Ally and Enemy

As an artist, you are interested solely in the work of genius and what it takes to bring it into being. The existence of a market for art, with money sloshing against its walls, is a strong indicator that a masterpiece may emerge. But for someone who makes art, that fact alone is not enough. As an artist, you want to know what can be said about art and judgments of taste in terms of quality, substance and falsifiability.

What Shakespeare, Velázquez and Kubrick have in common is that they look their audience, in other words their market, straight in the eye and show it something it otherwise fails to see: itself, seen through the eyes of someone whose deepest loyalty lies with the work of art, who is therefore neither an ally nor an enemy, but has something of both. In that role, the artist exposes a ruler's weakness through the eyes of the people, or the individual's insignificance through the eyes of death. Only in that role can an artist master the market.