Art - v-mammon - the debate rages

The prevalent evaluation and co-option of the arts as predominantly a series of commercial considerations is probably the single most debilitating influence on genuine creativity in the UK, actually throughout the world at the moment.

Certainly it cannot have failed to escape the notice of anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the history of art that wealth, patronage and the Fine-Arts-to-Order market have usually gone hand in hand. There's nothing like a Divine-Royal Charter

The fundamental difference was that the Medicis, the Borghias et al were still believers in, or at least occasionally intimidated by, a hazy notion of "God".
They supported artists with vision, years of training discipline, an ongoing drive to continually develop their talents and a sense of investment in the temporal to the greater glory of the spiritual, as a means by which they might help get their Patrons around Christ's severe admonishment concerning, rich men, eyes of needles, ease, camels and getting into heaven.

One could ask whether the faux-spiritual was a better motivation than the current predominantly dreadful Art the Super-rich now patronise as a hedge investment against the day their usual incomes from Girls, Guns, Drugs and dodgy Siberian resource pipelines dry up. Not much has changed since the Doge's day.

The question is whether patronage inspires great art, or whether great art, as an extension of the idea of the Divine, inspires the necessary patronage to support its creation?

In fact neither matters, as long as the common denominator is great art, rather than the ongoing and relentlessly overhyped High Value Fast Moving Consumer Goods which currently pass for meaningful and important in a Serotaesque sort of a way.

Charles Saatchi is an advertising man. His stock-in-trade is edgy, conceptual, tax-deductible throwaway storyboards and design resources for client pitch purposes. Much of what he now passes off as art has been hithertofore used in the flogging of oven-chips, mars bars, sanitary towels and the other useless consumptive detritus that his dreadful little business is engaged in forcing on us Droolers, Toilers and Couch-surfers of the world.

Using his high-priced help in marketing black-arts for perceptual infiltration and manipulation, artifically to inflate the inherent values of this mostly inconsequential conceptual "stuff" to the status of importance and value by giving it a name "Young British Art". By further sticking it on pedestals in galleries shows chutzpah and a remarkable gift for stealing the product of cess-pits and selling it back as soap.

Art's funding equations will never balance. Making good art is not easy. It can't be, by definition.

Perhaps, however, once we claw our way out of the looming depression, there will result in a far more positive Artistic legacy than we ever imagined. Less market and more ideas driven.
One in which only the committed and truly inspired will survive.

In the final analysis, and with a nod to Mr Darwin's bi-centennial, on the basis of natural selection this might be good for "the arts" of every genetic strain and disposition.