Subnostr

Ezra Pound points to a very small group of peers / audience that are necessary for being accurate judges of the quality of the work:

“The curse of a large audience is not its largeness but crassness of its criteria. A painter or writer who paints or writes for the multitude is, or becomes, a bad painter or a bad writer not because masterwork is incapable of wide distribution, but because masterwork is incapable of wide recognition immediately after its birth.

The artist must work for the few because there are only a few for whom he can really work.

There are at no time more than a few hundred, or perhaps a few dozen, men who know at first sight whether a given work of any one living artist is that definite artist's best; whether it is actually the finest thing he can do or whether it represents a bad moment, a tired hour, a day when his head or his hand or both was, or were, being lazy.

When the artist ceases to work for this vigorous circle of harsh friends and priceless

"enemies"; when he begins to work for the public who will buy his canvas or his copy for his name, careless of quality, incapable of knowing the quality, his work begins to decline.”

chowcollection 2y ago

My perspective is that for this type of artist who is operating at the highest level (according to themselves) they are always capable of making an even better masterpiece than the one they made before. So the potential is always there to raise the bar over and over again, but obviously we can only see those results if someone is paying for them. And sometimes these new projects will cost a huge amount of money, and no buyers can be found, and that unrealized potential just dies with the artist.

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chowcollection 2y ago

So besides all the great artworks that got destroyed over time, I also think about all the great artworks that could have been made if there had simply been one more patron to fund the next project. In retrospect, we would pay anything to have extra masterpieces from the great artists in history, but at the time that this is possible with art patronage, the cost is relatively tiny.