Or so we are told. I have in mind all this stuff about artists being “professionals”. After posting yesterday’s piece, in which I wrote about art as manual labour, I fell to thinking about a book I read many years ago. This was the biography of Mozart written by Norbert Elias.* Mozart was a figure of special interest (according to Elias) because he broke away from the prevailing pattern by which artists were attached to secular or ecclesiastical courts as mere employees of their masters. Prior to Mozart a musician, however talented he or she was as a composer or performer, was simply an employee, and dependent on the favour of the Duke or Bishop in whose service they worked. Mozart detached himself from this system and sought to live as a free lance, selling his services as an independent creator and performer, to whoever was willing to pay for them, usually by commissioning a piece. According to Elias, Mozart had a clear understanding of the radical break in convention he was attempting to make.
Insistence on this elevated status of the artist has been commonplace since then among artists of all disciplines, although the speed and extent to which they managed to secure acceptance of this claim varied with different art forms. The “professionalism” of artists is still, in many respects, an unresolved issue today.
I have always been of the opinion that it is obfuscating the issue if artists make too much of the notion of professionalism, and the question is muddied by the prevailing status and class consciousness of our society more generally. Manual work is still, to far too great an extent, devalued in comparison with “brain work”. I am happy to acknowledge the manual aspect of what I do as an artist.
When it comes down to it, would you be happy to be operated on by a surgeon who was recognised as “brilliant” …. but who suffered from dyspraxia?
- This venture into biography was unique on Elias’ part, as he is generally known as one of the major figures in the development of sociology during the twentieth century.