Full transcript and links: https://sponge.ithakaonmymind.com/audio/i-do-it-for-love-the-market-decides/ Everything I do is organized here: https://ithakaonmymind.com/ ✨✨✨ This, I absorbed from "The Mirror and the Palette" by Jennifer Higgie: there was no past in the history of humanity that can be glorified for the separation between art and the market. “The Mirror and the Palette” is a book about female self-portraiture. And I thought about the inevitable symbiosis between art and the market when the author mentioned the Dutch artist Judith Leyster. I got this pronunciation for her name from an article titled, “How to Pronounce the Names of Some Dutch Painting Masters.” I hope I’m saying it correctly. In the book, well before Judith Leyster is mentioned by name, Jennifer Higgie talks about how difficult it is to attribute a painting to the correct artist. Wars happen. Mishandling happens. And sometimes, everyone does their job and destroys nothing, and yet through the simple passing of time, the roots and sources of artwork get… blurry. Considering this tendency toward art being separated from the artist, what Judith Leyster did was genius. She had a distinctive monogram. It was J, followed by an l, with a little star next to it. “Jl*.” Isn’t this so wonderful? Isn’t it great that an artist made her pride in her work perfectly clear by branding it for the market? Yes. I think Judith Leyster had the market in mind. This seems to be an early example of branding, not only for the sake of putting a name tag on something, but specifically for the market, for others to see and recognize. Why was it that other artists didn’t always do something similar? There could be many reasons. First of all, many markets back then might have been so personal, so person-to-person, that a written, visible brand wasn’t needed unless you were particularly ambitious—say, if you were someone who dreamed of having their work be known on the opposite side of the continent. Otherwise, you might have known everyone involved in your particular local market. You knew the baker, the butcher, the seamstress, and so on. And they knew you. So, a separate brand that is distinguishable from your face might not have been necessary, in most cases. Another explanation is that maybe, not signing a work might have been interpreted as humility. Whatever the reason is, our current inability to connect past works to all their creators is sad. And taking these examples from the past, I look at the present. In some modern circles, there seems to be the misconception that before the capitalist domination of society, or before globalization, or before the arrival of electricity and widely-available technology—basically, before everything that characterizes the modern world—there used to be an idyllic dream period in which artists could make art, free from the market, and therefore didn’t need to do any branding or marketing or sales or any such thing. I believe this is just that: a misconception. Before the aforementioned elements of modernity appeared, the biggest market in the Western world was the Church. It was what bought art. If the Church-dominated times seemed to preclude branding, marketing, and sales, then it was because it controlled the market to such an extent that such efforts were futile. ... .. .