Has the free market increased the quality of art, or has it brought it down? Is institutional support for art a good thing?

Paul Cantor helps us to answer some of these questions in his lecture here.

In his lecture, he covers a lot of ground. Patronage, free market, capitalism, Marxism, art, politics, etc. However, he talks quite a bit about the free market effect on art today and on the bad effects of institutional support for art.

Patronage and Market. What’s the difference? The biggest difference Cantor explains is that patronage has a lot more personal involvement with customers, whereas Market has to do more with mass audience. For instance, as a musician, you might not be taking tickets stubs at the door. Not actually interacting with your “customers.” But you are performing for them still. You are still trading a service for a good.

This was made possible much because of the advancements in technology and changes in culture. Before 1800, people were basically too poor to care about art. They spent every minute of their lives surviving. Whether through farming or whatever it was, their jobs were necessities to daily living.

To be an artist in the days before this, artists had to seriously learn how to “please the customer.” Because if most people were going to be doing this necessity of a job and you were off “having fun” as far as they are concerned, you had to learn how to make your art valuable enough for them that they would support your art.

By having free market development, it allowed art to become more mass produced. You started hearing phrases like “one million papers in circulation” around this time. Things could be more commercialized. Arguably, because of this, art greatly improved. Things like the English novel were born and started becoming much more popular than the old poets. By having to “please the customer,” artists were forced to create quality content that drew others attention.

However, in the lecture, Cantor explains how in the last century, there has developed a huge institutional support for art. People decided there needed to be this layer between the artist and the customer so that the artist could do his best work, but people seem to have misconceptions about how artists truly put out the best work.

For instance, sometimes people think about Charles Dickens or Jane Austin as people who were just writing in their attic all day and their genius came from ideas in this room by themselves, but truthfully, both Austin and Dickens were heavily involved in the market expanding and looking for what their readers wanted. They had to know how to please their audience.

Think of it this way, if you’re a builder, and you’re the most creative person ever and people come to you with their plans for what they want their house to look like. The things they like, the things they dislike, etc. but then, someone comes up and says, “Hey, we need to cut off this communication because you are the most creative, so you don’t need input from your customers.” So you build this house incredibly creatively and with all your finest touches. And your customers come back to look at it, and while they understand how well done it is, it’s not what they want. It doesn’t please them personally.

By not having the pressure of customers wanting the best possible, we tend to create much worse content. We become self-indulged and we no longer have great outside input coming in.

A fantastic lecture and I can’t wait to listen to the rest of the lectures! Hope you stick around to see what I learn each day!