We are all familiar with the Renaissance artist who seeks to curry favour with a wealthy patron b... more We are all familiar with the Renaissance artist who seeks to curry favour with a wealthy patron by including his face, perhaps in an idealised version, among those of the bystanders at the Nativity, say, but altogether more interesting than such acts of pure ingratiation are sponsored works fraught with conflicting feelings of gratitude and resentment, works in which the beholden painter at once lashes out and pulls his punch, bites the feeding hand and tends to the inflicted wound. The present essay will explore the various forms which this tension takes in works spanning 150 years. In tracing a trajectory which takes in – and imparts representative significance to – Courbet, Duchamp, Gavin Turk and Tanja Ostojić, it will necessarily engage with a range of different kinds of works (traditional painting, painting produced in defiance of the artist’s inclinations at the behest of an insensitive patron, installation works of a site-specific kind, performance pieces incorporating the patron) and also define the patron in a fluctuating sense (whether as a rich individual capable of bankrolling a favoured artist or as an influential curator with the power to make or break careers with his exhibition selections). These variables will enter the discussion as interestingly complicating factors informing the relationship between artist and patron.
We are all familiar with the Renaissance artist who seeks to curry favour with a wealthy patron b... more We are all familiar with the Renaissance artist who seeks to curry favour with a wealthy patron by including his face, perhaps in an idealised version, among those of the bystanders at the Nativity, say, but altogether more interesting than such acts of pure ingratiation are sponsored works fraught with conflicting feelings of gratitude and resentment, works in which the beholden painter at once lashes out and pulls his punch, bites the feeding hand and tends to the inflicted wound. The present essay will explore the various forms which this tension takes in works spanning 150 years. In tracing a trajectory which takes in – and imparts representative significance to – Courbet, Duchamp, Gavin Turk and Tanja Ostojić, it will necessarily engage with a range of different kinds of works (traditional painting, painting produced in defiance of the artist’s inclinations at the behest of an insensitive patron, installation works of a site-specific kind, performance pieces incorporating the patron) and also define the patron in a fluctuating sense (whether as a rich individual capable of bankrolling a favoured artist or as an influential curator with the power to make or break careers with his exhibition selections). These variables will enter the discussion as interestingly complicating factors informing the relationship between artist and patron.
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