This chapter considers the relationship between art, commerce, and creative labor in the cultural marketplace, as depicted in Peter Greenaway's “Dutch Masters” films Nightwatching (2007) and Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), and secondarily in the spin-off mockumentary Rembrandt's J’Accuse (2008). I pursue this inquiry in the context of a broader interest in how Greenaway's films engage with the (artistic and political) public sphere, for a historical imaginary of publicness is present in many of his features and inflects how themes of democracy and public freedom, artisthood and creative entrepreneurship are taken up and interrelated. In one perspective, the films in the “Dutch Masters” series would seem to be thematically continuous with earlier features in Greenaway's oeuvre, most notably The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), in that they foreground the contractual element that binds artist-entrepreneurs to structures of power and patronage in which they might get enmeshed and lose (artistic) control. In what follows, however, it will be argued that the “Dutch Masters” films also form a new departure as they invite analysis of the pressures placed on subjectivity when the imperative to “be creative” is generalized to extend from artistic or aesthetic labor to immaterial and affective labor in a large, encompassing sense. The point is to show how, in so doing, the films probe the ways in which “art” and “business” slide into each other in the present cultural juncture.

‘Signs of Autumn’

This chapter examines the idea of (New) Amsterdam as a lieu de mémoire of early-modern global finance, trade, and commerce from the perspective of recent theories of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, considered here more especially in their bearings on novelistic representation and literary form. Put briefly, what is at issue here is the question how the remembrance of an older capitalist world system – in this case, the Dutch commercial empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – exerts an impact on, and may contribute formatively to, the articulation of cosmopolitan and ‘globally conscious’ subjectivities in the present. Far from submitting to a hegemonic discourse of globalization, however, I will argue that literary evocations of the idea of (New) Amsterdam have recently begun to elaborate forms of historical (dis)identification that are not just highly pragmatic and self-consciously post-national, but also uniquely capable of interrogating the politics of ‘thinking globally’ as such. This argument places this chapter squarely in a contrapuntal relationship to that which precedes it: while Joyce Goggin and Erinc Salor examine the idea and image of Amsterdam in historically situated popular fictions which are deeply invested in the ‘romance’ of global commerce, the present chapter seeks to foreground the counter-hegemonic possibilities of some of the more experimental and self-reflective novels which use (New) Amsterdam as an important space of reference and in which early-modern Dutch colonialism is articulated as a theme.

Cultural Mobility, Global Performativity

A young woman – immersed, it appears, in her reading – sits on a large, beanbagshaped stone chair on Amsterdam's Dam Square. Her pose, if not exactly comfortable, seems balanced enough, although she may have had to put herself into a squat first over her sizeable black travelling bag. Behind her we see a museum poster, one of a series put up there by the Amsterdam (Historical) Museum to advertize its collection when a large bank building was temporarily fenced off in 2009 and 2010. The scene on the poster forms a striking contrast with the calm of the woman's pose: a monumental canvas by Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraaten, it evokes the fire that destroyed Amsterdam's old town hall in the night of 7 July 1652. The inflamed sky, rendered in part in screaming colours, suggests the event may have seemed to spell apocalypse to some of those who witnessed it, including perhaps the painter himself. The fact that the Exchange Bank, too, was destroyed (it was housed in the same building) offers the potential of a stern cautionary tale in this city of Calvinists and commerce, of seventeenth-century republicans and burghers. In fact, a new town hall was already being built; seen in its entirety, the painting shows the scaffolding behind the waaghuis, suggesting that the fire only sealed the old building's appointed fate – and so, could just as well be cast as a providential sign of benevolence, divine arrangements meshing nicely with worldly ones.

The woman, in any case, is oblivious to the painting, as she is to the tourist draws near where she sits. We know that on her right stands the Nieuwe Kerk, which regularly houses art and heritage exhibitions. Just in front of her is the city's Madame Tussauds; if she looks up, she is likely to see people queue up to see Rembrandt, Lady Gaga, and the Dalai Lama in wax. Just across from her is the Palace on the Dam, the building which Beerstraaten saw completed during his lifetime, and which now functions as a museum and a place for royal receptions.

‘Rembrandt 400’ as Global Mega-Event

In 2006, Amsterdam and Leiden celebrated Rembrandt Year. For both cities the quatercentenary of Rembrandt's birth formed a major chance to showcase the ‘Golden Age’ painter and his orbit – and, in so doing, to shore up their status as centres for cultural heritage and destinations for cultural tourism. Amsterdam especially stood in dire need of an opportunity like this. If in previous decades its position in the European market for tourism and travel had weakened in the face of sharply increased inter-city competition, by the mid-1990s its reputation as a ‘theme park’ devoted to ‘sex and drugs’ seemed difficult to turn into a more positive city image or ‘brand’ (Dahles 1998; Nijman 1999; Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2006). What is more, the city's ambition to fight its way back into the race for dominance of Europe's geography of cultural capitals was complicated by the protracted – and costfully prolonged – closure for renovation purposes of both the Stedelijk Museum and large parts of the Rijksmuseum from 2003. In short, the city could do with a boost. The Rembrandt Year that crystallized was a truly global event, staging ‘local’ heritage in thoroughly place-bound ways while catering to national and, even more so, international publics. It squarely qualifies as one of those ‘mega-events’ which sociologist John Urry, following Maurice Roche, has proposed are characteristic of globalized cultural economies: events that form ‘spatio-temporal moments of global condensation, involving the peculiarly intense “localization” of … global events’ in cities that present both themselves and the event which they host as irreplaceably ‘unique’ (Urry 2002, 154). In this sense, Rembrandt Year was arguably as much a global mega-event as any World Expo or Olympic Games.

Before considering the ‘Rembrandt 400’ project in more detail, it is worth giving some more thought to the special nexus between cultural heritage, place, and global cultural flow in the context of Amsterdam and the Netherlands since the early 2000s. Two points are in order. First, it has justly been said that for a variety of reasons, Dutch cultural tourism is uncommonly dependent on early-modern or ‘Golden Age’ heritage.