Art has a funny relationship with money. On the one hand, there are diehard anti-capitalist artists. Anti-capitalists tend to deliberately make art which can’t be commoditised, in a general sense sold. On the other hand there are institutions that print money from art. You can perhaps think of large auction houses as examples. Most people tend to fall in between these two extremes.
The question of art and money isn’t a new question, either. Art as we know it today—from an artist who creates, rather than from an anonymous craftsperson—has been around since about the renaissance and so has the question of money within art. Renaissance art was funded by patrons. These tended to be wealthy families, such as the Medici family. Patrons had a tremendous influence on art. For example, the Medici family bankrolled Michelangelo and also the writing about Michelangelo—via Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects). In today’s parlance, they had influence over art and media. And if we look at today, things haven’t changed much. The rich and powerful still hold sway over much of art and media. Things have gotten better with the internet. The very fact that I and others run small art publications is testament to that.
Wherever you stand on the subject of art and money, the fact is there’s a relationship between art and money. Arguably, more now than ever, as we live in a hyper capitalist society (relative to any other time in history).
Today’s environment is a mix of ‘past’ institutions—e.g., museums, universities—and emerging technology-based ‘organisms’ (to use the parlance of ecosystems). The new media for art is online. Whether art itself will ever be more online than not is another question. But information about art being available online and the importance of information technologies as media seems difficult to deny.
Substack’s (the platform this is written on) value proposition is to fund culture. This is important in the same way the Medici’s were important to art. People who fund art influence art! On Substack, people get to ‘vote’ on the creation of art and culture. The resulting logic is what gets funded gets made.
Bringing me to the subject of the curated pictures of Vitrine. The curated pictures have been popular. They continue to be popular. However, when running a paid publication the threshold for creating what amounts to information for people is a high bar. Vitrine doesn’t reach the bar, so will end as a format. C’est la vie.
There will be a new format to replace Vitrine—which is yet to be decided. Art changes and so does Readymades. It should in theory be an improvement!