Abstract

This essay argues that unique multiples are a financial format whose production, while not exclusive to the modern period, became prolific in the late nineteenth century in the context of art’s growing secondary market, where liquidity emerged as a key criterion of modern art. Liquidity is a financial concept that figures centrally in scholarship produced across academic disciplines as well as seminal longue durée histories of capitalism.

Liquidity modernism introduces to art history a new criterion of art that is distinct from traditional concerns like “appraisals of beauty.” Since the late nineteenth century, production of art has been conditioned by estimations about what future market participants are likely to find valuable.