For one of my art classes , we were to watch this video series, “The Art Market” and write a short critique of the ways the monetary value of works of art is achieved in today’s art world,  with reference to the chapter on “Money” from the book “ART: Histories, Theories and Exceptions” by Adam Geczy.

I chose to wrote about Part 4 of the series, “Patrons”.

We see in Geczy’s account that art was valuable in the sense that it was beyond the world. Art is transcendent as it ‘speaks the unspeakable’. With this said, the patronage to the arts and the materialism it enforces is quite paradoxical. The more one buys them, collects, displays them, the more art seems to become something that is reachable; something very much within the world now.

We see how art is caught between capitalism and its truth to itself. The truth to itself being that raw passion of its very creation. It is not necessarily something to frown upon because patronage still is responsible for a huge role in helping the flourishing of the arts, putting it out there, and the artistic geniuses behind them.

In the end and in my opinion, the reason why patronage is something so important to some people and addicting too is because patronage, as I see it, is really about possessing something we can literally never truly own. But patronage along with its capitalistic nature, and societal class implications has also become a culture too in itself.

It is the culture that gives the art scene order. It values the sanctity of any artwork and as to not just as mere artisanship as it was viewed before. The higher an artwork is sold in auction houses and are sold or bought by patrons, in my opinion, saves the transcendence of art. We can see there is that interesting symbiotic relationship among capitalism, patronage, and the arts.