only so far as offering a precarious and patchy inclusion: a kind of holding pattern characterized by piecemeal professional integration and the more widespread consignment of black men and women to low-wage, low-skilled work, intermittent employment, and unemployment.

The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals, and Queer Cinema’s Legs

In analyzing the regimes of taste and films cultures that condition the circulation and cultural currency of queer cinemas, Chapter 2 aims to reconceptualize the notion of festival circuits. It locates queer cinema at the intersection of two regimes of cultural value – identity and cinephilia. Through a Bourdieusian approach to taste-making and cultural production, I highlight how both festivals and scholars negotiate these conflicting cultural values. Film traffic relies on a symbolic economy that is based on and fosters differentiated cultural discourses on queer cinema. In analyzing the strategies of both European and American film distributors, I underscore how this interplay between queerness and cinephilia is strategically mobilized so as to assert a film’s legitimacy and authenticity.