I haven’t studied the topic enough, but it would be very interesting to see when this dichotomy of money-making vs. self-interest really embedded itself into the act of creation. Somewhere during the Industrial Revolution, I suppose. But I also think the default mode of “art as self expression” plays a big part, and that’s more early-mid 20th century.
Because when you read about creators during say, the Renaissance, you don’t really have this much of a dichotomy. Da Vinci worked on a paid portrait project, and then did unpaid experiments on his own which ended up being useful for his paid projects. It was a very loop-like thing and I think he would find the explicit framing of “I’m doing this to make money” and “I’m doing this purely to create something I want to create” as alien. Ditto for most forms of art in most parts of the world, prior to the late 19th century.
The solution, I think, might be to focus primarily on the craft and not on the end product. You see this a lot with early 20th century fiction writers that moved in and out of journalism, with the idea that they were becoming better at the craft of writing, not at creating a final product or “being a good fiction writer.”
Whilst visiting Florence, I found out that Michelangelo is broadly considered the first artist to set his own price for his work.
Before him, the patron would go “I need this cathedral painted” and the patron would also decide how much to pay the artist (generally they’d be paltry sums). With Michelangelo, the patron would go “I need this cathedral painted,” and Michelangelo would go “sure, that’d be 400 golden florins, take it or leave it.” There are stories of him not delivering his work when the patron decided to change the price after the fact.
On the topic, I think that if the “money-making” bit is defined broadly enough, then it merges very well with self-interest. Like if someone asked me to make a remix of a song, but then how I’d do that is left completely up to me, it’s a broad enough task as to feel like I’m in control. At that point, there’s very little of the feeling of “I’m doing this for money.”
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
― L.P. Jacks
In the sense of the article artists have always done their best to cater to the taste of the people who might pay them. At least from the 16th century. They were typically paid for and protected by a mecenas (wealthy Merchant or nobility). There are no doubt exceptions but in general the art was to please their mecenas.
Right but (and I could be wrong here) it seems like lamenting this is largely a recent thing. Renaissance artists were focused on creating the best possible work, not lamenting that they had to make paintings for money and not for their own desires.
You are making quite the assumption there. There are quite a few among us focusing on creating the best possible work. And there are quite a few back then who did the opposite. Wouldn't you wonder where the conception that things were different came from?
As I said, I could be wrong. If you have an example of artists in the distant past lamenting the fact that they can’t do what they want and instead must make art for money, I’d be glad to read them.
I didn’t say people today aren’t creating the best possible work, I said this focus on the juxtaposition between the market and the self seems like a recent thing to me.
Depends on how you define "lamenting". Unless there are diaries of the artists in question, it is very difficult to know the private thoughts of people in the distant past. That said, there are certainly well-documented stories of artists being forced to change their work because of (unreasonable) demands from their patrons.
One example is the Windsor guildhall [1], where the architect was forced to add extra columns "for safety reasons" even though he knew they were unnecessary and even though they conflicted with his artistic vision. He was clearly unhappy with this and made them all an inch short of the ceiling as a demonstration to later generations, even though it was impossible to see this from ground level so he still got paid.
Michelangelo would also appease his patron (gonfaliere Soderini) while he was present, famously by faking the altering of the nose of his statue of David. Then some years later while Soderini had fled to Rome for unrelated reasons, Michelangelo publicly made fun of Soderini and mentioned that he only worked for him because he paid so well [2].
These are just some examples that readily came to mind, I'm sure there are many many more. The concept of patronage has existed at least since Roman times, and very much implied that the artists involved would spend their time glorifying their patron instead of just doing "what they want".
Da Vinci perhaps did not lament, but hustled hard to minimize the amount of boring commissions people were most willing to pay for (portraits of noblewomen, of merchants' daughters etc.). And, when he did take a boring commission work, he could procrastinate on it for years, or never finish it at all.
I mean, this is part of the story of Caravaggio, right? So much of the standards for art (if you wanted any patronage) at the time were around "what is the church willing to pay for", and Caravaggio alternated between painting stuff that would get him money from the church, and painting stuff that the church wouldn't condone (because of the unapproved ways he used particular symbols, or because they were just secular subject matter).
Well, that and his tendency to murder folks, of course. But that part's less relevant to the "how old is art-for-money-vs-art-for-art" discussion.
I would place somewhere between the 1970s and 1980s. Prior to Reaganomics I remember it being pretty easy to get by on very little money. The go go eighties really changed materialism from my perspective.
I meant I don't comprehend what you are saying. I would expect an elaboration on the point you were making. Please I'm not making any connections between what I dive to normal would be. What is normal?
It's more that I'm suspecting that you're thinking that the first post-WW2 decades were something "normal", rather than something that might not be achieved on this planet ever again ?
Well there is our confusion. I think that WW2 had a great distortion on what is considered "normal". I think that we have been living in a wartime economy mentality ever since.
I working towards a more local scale which is pre-ww2.
In the fine art world, definitely I agree. That’s when Gagosian etc. really started taking off and making the fine art market a thing for billionaires.
Because when you read about creators during say, the Renaissance, you don’t really have this much of a dichotomy. Da Vinci worked on a paid portrait project, and then did unpaid experiments on his own which ended up being useful for his paid projects. It was a very loop-like thing and I think he would find the explicit framing of “I’m doing this to make money” and “I’m doing this purely to create something I want to create” as alien. Ditto for most forms of art in most parts of the world, prior to the late 19th century.
The solution, I think, might be to focus primarily on the craft and not on the end product. You see this a lot with early 20th century fiction writers that moved in and out of journalism, with the idea that they were becoming better at the craft of writing, not at creating a final product or “being a good fiction writer.”