The artists that I know are their own worst (or most harsh) critic, and so for me they are the best judge of their past work. They also know when they can do something even better, and that’s what art patronage needs to identify and support. But I think the hardest part is finding an artist like that who is the best in their field. They will be the best, they will have the highest standards for themselves, and they will also be extraordinary harsh critics of themselves. In a sense they are in competition with themselves, but they also need to attract funding somehow, and that’s a different kind of competition that may have nothing to do with the quality of their art. I would argue that an artist like that with a marketing team would be unstoppable. Kind of like a great band with a powerful record label backing them.
Discussion
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.”
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.
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.
Thanks. Once the artist has determined which of their works is their best and group of experts have concurred, and have labeled said work a "masterpiece" can this guarantee that future generations of artists and experts will feel the same way? Is it possible to determine in the present, whether a piece of art will sustain the tests of time? Also, a piece of art may be ignored in the present and then as the perceptions and beliefs of those assessing art change, they may change their defintion and label it as a materpiece in retrospect.
This to me, must be the greatest risk of the collector. How do you assess the current value of a work, when you don't know the criteria future collectors will use to assess the work you have purchased?
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.
Thank you. I think I may understand your point of view. There are certain criteria/thresholds that can met in the present, to accurately identify an artist who has the capacity to create a masterpiece. There is no guarantee that they will be able to accomplish this, but technology may be able to be used to spread the risk of funding his/her work, instead of relying on a single patron. Thereby increasing the probability that more masterpieces can be created, which would benefit humanity as whole?
Well I think that identifying artists with the capacity to create masterpieces will be a talent that patrons will already have, otherwise how would they know how to spend their money? It’s definitely not random guessing. I think there’s way too many choices of artists available for randomness to work. If that talent isn’t there, then the quality of the collection will not impress anyone. Likewise, a talented indie record label has to identify gifted bands and back them, and that music will impress, or not. For visual artists I think single patrons are necessary for unique works of art, so you would need a lot of single patrons to do the heavy lifting for lots of artists.
I would argue that there are just as many failed collectors/patrons as there are failed artists, and that patrons have to just as gifted at choosing artists to support as artists have to be gifted at creating art.
Yes, and like you said earlier it’s not just a matter of assessing the art, a good patron would have to be able to asses the artist as well.