"To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity"
About this Quote
Edison’s line is a cold splash of capitalist realism masquerading as an aesthetic judgment. The provocation isn’t that he dislikes the old masters; it’s that he refuses to grant them the one thing art is supposed to have: intrinsic value. By reducing Rembrandt and Raphael to scarcity assets, he frames culture as a market function, not a spiritual or human one. That’s not ignorance so much as ideology: the inventor speaking in the native tongue of patents, production, and competitive advantage.
The intent reads like a flex from the age of industrial reproducibility. Edison built a career on making phenomena portable and repeatable - light, sound, motion. “Old masters” belong to the opposite regime: singular objects whose aura is protected by distance, museum walls, and a cultivated shortage. His jab punctures the reverence around them by implying that if you could manufacture their condition (make them abundant), their mystique would collapse. Scarcity, not genius, props up the pedestal.
Subtext: modernity doesn’t need to kneel. Edison is pitching a new hierarchy where technological novelty outranks inherited taste, and where cultural authority is suspect because it’s intertwined with wealth and gatekeeping. Coming from an American industrialist in a period of booming mass media and the early art market’s financialization, the quote reads less like philistinism than a diagnosis - and a warning. If we’re not careful, even our most sacred images become just another commodity class, valued not for what they say, but for how few people can own them.
The intent reads like a flex from the age of industrial reproducibility. Edison built a career on making phenomena portable and repeatable - light, sound, motion. “Old masters” belong to the opposite regime: singular objects whose aura is protected by distance, museum walls, and a cultivated shortage. His jab punctures the reverence around them by implying that if you could manufacture their condition (make them abundant), their mystique would collapse. Scarcity, not genius, props up the pedestal.
Subtext: modernity doesn’t need to kneel. Edison is pitching a new hierarchy where technological novelty outranks inherited taste, and where cultural authority is suspect because it’s intertwined with wealth and gatekeeping. Coming from an American industrialist in a period of booming mass media and the early art market’s financialization, the quote reads less like philistinism than a diagnosis - and a warning. If we’re not careful, even our most sacred images become just another commodity class, valued not for what they say, but for how few people can own them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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