Mumford -- Art and Technics (v)

"What my friend Matthew Nowicki used to say about architecture--that a great client was essential in the production of a great building--holds for every other form of art..." (28)

"[the] stage of full maturity...that only great art reaches...in both the artist and his community it demands a certain dedication, indeed a certain sacrifice, that sets it off from the more decorative and pleasurable phases of art." (29)

Cue Branford on Cecil for a not-so-friendly reminder that there are limits to what artists can reasonably expect from audiences. That said, neither community nor clientele is exactly the same as audience; in fact, Mumford reminds us here, the latter is rather limited in influence compared to the more pervasive, less tractable influence of both the wider community and the specific person or group controlling the purse strings.

I suspect that virtually every gigging musician can recall at least one instance (but probably more than one) of client and audience being out of step, where all chains of accountability ran through the client and none directly between artist and audience. Perhaps this scenario belongs too properly to the commercial rather than the artistic world to be relevant here; it most certainly belongs to the community, though, and it most certainly represents a temporary breakdown of that institution. Communities get the art they deserve, the art for which they have laid the foundation via whatever conduct and discourse prevails therein; clients get the art they ask for, whether they know what they're actually asking for or not; and audiences too often are left to choose from among the debris field of broken relationships and communication bottlenecks.

The notion that the community has a role to play in helping its art to reach the greatest possible heights has unfortunately become conflated with the task of initiating the non-initiated into such esoteric art practices as the administrophere sees fit to impose on them. This in and of itself does nothing to create the conditions under which art thrives.