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Security for the artist:
At what Price?

Alexander Shurbanov

There must be more exciting topics to do with art and the artist than the latter's economic status with its bathetic sound. And yet the concern with such mundane matters should not be seen as philistine, for they affect the very essence of the artistic product.

We would probably all agree that the mission of art is an unending quest for the truth about man and his world. Nothing less than the truth is acceptable here and the slightest compromise can inflict irreparable damage. This raises the position of the artist to that of a soothsayer endowed with an unblurred vision and communicative power. An enviably exclusive stance indeed, but one that is only feasible outside the world of man, for no object can be assessed from within.

The artist, however, is human and is therefore destined to remain part and parcel of what he is called upon to reveal. Some of this can probably be taken as natural, and it may be argued that it is a measure of the artist's greatness to be able to rise above the prejudices of class and race and to transcend the limitations of a historical period in addressing humanity at large. Difficult as this aim might be, it is not unattainable.

But there is another, more subtle aspect of the artist's involvement with the world that only the luckiest have been able to shun. The artist is, first of all a 'corpus naturale' and is therefore compelled, if he is to survive and carry on his work, to ensure his daily sustenance. This very need turns the would-be impartial observer of human comedy into its irredeemable hanger-on. For, in order to be able to plunge into professional writing, painting, music-making, etc., you have to first obtain some basic security, a quiet and sheltered nook where your mind can be reasonably free of the nagging concerns that flesh is heir to.Tolstoy had his estate of Yasnaya Polyana, which made him his own man, but how many of his fellows have been half as fortunate? Most of the others have been compelled to cultivate not only the art of their calling but also the parallel art of pleasing the potential source of material support for themselves and their families.

For European artists in the Middle Ages that was almost always the Church, and so most of the art of that period bears undeniable marks of its makers' eagerness to comply with the priorities of that formidable institution. However, alternative sources started cropping up with the rise of a class that called itself noble and developed an ever stronger taste for luxury. So side by side with the monasteries the aristocratic mansions became places where an artist could seek employment. As the Renaissance drew near, one of the components of ancient culture due for a rebirth was the figure of the Roman Maecenas as the new patron. Not even the greatest of modern poets could afford to spare himself the servility of the following mercenary dedication:

"Right Honourable,
I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden. Only, if your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised; and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your Honourable survey, and your Honour to your heart's content, which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world's hopeful expectation.

Your Honour's in all duty,
William Shakespeare.

Cervantes's accolades of his patrons were even more extravagant. But dedications are, of course, paratexts. For four centuries now packs of commentators have been ransacking the works of these and other writers of genius for the traces of courtly compliment to the high and mighty and their endeavours have not been unrewarded. The writings of no lesser men then Dante, Chaucer, Spenser abound in various forms of enforced sycophancy. When one comes to the problem of why Shakespeare chose to write the tragedy of Macbeth directly after the accession to the English throne of Scottish king claiming descendancy from the line of Banquo, or why a little earlier he demonised Richard III whom the Tudors abhorred, things become even more complicated. One may also ask how truthful was the inimitable Velasques in the many equestrian and pedestrian portraits of his royal master. These are questions that must remain unanswered, and we wave them aside with the consolation that it is enough to be able to enjoy the aesthetic excellence of the paintings. At the dawn of the modern age Capitalism cam to replace the patron with a new paymaster for all art, the market, i.e. the lowest common denominator of public taste. William Morris called it Commerce. And he had the following to say about its reign:

The poet, the artist, the man of science, is it not true that in their fresh and glorious days, when they are in the heyday of their faith and enthusiasm, they are thwarted at every turn by Commercial War, with its sneering question 'Will it pay?'. Is it not true that when they begin to win worldly success, when they become comparatively rich, in spite of ourselves they seem to us tainted by the contact with the commercial world?
Need I speek of great schemes that hang about neglected; of things most necessary to be done, and so confessed by all men, that no one can seriously set a hand to because of the lack of money; while if it be a question of creating or stimulating some foolish whim in the public mind, the satisfaction of which will breed a profit, the money will come in by the ton.

