Was Art Only Available to the Rich in Rennaisance Times
Part of the Art, Money, and the Renaissance web log serial
Silicon Valley didn't invent the "gig economic system." On the reverse, the life of a contractor with neither benefits nor security would have been very familiar to Leonardo da Vinci.
Co-ordinate to Dr. Matthew Landrus, a fellow member of the history faculty at Oxford and a specialist on the artists and engineers of the fourteenth-eighteenthursday centuries, Leonardo was a "working artist" with frequent commissions, yeah, but he made most of his money from civil and military engineering. And if he was constantly in need, it was because "he worked hard to make sure he was in demand."
In fact, of the voluminous journals that Leonardo left us, including his thoughts on fine art, engineering, scientific discipline, nature, history, and even (upward to a point) social customs — there is virtually nothing indicating his political views.
"That was too dangerous," Landrus said. "He didn't desire to hazard offending a patron." Leonardo was a glory, he was a legend in his own time, simply he didn't have a prophylactic cyberspace. There was no programme B.
The "gig economy" (or "service economic system" if you want a less authentic euphemism) is non an innovation but a recurrence of an earlier model and an earlier time. Artists accept usually lived on the economic fringes of society, merely for most of Western history anybody was, in some way, dependent upon the largesse of a patron.
It was the rise of the middle class — the very suburbia whom twentyth century artists delighted in mocking and shocking — that made the idea of an independent citizenry possible. The "nation of shopkeepers" were what made an contained avant garde a force.
But if economical forces were vital for art'due south liberation from patronage, it notwithstanding didn't happen by accident. The man who is most often credited for freeing artists from the patronage organisation lived virtually 300 years subsequently Leonardo, and it'southward a story every artist should know.
Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote the first full lexicon of the English linguistic communication, and when he began the project, it was under the patronage of the ivthursday Earl of Chesterfield. Just later on providing an initial grant, Chesterfield stopped supporting it for the entirety of the vii years it took Johnson to finish. After it was done, withal, Chesterfield began mentioning the Dictionary publicly, along with his own "involvement" in the project.
Johnson, notoriously piece of cake to offend, responded with a public letter in which he trashed Chesterfield — and the idea of patrons as a whole.
"Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the h2o, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with assistance?" Johnson wrote.
This letter, at present infamous, has oft been referred to as literature's "Annunciation of Independence," and was the symbolic beginning of our thought of artists as independent laborers who could depend upon public sales rather than moneyed patronage to back up their lives and livelihoods.
Today nosotros see our society moving towards both models at in one case. Crowdfunding and social media allow artists and makers straight access to their publics on an unpredicted calibration — only the erosion of the heart class ways that more and more art and arts institutions are increasingly dependent upon the largesse of a new grade of ultra-rich patrons.
Burning Man is straddling the crest of both waves. Founded entirely past volunteers and small-scale participant donations in its early years, funded almost entirely past ticket sales in its period of massive growth, it is now peradventure the largest hub for crowd-and-participant funded art in the world. At the aforementioned time, information technology is likewise famously the new favorite playground of the ultra-rich, who spend ungodly sums of money to do what the rest of us used to do on the cheap.
Anyone who has actually attended Burning Man knows the presence of the 1% in Black Rock Metropolis is significantly over-hyped by the media (is annihilation nether-hyped?), and the vast majority of Burners would never know that Richie Rich'due south wealthier brother was on playa if people off-playa weren't lament about information technology. But whether information technology'south causation or correlation, the rise of the 1% at Burning Human does correspond very closely with an increment in the epic scale of the city's infrastructure, and its fine art.
Equally Black Rock City gets bigger, its art has gotten grander — and correspondingly more expensive. To exist sure, it is however possible to have profoundly affecting art projects washed on a pocket-sized scale and without permission, merely Burning Man has become increasingly associated with the kind of calibration and spectacle that requires either a massive crowd-funding campaign or a very wealthy patron.
This is an uncomfortable tension, and maybe unsustainable. Information technology's also hard to talk virtually.
Fine art and money have never been separable, but somehow the idea of talking almost them together has become a swell taboo. We admire "starving artists" in a way that we would never endorse for "starving teachers" or "starving firemen." We have a notion deeply embedded in our culture that anybody who talks nigh doing art for the coin must not be a "real" artist. In that location's something to that, but information technology's also in role a modern concept. It certainly wasn't Dr. Johnson's view. He said, "No human but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
The musicologist Peter Schickele once similarly pointed out, in a hilarious performance that information technology kills me not to be able to find anywhere online, that most of the correspondence nosotros accept of the extraordinarily influential composer Johann Sebastian Bach (a contemporary of Dr. Johnson'south) is not about music at all, but mostly complaining almost the cost of living and the fact that his patrons didn't pay him on time.
