I think that it is in his song The Captain that Leonard Cohen has the unforgettably startling lines, “Complain, complain, that’s all we’ve done, ever since we lost./If it’s not the Crucifixion then it’s the Holocaust.” The jibe is directed against his fellow Jews, but it came into my mind today as I was taking advantage of a brief spell of fine weather to catch up on some garden maintenance. Surely something similar could be directed at artists. We are terrible complainers.
The thing that set my mind along this line of thought was the work I’m currently doing towards my lecture on art and Fascism in Italy. Clearly there is no way in which I would want to defend the enormous degree of state patronage that provided the basic background condition for interbellum Italian art. On the other hand, I decided, there are reasons for us to complain about the way in which the future and fortunes of artists in my own society are shaped by the market.
The irrationalities of this are evident. Prices are driven by fashion, which in turn is created by influential purchasers. There was a time when figurative art went totally out of fashion, for no apparent reason. Buzz words have a lot to do with the shaping of preferences, such as “conceptual art” or in a previous period “op art.” There are media that gallery owners will tell you are “difficult to sell” (such as pastels) but when probed on the question they find it hard to give a rational answer, or to square with the immense respect given to an artist such as David Blackburn.
Patronage has always been an issue for artists, whether the dominant patron has been the church, the aristocracy, the new bourgeoisie, civic galleries, the state, or private collectors. It will aways be thus. Think about it this way. The artist’s utopia is probably a situation in which we produce whatever it seems to us to be right, and a grateful society is willing to pay us a living (through one means or another) in order to make it possible for us to do just that. Cohen is right. “Complain, complain, that’s all we’ve done,” throughout the history of art. The market has its irrationalities, but it is more tolerable than several other systems of patronage, whether the Church, the fascist state or any of the others I mentioned. Whatever the case, we are not going to be offered an artists’ utopia.