I think this goes back to that Ezra Pound quote above: the artist will know immediately, the patrons will know immediately, a small circle around them may know, but otherwise a wide public appreciation might take decades if not hundreds of years. But you could argue: Does this still hold true in the age of social media, where you could share these works millions of times on the Internet? I don’t know. It’s worth experimenting to find out. I’ve been wondering what would be the equivalent to livestream reactions to music videos for the visual arts, and whether there is an audience for that. I will say this: if there are enough patrons out there to get the great artists the funding they need to do their best works throughout their lives, that’s the bare minimum that should be expected for any culture. Any one patron is not going to have the definitive opinions about who those great artists are, so it’s more like a patchwork that hopefully covers all the bases.