Saturday, March 16, 2013

The Patron of Art - The Maecenas - and the Idea of Freedom

My dear friends, life is getting to my nerves.
Literally.
After I trapped one of them in my back between two intervertebral discs, I had some days off, reading and wincing and not very happy. All the while I could not work and time and money where running out. :-(

And while I read, some phantastic, some SciFi and a little bit of medieval I begann questioning myself - is there some of the tradition still alive, when rich and influential people took patronage of artists? So I scanned the great wide opens of the internet and found lots of statements that there are still maecenas and they still do the patronage thing for artist, museums and artschools.

But how do they find each other?

I really thought about it and find it hard to imagine how life would be if you had not all day long the struggle of shear surviving. When you could make "your true art" without spending a thought on "will it sell?", "will I be able to pay my bills?"..

But what about freedom? Is the sponsored artist still free or more the pet of his maecenas?

What do you think?

All I want to do ist "Art". It builds up inside of me and then it breaks through - but sleeping peacefully for the first time in years, knowing, there is no struggling of survival, knowing, there ist pure creative energy flowing rough you waiting to take shape...wouldn´t that be alluring?

Found this very interesting Artikel: Patronage and the Status of the Artist