(If anyone reading this knows Dr. Schikele, please enquire him if he has a prune of that performance we can show.)
So nosotros've gone from a period where artists were hyper-aware of money, and open virtually it, to a menses where artists talking most coin endangers their condition every bit "artists." This would be understandable, even laudable, if artists were actually less worried about money, just since they're not — since in fact we live in a time of profound economic doubtfulness about artists and arts funding — this just won't exercise.
The 2016 theme of "da Vinci's Workshop" and Renaissance Florence is intended in no small part to violate this taboo and open this conversation. For the sake of artists, let alone order, we need to think virtually how we want arts to be funded, how we tin practise then in ways that are consistent with our values, and how we tin can create the touch on the arts and funding that we want to take in the world.
To be sure, no ane wants to return to the days before Dr. Johnson's announcement of independence. Leonardo himself illustrates, in his refusal to talk politics, just how stifling that system could be. But not wanting to go back doesn't mean nosotros can't learn from history — indeed it's one of the few things nosotros can learn from. For all its faults, there are many ways in which the Renaissance is exactly what we want to look to for guidance about both what to practise and what not to practice. If the 21st century is to accept patrons, what are best practices for them? How tin can they be part of the solution, rather than a bottleneck for art and a source of feet for artists?
The Renaissance certainly teaches usa that there was more than i kind of patron — and more than one reason for making art. While "patronage" today is well-nigh synonymous with "getting money from a rich guy," much of the greatest work of the Renaissance was paid for by the church building, and many of Florence's most significant public treasures were paid for by its various guilds. If it was a period equally as obsessed with coin as ours, it was besides a period when the most powerful institutions in society saw the creation of art as primal to their missions. The glory of God and the country were tied in closely to the art created in their names; a nation or church building without public art lacked a fundamental legitimacy. They were non doing their job. Nobility and merchants who did not appoint with and support the arts were equally lacking. Money was a means to an stop; but accumulating coin served no legitimate social skillful. Sponsoring art was an abracadabra past which money transformed into a higher purpose.
Ironically, we live in an era that claims to value art for its own sake, merely that also sees it as far more than optional than the Renaissance did. The virulence of a Savonarola against art is but possible when you in fact accept fine art seriously.
Our era has the potential for an unparalleled artistic renaissance. Not only is there enough of coin — if we can merely figure out how to access and harness it — but our distribution networks for art and artists are leaps and bounds beyond anything e'er envisioned before. Nosotros live in a fourth dimension, to paraphrase Clive James, when information technology is possible to feel much of the greatest art e'er created, for costless, without even leaving your dwelling house.
Indeed, the ease and quality of the distribution network is role of the problem. Peradventure it's an even greater problem: many societies have tried to address issues of coin, equality, and fine art before, just to my knowledge no order in history has needed to accost the problem of art and civilization existence too easily accessible to everyone. That seems truly a first. Information technology may exist, when we dig deep, that some issues of money may not really be about money, much in the way some problems of sex activity are not really near sex.
But we won't know until nosotros call them out.
We hope this theme will give Burning Man's legions of artists, doers, and creative thinkers permission to actively embrace this taboo and a space in which to explore these questions. What can we larn about the relationship between art and money from the Renaissance, and what can we do — what must we do — to embrace the potential of our ain time to be the side by side Renaissance? Hopefully a renaissance equally concerned with human dignity and bureau as it is with technical advances and artistic accomplishment.
In the series of essays that follow, leading upwards to the consequence itself, we will be examining questions that we promise will offer insight and inspiration to anyone looking to address these issues or take on this theme.
Our history, like the histories of those before us, volition be divers by our fine art. Near no one remembers Leonardo for his military engineering, but his paintings helped define an era and changed the world. It is a thing of historical record that the merely reason anyone actually remembers the 4thursday Earl of Chesterfield today is that Samuel Johnson made fun of him in a letter about an art project that altered the class of civilization.
It may be new technologies and economic forces that make our future possible, but it won't happen by blow. We need a new Proclamation of Independence for artists.
Leonardo, Dr. Landrus tells us, viewed art equally a guide to the futurity. He imagined things that did not exist so that he could build them. And so, as well, Burning Man: We study the Renaissance in order to imagine a new one. We imagine a new one in order to see if we can build information technology. In Black Rock City, and around the world.
Re-imagining the relationship between Art and Money, artists and funding, is how we brainstorm.
Coming side by side: Case studies in beingness a Renaissance artist
(Top photo by Steven Fritz)
Source: https://journal.burningman.org/2016/01/philosophical-center/tenprinciples/art-money-and-the-renaissance-introduction/
0 Response to "Was Art Only Available to the Rich in Rennaisance Times"
إرسال تعليق