In the late 1400s, the city-state of Florence was surrounded on all sides by rivals and also threatened from within by the Medici family. David (the third king of Israel in the Bible) was a popular figure in art produced around the time symbolizing the defense of civil liberties. A twelve-member committee of the Operai del Duomo, a smaller office inside a larger office tasked with building and maintaining the Florence Cathedral, was responsible for commissioning new artworks to be displayed around the roof of the church. The Operai chose one submission by Michaelangelo as one of the new works, but the massive statue was unfit for the roof and was instead placed in front of the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government.
Karl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky of Woschütz / Gratz / Silesia / Austria / Prussia (I do not know European history well enough to keep track of who claimed what lands when — but today it’s part of the Czech Republic) was a musician and composer who met both Mozart and Beethoven in the late 1700s. Though falling out with Mozart within two years (resulting in a lawsuit!), Prince Lichnowsky supported Beethoven for the better part of a decade, paying him a stipend at the beginning of his career while Beethoven built a name for himself. From his early works, seven of which are dedicated to Prince, Beethoven’s star rose and more famous pieces such as Fur Elise or the Eroica Symphony would not have been possible without the early patronage of powerful men with lots of money. Opus 1 was performed for the first time in Lichnowsky’s own home.
In 1956, Nelle Harper Lee was a ticket agent in NYC for the British Overseas Airways Corporation writing in her spare time, trying to eke out a living while also pursuing a passion, something many New Yorkers are all too familiar with. Lee was a friends with a couple, Michael and Joy Brown, where Michael had built quite a fortune writing music for corporations like DuPont and JC Penney. (x) They recognized her talents and offered her the opportunity of a lifetime: quit work for a year and we’ll pay for your expenses. They gave her a Christmas present in the form of a year’s salary and Lee used that time to write what would become To Kill a Mockingbird.
Patronage gives artists the freedom to create masterpieces that stand the test of time. It used to be common for people with too much money to take a liking to an artist and pour funds into their vision to create something beautiful or thought provoking that previously didn’t exist in the world. Art can serve many purposes — to uplift us, to remind us of our humanity, to make us see the world differently — but someone has to pay for that.
To support the release of Lemonade, Beyoncé embarked on the Formation World Tour. Eventually grossing over $250 million, Beyoncé’s first solo stadium tour saw ticket averages upward of $400 (x), cementing her status as one of the wealthiest musicians in the entertainment industry. Whenenver I get a bonus at work, I go on a spending spree. This last one resulted in the biggest, most obnoxious television you have ever seen in a studio apartment (75 inches!) and Beyoncé is just like me — she started spending money. However, where I took my little piece of change and bought some material goods to make myself feel fancy, Beyoncé poured into her art, releasing an iconic string of masterpieces on par with Stevie Wonder’s 6-album run in the early 70s or Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Last Ark – ET – Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – The Color Purple section of his filmography. Look at what Beyoncé has done between 2016 and 2023 and recognize that this caliber of output is only possible if you have an extremely rich patron behind you to bankroll your vision and execute at this level of perfection.
Beyoncé kicked off the most expensive era of her career with her most understated (yet most quietly powerful) performance at the 2017 Grammys.
Dripping in gold and carrying two babies, Beyoncé took to the stage to give a memorable experience and an ode to women and motherhood that rises above the mere category of “awards show performance.”
Fresh off the priceless journey of producing two whole humans, Beyoncé made up for her canceled 2017 Coachella performance with what is largely regarded as one of the most iconic concerts of all time.
The journey from conception to performance was captured in Netflix’s Homecoming where Beyoncé gave the public a glimpse of the drive and determination it takes to be the standard bearer for live performance in this day and age. Paying homage to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Beyonce gathered an army of singers, musicians, and dancers to bring a culturual experience to the dry desert, something Tina Knowles initially had reservations about.
“I told Beyoncé that I was afraid that the predominately white audience at Coachella would be confused by all of the black culture and black college culture because it was something that they might not get,” she wrote on Instagram, next to a photo of a quote about the Coachella performance. “[Beyoncé’s] brave response to [my concerns] made me feel a bit selfish and ashamed. She said, I have worked very hard to get to the point where I have a true voice, and at this point in my life and my career, I have a responsibility to do what’s best for the world and not what is most popular.”
Then, she went from Coachella to Cardiff for the On the Run II Tour with Jay-Z a few months later. Ten days after the tour ended, The Carters released Everything is Love featuring “Apeshit” where they shut down the Louvre in Paris.
Granted, renting the Louvre for a shoot isn’t as expensive as one may think (less than $6000 for a music video), but every detail from the choreography to the styling to the cinematography is on a level you cannot reach without funding.
This is a pro-Beyoncé space so we don’t need to talk about The Lion King remake, but we do need to address how stunning the companion project is. Serving as a visual album counterpart to The Gift (the “soundtrack” for The Lion King), Black is King was directed, written, and produced by Beyoncé over the course of a year with filming on three continents.
