As it is perceived today, art derives much of its value from the expectation that it is a product of agency: birthed in a vacuum free of direction, intellectual constraints, and societal expectation. In practice, however, art is liable to its market demand curve and, though often acknowledged discreetly to avoid unnecessary commercial contamination, many artists do hope to produce market works that ultimately distance them from the adulated trope of the starving artist. Exploring the way in which the relationship between artistic creation and social hierarchy has shifted between Renaissance art patronage and contemporary art markets, I’d however argue that artists have gained agency and are less constrained by social hierarchy in the contemporary art market.

The patronage system that dominated the Renaissance art market forfeited creativity and artistic license to the contracts constraining the production of art to whatever was agreed upon between artist and patron, assigning an upper-bound to the agency and power afforded to Renaissance-era artists. In Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Michael Baxandall outlines the nature of Renaissance-era contracts — some going so far as to require a certain pigment of specified quality (Gherardo Starnina’s contract for Life of the Virgin was “meticulous about blue”, requiring a more expensive ultramarine used for Mary then the rest of the painting, registering importance with a violet tinge), and others specifying whose hand was deemed appropriately skilled (Fillipino Lippi’s contract allowing solely Piero’s hand to touch the brush). Implied in the Renaissance-era relationship between artist and patron was the greater social hierarchy granted to the patron as the buyer of, and thus ultimate decision-maker for, art.

Contemporary artists such as the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt and the NFT artist Pak are a testament to how this hierarchy is confronted, questioned, and defied in the art market of today. LeWitt’s unilateral and chosen nonchalance towards his installations stands in strong contrast to the meticulous intentionality of Renaissance patrons such as Lippi, who governed even the hands with licensed access to his commissioned work. LeWitt refrains from any physical implementation of his art beyond a birds-eye approval of the overall installation, entrusting the hands of whichever skilled aides or novice volunteers are to realize his work — introducing a contract between the buyer and LeWitt wherein accepting a lack of the artist’s hand is imposed upon the buyer. Pak’s challenge of the historical hierarchies manifests through his implied mockery of his buyers. In Fungible Open Editions, Pak allows buyers to purchase any number of “cubes” (individual NFT units) that, depending on the buyer’s overall “cube” ownership, will deliver a different set of NFTs. Through Fungible Open Editions, Pak perverts the act of purchasing art (a process with requisite care, expertise, and purpose woven throughout) by limiting his buyers to purchasing abstract units, stripping them of determination and agency. Pak derides his audience through leveraging this perversion to produce and sell his art, a tribute to how his agency exceeds that of his buyers within the hierarchy present in the contemporary art market.

Though the hierarchical positioning of artists and Renaissance patrons is distinguishable from that of buyers and contemporary artists, the incentive structure influencing audiences’ desires to immerse themselves in the art world remains invariant. In The Death of Leonardo da Vinci, Francis I of France is pictured receiving Leonardo’s last breaths in a fictional retelling of Leonardo’s death that compels a narrative intentionally interlacing Francis I’s depiction with Leonardo’s elusory genius. The painting is a timestamped testimony illustrating how even Europe’s kings lusted to interweave their person with the rare, unearthly brilliance assigned to artists.

Audiences have remained shackled to this instinctive thirst for prestige by association through to today. LeWitt and Pak appeal to an audience with a “tremendous surplus of economic capital and an equally large deficit of social and cultural capital”, lured by the promise of art as a medium of exchange between dollars and distinction. The spectacle accompanying art has persisted through the Renaissance period to the present and conceived the fetishization of art in audiences’ minds, wherein the market anchors itself on the external quality of art as a means to receive commodified admission to “buy access to a social world”. As audiences have remained enamored by the elusivity of artistic genius, they have increasingly turned to art as a tangible source of self-promotion, trusting the covenant that brushing shoulders with high-society buyers while chasing the cultural capital held by artists will ultimately convert into symbolic capital.

A complex interplay of increasing artistic agency, market forces, and societal incentive structures are revealed when examining what remains and what has been disrupted of the power structures regulating Renaissance art patronage to the art markets of the modern day. Our definition of and expectations for artistic creation have shifted in parallel — contemporary audiences bask in their struggle with esoteric art, craving art as nourishment principally for the mind and as a further matter for the eyes. Yet, as a medium of exchange between genius and prestige, audiences have and will continue to turn towards art as a currency of expression, social signaling, and intellectual provision.