Is this not a familiar situation? Have things in the so called "democratic" or "free" world changed radically in their essence for the last 120 years since these bitter words were put on paper? Of course, there have been artists such as Gauguin and Dickens, and Balzac, who do not seem to have been tainted by their intimate contact with the commercial world, yet their triumph in the teeth of adversity does not make the overall picture more palatable. The toll of the Commercial War is no less appalling.

What is really disconcerting is that Morris's dream of a more equitable social arrangemet has proved a failure. Communism placed all art together with everything else under the control (the preferred phrasing was: the leadership) of the ruling Party and its state mechanism. Artists were enrolled in their respective organisations (unions) where they could be kept all the time under Big Brother's watchful gaze. These unions were quite rich, thanks to the generosity of their patron, the state, and to a kickback return of a certain percentage from all sales of artistic output to their coffers. The administration of the unions was effectively appointed by the headquarters of the Communist Party and was directly responsible to it. An important part of its duties was to recruit the right kind of people into the ranks of its membership, to stage-manage yearly public surveys of all the production of that membership, to divide carefully the goats from the sheep and to cleanse it of those who had shown any disrespect to the Party or the state.

It was possible, of course, to exist outside the union. But then you had to be prepared to keep your art to yourself and to a close circle of friends without any hope that you could reach a wider audience. In the case of actors (who need a stage) or painters (whose paints and brushes were rationed by their union) it was practically impossible to carry out any professional activity outside the system. Left to shift for yourself, you became a suspicious misfit a could, like Joseph Brodsky in Russia, be declared a loafer and confined to a place where you would be more usefully employed for the benefit of the state.

Those who were privileged to remain within the pale were taken good care of. They were provided with sinecure appointments and were regularly published and rewarded. Their only obligation was to be loyal to their masters. Thus an art of "socialist realism" flourished endeavouring to fill the nation with confidence in the soundness of the Party line and the bright future it was leading to. Whoever did not like this arrangement was free to leave the union - and, ultimately, the profession. Most of the artists chose a compromise solution of this ethical problem: they continued to present a front of conformity while contriving to hide behind it a host of subversive impulses. This duality resulted in the widespread phenomenon of Aesopian language in art, which impregnated all culture with irony and suspense. When one turns to the end-product of this subtle and dangerous game now, one is bound to be disappointed by its palliative character. Minimal economic security and the right of professional realisation in those days had to be paid for by a compromising of the very function of art as soothsaying.

With the coming down of the Berlin wall in late 1989, this defective system of regulating art as an ideological instrument of the state collapsed in all European lands that had been forced to adopt the Soviet political model. Now the artists in this area are free again - free to find a place under the sun without oppressive control and without assistance, free to fight for a niche in the market that has regained its supremacy. Is this an occasion for rejoicing? The feeling of being deserted, almost orphaned is, at least in my country, quite common among those who had formerly been used to the stifling yet life-giving embrace of the state. It is glorious to be able to speak out, without fear and calculation, the full truth that you think you are in possession of. Yet you are soon thrown back on the maxim that in order to proclaim the truth you must keep yourself alive. And the age-old paradox re-emerges. Difficult questions are asked and we do not know their answers. Should we try to retain something of the totalitarian structure of central funding for the arts? Is that possible to do without jeopardising their autonomy? How should our new legislation encourage the alternative system of decentralised support? Will the artist be forced to look for a steady, "respectable" job and relegate his aesthetic pursuits to a mere sideline?

At the moment the economic status of the post-communist artist is at its lowest, which makes his newly acquired intellectual freedom fictitious and leaves him at the mercy of a topsy-turvy market mechanism. Its temptations are largely destructive or so they appear to us as we emerge from our darkly sheltered past. We shall, no doubt, have to turn to the experience of our Western colleagues and learn from their solutions of the problems that have long afflicted the relationship between art and society. However, there will inevitably be some particular differences in our approach to these problems conditioned by our different history. One of these, it seems to me, is our eagerness to form new, independent associations of the arts which could help us to fight for an appropriate place in the emerging democratic set-up. There will come into being new forms of protection or patronage for the artist in this still uncertain context. Some of them may even be international, perhaps under the auspices of UNESCO, the first signs of which we have already witnessed. The price for the new settlement has to be carefully negociated, for, as before, it concerns nothing less than the authenticity of art and, consequently, its mission.

Alexander Shurbanov
Association of Bulgarian Writers

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