After Black is King premiered on Disney+, Beyoncé took a break (we thought!), only contributing a song to the King Richard soundtrack 2021 along with a surprise performance in 2022 to accompany her first Oscar nomination. I’m convinced nobody does awards shows like Beyoncé-the-artist because nobody has a financial backer like Beyoncé-the-rich-patron.
Two months after that performance, Beyoncé announced her seventh studio album with a lead single to be released later that week. “Break My Soul” dropped on June 20th, 2022 followed by Renaissance the next month where the public was reminded that Beyoncé does not take breaks. The relatively quiet period after Black is King was spent creating an album triology with Renaissance as the first act.
Within this trilogy, we got the Renaissance World Tour which really needs no further exposition from me — y’all saw it, either in person, online, or on film.
The set, the costumes, the performers, the technology, and all of the little details constitute a massive undertaking with an enormous amount of funding. Even divorced from the actual green dollars it takes to put on a show of that size, think about the amount of mental energy it takes to conceptualize a movie (with appropriate blocking), a tour (with all its logistical concerns), and an album (for a cohesive artistic statement) simultaneously. Beyoncé was thinking about the movie for the tour before she even started creating the album, and we had no idea from the finished product that Renaissance the album was anything other than the best album of 2022, let alone one of three, let alone the end point of a vision that started with a concert film. Really pause and think about that mental energy and how you probably don’t have the capacity to do that, because you have to pay bills. Money makes that possible. Money is what gives you the freedom to even begin to conceive the kind of art that Beyoncé puts out, and that’s before you even have to spend a dime.
With Renaissance (and now with Cowboy Carter and the full trilogy I’m sure) we see Beyoncé the Curator and Visionary realize her full potential after building to this point from self-titled through today. People can have debates about Beyonce’s vocal, dancing, or performance ability (I don’t participate in those, but art is subjective and you’re allowed to like what you like), and they can have discussions about who her influences are and how much of her superstar status is due to those who paved the way before, but I stand firm on the fact that Beyoncé is a kind of artist and musician that we’ve never seen before in the way that she collaborates.
Art critique is interesting because it’s impossible to divorce it entirely from personal taste and inherent feelings about what should qualify as art. For music especially, critique has not really built space for artists who show a particular talent for collaboration, execution of a statement, and cohesion among various points of input. Beyoncé the Artist can have 20 contributors to an album because Beyoncé the Patron has the means to say “I have this vision. Go find whoever you need to find in order to produce this vision. I refuse to compromise on the finished product. I don’t care if you need to find an entire person to perfect 3 seconds of this vision — go find them. I can pay for it.” And then Beyoncé the Artist will find them.
There’s no space for this in music because so often the music isn’t always judged by the finished product but by the process to get there. Two people in a studio for three months is given point of prominence over 20 people making contributions over the span of five years, even when the finished product of one is objectively more impressive than the finished product of the other. If you make a ham sandwich all by yourself in 10 minutes, and I make a wedding cake with four people in five hours, is the sandwich better just because you did it yourself? Is the taste and experience of the wedding cake somehow diminished because we collaborated?
That’s a question music critique doesn’t like to ask.
With Renaissance, we saw Beyoncé continue her viewpoint from Coachella where she’s not concerned with the commercial result as long as her vision is intact, and we saw Beyoncé the Patron continue to promote the artistic statements of both lesser-known artists and well-known artists who may not have been given all their flowers. After the release we were discussing the contributions of queer icons like Honey Dijon and Kevin Aviance while Grace Jones was nominated for her first Grammy since 1984. Since self-titled, the Beyoncé Boost has launched careers. On that album, Beyoncé pulled a producer by the name of Boots from the back of beyond somewhere, and after a steady schedule of collaborations with artists from Kelela to Fischerspooner, two years ago his first film won Best Animation at the Bowery Film Festival. Not enough people had heard of Linda Martell or Shaboozey before Cowboy Carter. Shortly after release, the public became invested in the history of Black people in country music and Shaboozey is slated to perform at the BET Awards with a Top Ten single on the charts.
All of this is to say, I don’t really see the value in conversations about how much money Beyoncé has or what she does with it. I’m a lover of art. It should be evident to everyone by now that art is integral to the human experience. People have wanted to create from the moment we had the free time to take a break from gathering nuts and berries. As societies developed, people specialized. You could be an expert blacksmith, and be paid for your armor. You could be an expert horse trainer, and be paid to stay on retainer at a royal palace as Master of the Horse. You could be an expert in the visual arts, paid by commission to create the statue of David or the Mona Lisa. And you could be Beyoncé The Organization, paid by the people for the finished product, making the Patron wealthy enough and powerful enough to pour back into the Artist to create even more impressive projects in whichever form she desires to take.
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