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could find it only in the art market; there-reduced to a commodity, far removed both from its creators and from those who were able to understand it-the work of art endured. The fetish of the art market is the master's name. From a historical point of view, Fuchs's greatest achievement may be that he cleared the way for art history to be freed from the fetish of the master's signature. "That is why," says Fuchs in his essay on the Tang period, "the complete anonymity of these burial gifts means that one cannot, even in a single case, know the name of the individual creator. This is an important proof of the fact that here it is never a question of individual artistic production, but rather a matter of way in which the world and things are grasped as a whole. "89 Fuchs was one of the first to expound the specific character of mass art and thus to develop the impulses he had received from historical materialism. Any study of mass art leads necessarily to the question of the technological reproduction of the work of art. "Every age has very specific techniques of reproduction corresponding to it. These represent the prevailing standard of technological development and are ... the result of a specific need of that age. For this reason, it is not surprising that any historical upheaval which brings to power ... classes other than those currently ruling ... regularly goes hand in hand with changes in techniques of pictorial reproduction. This fact calls for careful elucidation. "90 Insights like this proved Fuchs a pioneer. In snch remarks, he pointed to objects which would represent an educational gain for historical materialism if it studied them. The technological standard of the arts is one of the most important of his insights. If one keeps this standard in mind, one can compensate for many a lax construction stemming from the vague way culture is conceived in the traditional history of ideas (and occasionally even in Fuchs's own work). The fact that "thousands of simple potters were capable on the spur of the moment ... of creating products that were both technically artistically daring"91 rightly appears to Fuchs as a concrete authentication of old Chinese art. Occasionally his technological reflections lead him to illuminating aperfus that are ahead of his time. There is no other way to view his explanation of the fact that caricature was unknown in antiquity. An idealistic understanding of history would no doubt see this as evidence for the classicist of the Greeks and their "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.') How does Fuchs explain the matter? Caricature, he says, is a mass art. There cannot be any caricature without mass distribution of its products. Mass distribution means cheap distribution. But "except for the minting of coins, antiquity has no cheap means of reproduction. "92 The surface area of a coin is too small to allow for caricature. This is why caricature was unknown in antiquity.