Peter Greenaway's Artist-Entrepreneurs

This chapter considers the relationship between art, commerce, and artistic entrepreneurship in film through the case of Peter Greenaway’s “Dutch Masters” films Nightwatching (2007) and Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012). Drawing on theoretical work on affective labor, precarity, and entrepreneurial subjectivity in the new creative industries – and more broadly in contemporary public spheres, – it analyzes the eponymous character of Goltzius and the Pelican Company as a “virtuoso” figure whose performance of himself in the cultural marketplace holds an ineradicably political potential, related to his deployment of theatricality and language. In the context of Greenaway’s cinema, this leads to ref lection on how Goltzius encodes its engagement with artistic entrepreneurship in what is here called an aesthetic of “virtuosic remediation.”