Feudalism & the Artist:
A 21st-Century Meditation
Week 1 of our new series Feudalism & the Artist begins with the blueprint: how the artist became the landlord of culture, and how the platforms learned to rule.
The Altar whispers:
“Make something worthy of mystery."
The Algorithm whispers:
“Make something worthy of clicks."
You are not a product.
You are not a metric.
You are not a spark for someone else’s machine.
You are the bearer of something slower.
Older.
Dangerous.
Holy.
IN our prologue we looked inward at how images shape identity. Now, we turn outward, to explore how artists themselves helped build the structures we now find ourselves living within.
Once upon a time, art answered only to the soul. It whispered from garrets, poured out in candlelight, or was sung from church lofts by the half-starved. Artists with nature as teacher enjoyed the primacy of personal experience and debated the transformation of ordinary life into spiritual revelation.
But in this our own time, especially the gilded, glowing art years from the 1980s through the digital turn, a strange new thing happened. The artist became the landlord.
And then, all too quietly, became the tenant again.
In the twilight of the 20th century, the artist stepped into a kind of feudal power.
U2 once stood as revolutionaries--Sunday Bloody Sunday, Pride (In the Name of Love)--voices of resistance. Their music became empire. Their stage a citadel as they evolved into one of the most financially sophisticated acts in history. Their message, still urgent, was now delivered from within the machinery of global capital.
Picasso had showed the world that an artist’s name could become a stronghold. He didn’t just sell paintings, he packaged a mythology. Created a brand, as he proceeded to chop the human images into bits, to explore form, to push boundaries he displayed the disfigurment of life and war. And we loved it and mused on it. For though the human form was broken under a brush, the human ego held its beauty within. Now his family still hold the gates to that name.
Stephen King built an entire fictional realm--interconnected, serialized, populated by recurring symbols and haunted geographies. You don’t just read King. You moved into his world., he created the original prose-haunted VCR with his plots and characters.
Each of these artists created something lasting. But they also created a blueprint for a model: Art as empire. Creativity as capital. They skillfully managed their vast creative power and their muse became a master of vision, of land, as they climbed the old stairway to the stars.
And others were watching.
Today, the castles are invisible, but their walls are higher.
Tech platforms--Google, Meta, Amazon--have taken the artist's blueprint and scaled it. Instead of fans, they have users. Instead of audiences, they have data profiles. Instead of legacy, they have lock-ins.
The tech titans extract attention the way kings once taxed grain. Private equity controls the venues where life itself plays out--health, housing, even burial.
AI model creators now own the tools of language, story, and thought. What once belonged to the scribe and the soul now belongs to servers and shareholders.
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And the Artist?
They are no longer the lords of the land--but the labourers. Caught between expression and extraction. Told to create, but fast. To post, but not pause. To serve the algorithm, not the altar.
And yet--the ghost of the old muse still walks the battlements. Still knocks on the gates. Still calls through the static:
“Remember what the art was for."