
Grand Aesthete Podcast
Artists Are Right to Hate the Free Market
<p>Artists have always possessed a healthy suspicion of merchants.</p><p>The merchant asks what people will buy. The artist asks what deserves to exist. These questions can cooperate for a time, though they eventually quarrel over the bill. One concerns appetite. The other concerns worth.</p><p>Modern defenders of the free market tend to regard artistic hostility toward commerce as a mixture of vanity and economic illiteracy. The artist, they suspect, wants applause without customers, patronage without obedience, and money without the vulgar inconvenience of producing something anyone wishes to purchase. There are artists who fit this...






