Aesthetics and Economics.

This monograph concerns goods which have an "esthetic qualification," which here seems to mean "art," such as painting or music. However, the definition Gianfranco Mossetto chooses for "esthetic" is much wider: following Immanuel Kant, he defines it as encompassing those goods which have no aim or purpose. Mossetto believes that this captures the essence of goods whose only purpose is to give abstract pleasure and so allows a clear distinction from goods which have utilitarian or moral purposes.

The author does briefly acknowledge that this particular definition may cover many goods, but he does not seem to have contemplated just how widely it might stretch. Under this definition, anything beyond a market basket just sufficient to allow the human organism to survive and reproduce is "esthetic," and most of our choices even in basic food and drink are esthetic. If not, why would we prefer fresh to frozen vegetables or generally seek to avoid campus cafeterias? Mossetto makes no attempt to extend his conclusions to this wide class of goods; while he has explored some odd facets of art goods, the author really has made no clear distinction between these goods and many others that would not be considered art. Nor has he articulated the reason economists have generally felt it unnecessary to dwell on the esthetic dimensions of ordinary goods. Thus, the significance of this work is unclear.

Moreover, the chosen definition is not applied in a consistent fashion. The author looks at several ways of modelling esthetic goods and at several phenomena which may be especially pronounced with art goods, but these are introduced almost ad hoc; they do not flow naturally from Mossetto's basic definition and premises. The result is predictably uneven; some of Mossetto's observations are interesting, if a bit tentative, while others seem incomplete or simply wrong.

The most interesting parts of this monograph are the modelling of esthetic consumption as a kind of addiction and the attempt to explain the role of "certifiers" in art markets. Enjoying the consumption of art requires learning about art, requires, that is, investment in prior consumption. It is surely a familiar notion that educated taste is more refined than raw and inexperienced taste. Equally familiar is the idea that certain things are likely to repel us at first encounter but become very enjoyable with experience; who has not heard the old saw that one must "develop a taste" for Scotch whisky? Mossetto's contribution is to recognize the common ground between the consumption of esthetic goods and the concept of addiction associated with Gary Becket: consumption is partly investment, and the stock of past consumption helps determine demand in the present. This model has certain specific consequences, including the possibility that demand curves may slope upward and create multiple equilibria, and it suggests some intriguing questions about optimum government investment in esthetic education, although Mossetto doesn't pursue these questions extensively.

"Certifiers" are those on whom consumers rely for information about the quality of esthetic goods. They are part, in Mossetto's view, of a self-declared cultural monopoly, and they extract monopoly rents from the economy. While this monopoly argument is interesting. it is seriously incomplete. Mossetto does not try to deal with whether there are limits to the certifiers' behavior; as described here, anything at all could be presented and accepted as art. This seems improbable; no matter what the Establishment says, the public will reject some extremes. Further, the author does not deal with the interactions which would certainly exist between the consumption stock embedded in addicted art-lovers and the behavior of certifiers. While dwelling on information asymmetries, he fails to consider whether there is any real difference between Consumer Reports' opinion of a brand of paint and a critic's report on a new play (displaying perhaps the weakness of Mossetto's whole approach). But his most serious omission may be the failure to explain how one gets to be a certifier; this question is airily dismissed as one not of logic but of history. Since the question of what constitutes art is the central practical issue of this whole area of inquiry, evading this question is unacceptable.

This book leaves several impressions. One is that there is much still to be learned about the economics of art. Economists have had little to add, for example, to the recent controversies over the taste displayed by the National Endowment for Art or the question of appropriate funding for that agency. If Mossetto's monograph is a guide to the current state of knowledge in this area, that is because economists, as economists, don't know enough about the subject to comment intelligently. A second impression is that the practices and customs of European economics are very different from American economics. In an odd but characteristic difference, this book lacks the preface and acknowledgements that have been obligatory parts of the American academic style for at least forty years. More importantly, an American economist would have been forced to define his or her terms much more clearly and in mathematical notation at that; the sort of casual and literary approach Mossetto takes went out of fashion on this side of the Atlantic decades ago. But perhaps these differences are only esthetic. Aren't they?

Larry T. McRae Appalachian State University