Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 34-35))

ART AS A COMMODITY

AT the risk of being branded as a Philistine, I feel it necessary to express
my views on the relations of artist and patron in the buying and selling
of works of art.
Nobody will question the right of the artist in producing a picture to use
any materials he may desire irrespective of permanency. No more can anyone
presume to take away from him the privilege of valuing his work artistically
above the most prized possessions of any museum. As long as he is working
for his own satisfaction there is no limit to his rights.
But very few are the translators of visions of beauty who do not seek for
recognition of their merits and who do not expect this recognition to take the
form of an exchange of their cherished productions for the despised shekels
of the bourgeois.
Hard as it may be for them to admit the truth of the following statement,
it is a fact that when this exchange takes place the artist becomes a merchant.
His status as an artist stops with the production of the picture. When he seeks
to dispose of it, we must look upon him as a dealer, and in the transaction both
parties have certain rights and certain obligations towards one another.
The first obligation both parties assume is the exchange of fair equiva-
lents. Artists, as a rule, are inclined to think of people with money as a favored
class who simply happen to have been standing in a propitious spot during a
* ‘local shower” of gold, and that all they had to do was to stretch out their
hands to gather in the precious metal. They forget too easily that in the
majority of cases money is the reward of thought, labor, worries, privations
and hardships, that the man who is tendering them the precious medium of
exchange may in order to do so be depriving himself of many comforts.
The artist takes the point of view that he is a benefit to the community
and that the community owes him a living. To a certain extent he is right.
A community is certainly the richer intellectually by the work of its artists,
and benefits by the contemplations of beautiful expression. Too many so-
called patrons of the arts believe in patronizing “the arts but not the artists.”
On the other hand, we cannot deny the man who possesses money to dispose
of it as he sees fit and to appreciate on his own basis the value to himself of the
work he intends to acquire. This value, in terms of money, is based on many
elements the least of which is probably its intrinsic artistic value. This is a
regrettable state of affairs, but we might as well try to suppress the law of
attraction of planets among themselves as to correct certain economic laws.
The prime factor in all questions of value is the law of supply and demand,
and the artist who complains that his beautiful paintings bring him less cash
than those of a less talented brother painter is reasoning in very much the same
way as the farmer who complains that his beautiful apples from a bountiful
crop are worth less on the market than the poorer specimens of a lean year
twelve months previous.
The amount of pleasure the possessor will get from the work purchased as
compared with other possible enjoyments to be obtained from the purchasing

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