ARTIST AGAINST SOCIETY
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we call artists. One has to say "in part prosperous" because history
affords no example of any great society prosperous throughout. The
past is one vast scarcity economy, and all the mighty historical move–
ments, from the expansion of Rome to the expansion of Europe and
America, have mainly been plundering expeditions to remedy the
niggardliness of Nature or the economic failure of man. So that if
we survey what may be termed the alimentary history of art in the
West, the fact that stands out is that with a few (and perhaps mis–
leading) exceptions, art has always led a hand-to-mouth existence. It
has had to find the few nutritious pockets of a social system that
could hardly maintain government without going bankrupt, and
that never succeeded in truly organizing material life.
To put it differently, art and artists have invariably had to
seek out the temporary holders of power and wealth, the Elite. On its
side, this variable class-again with a few individual exceptions–
has never supported art from motives of pure generOSity, nor has it
ever regarded the artist as a man on a level with its own members.
The reasoning that we now take for granted, that art is "a good
thing," a regular product among other goods which a self-respecting
nation must produce, is of recent origin. The traditional motives for
support have been such as we should now consider irrevelant, or at
least secondary: ritual and religious motives-celebrating the ancient
City or propagating the law, the gospels, and the glory of God;
civic rivalry and collective self-advertisement in the later Middle
Ages; political and dynastic motives in royal establishments and
their appurtenances; sheer ostentation and conspicuous consump–
tion in princely or bourgeois households since the Renaissance;
personal snobbery and commercial profit within the last two hundred
years, when the idea of Art as a good-in-itself has gradually taken
shape.
It is worth dwelling on this point that at no time within the
2,500 years of Western history has art been financed for the intrinsic
reasons now proposed to our century. Yet we know that despite this
fact Western art has been remarkably abundant, varied, indomitable,
profound, inspiriting- one is tempted to say god-like. It has defied
the dead hand of authority, circumvented policing, and escaped the
suicide of anarchy; it has sprouted in all the likely and unlikely places,
and overcome what must have looked like the laws of Nature itself-
