Art for Your Great House

Make Art and Writing Work for You

A great family is a grand pavilion tent,

loyalty and identity the pillars withal.

If money is lacking, yes, the canvas is rent.

But if the pillars are lacking, the canvas will fall.

We are in the middle of an era of flourishing amateur political philosophy, just like the 1600s and the Royal Society was an era of great amateur natural philosophy.

One conclusion that everyone who looks at it comes to, no matter what angle they start on and insist on, is that there's no substitute for character and loyalty. No system can replace human judgment, no system can compensate for humans being motivated and loyal and cooperative.

And almost no one knows how to go about it.

The Steader has been for conducting an open-air master class on how to do that on a small scale, with family. Almost everything that we have been discussing here applies at a larger scale.

Nowhere is the claim that our insight about founding families also applies to weightier political or economic units more true than with the great houses. The lineages. Families that have achieved a corporate identity so strong that it is obvious to those around them.

Today’s transmission makes two claims: your family or other institution needs its own culture and you can literally just buy it.

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We have been inspired recently by an estate attorney's guide to building a great house.

How to Build a Great House (pt 1 of 4)

The work that he does personally, in structuring the finances and creating the investment vehicles and the inheritance payloads, is like putting clothes on a body. The body is much better off with the clothes, but the clothes are not the body.

The body is the identity and loyalty, the culture that can pass on from generation to generation. Sovereignty always and everywhere begins in the soul. It takes the form of loyalty and identity and commitment and mission. Those drive legal and financial independence, not the other way around.

Fortunately, great houses, high net worth families that are genuinely families (not just a collection of biologically related individuals, one of whom happens to get a lot of money and is throwing some of it around to his kids because he hasn't found a nonprofit to donate to yet) are better situated than ever to in one generation create cultural and loyalty and identity structures that will last for generations to come. It used to take many cycles of inheritance and succession to create a weighty heritage.

“the daughter of a hundred earls”

-Tennyson

No more. These are exciting times.

We have opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship that have never existed before. There are men and women today who are founding or refounding or upfounding families,

that are creating identities that will be found in Mars and in space and possibly in the stars.

So let's get specific. Let's talk about a key cultural technology for the Great Houses that has been lost and that is strikingly easy to rediscover. Let's talk about patronage and specifically cultural patronage.

Bespoke culture serves two purposes. Having something distinct culturally serves as a seed around which identity and therefore loyalty can accrete like pearl around a grain of sand. This is true regardless of the content of the culture. Second, if bespoke, the culture products can directly reflect values you want to have. They can be about loyalty, for instance.

Patronage

We all know that aristocrats cultivated a taste for patronage.

This was partly because it was an immense source of power.

The Roman patrons relied on their clients. We were just reading in a life of Caesar about a great meeting he had during the Gallic Wars with a number of his clients to give them some rewards and ask them for help in Roman politics. While he was still legally barred from coming back to Rome, he needed the clients to use their political power to get him elected to a second five year term as proconsul in the Gallic wars so he could prosecute them to a successful conclusion.

And they needed him. Patronage can be a straightforward material arrangement that makes sense in purely financial and transactional terms, though it can also transcends that arrangement. (History note: with Caesar it wasn't just the clients, of course, there were also his co-triumvirs Crassus and Pompey, but even there it was also the clients, Crassus and Pompey were willing to work with Caesar because of what his clients, who were loyal to Caesar, brought to the table back in Rome. Caesar's clients helped get them, the two of them, elected to the consulate, and then they, in turn, and their clients, helped Caesar's clients get him appointed to an extraordinary second term, a second five year term as the Gallic pro consul.) In any case, patronage as mutual back-scratching for power and wealth is very straightforward. That's a static-in-time picture of the patron client relationship that is well understood.

Now let's move to a second type of great house patronage where we are starting to slip the static time, snapshot a bit and move into the future.

It is this stacks view, by the way that the classic world's understanding and most of the political and cultural philosophy we inherit from the classic world was static, was ignorant of the time element, and there are genuinely new and revolutionary truths, even simple truths to be had, that have the time element absolutely built in. Compare geometry to calculus.

So the next outstanding element of patronage is tutors. Alexander was famously tutored by Aristotle, along with a collection of Alexander’s closest friends. They weren’t there for just knowledge instruction; they were to create character. The school of the princes and an aristocratic or highly educated, high quality tutor was a common feature of Western statecraft for the heir-prince since going back to the Middle Ages. It did all this work imperfectly, at least as far as creating a Superman of ideal character, but we should assume, just by revealed preference, by the fact that so many people did it, that it was worthwhile. For a high net worth family, the cost of hiring a extremely intelligent tutor capable of giving your children a bespoke education is actually pretty insignificant.

We could surely easily find somebody for 50- 60,000 a year, possibly less. Certainly for around 100,000 a year. People will pay much more than that to manage their assets and their enterprises, but will skimp on their families’ long term human capital.

And yes, that would be someone who is not just educated, but is also has vision and understanding of America, of religion, of faith, of what it means to do something last for generations. They exist. We read a comment recently the problem isn't that there's too many chiefs, it's that there are a lot of Indians, high quality people who should be right hand men, but there are very few families, high net worth families with the vision to try and create these networks. So they're having to try and become their own network, for lack of a patron. Very few have the vision of how to be a chief.

Tutor patronage is even better because a lot of times the tutor serves as a tryout for someone who has real capability, real understanding, and become can become a family advisor or a family client or a high level family counselor and servitor, a trusted member of the inner circle, and if not, the family gets education and is out $100,000 for a few years. No big deal for that kind of person. Small potatoes.

Now let's talk about an even more important function of patronage. Art.

Everybody knows that aristocratic families, the old great houses of Europe, were patrons of the arts. We think of beautiful architecture, sculptures, paintings, family portraits. There's that striking scene in Pride and Prejudice where the girl is touring his house, almost certainly was designed by one or more high quality architects to create a bespoke experience, and she's blown away by it and his grounds, again, think of the famous English landscape artists, people like Lancelot “Capability” Brown.

And then she is brought into his portrait hall and sees the art portraying his famous ancestors. The effect is overwhelming.

The result is she, a very high quality woman, becomes the next mother of his line. Now, that's pretty cold and calculated way of putting it, but it's also true, and Jane Austen as a brilliant writer knows it and includes it, although the deeper spiritual elements are also not absent from her work. The point is that patronage has created a family identity so strong that it almost stuns Elizabeth Bennett. They understood those things back then.

But now we are recreating how things work from scratch. There are the rich who have at least some idea that art and architecture shows you arrived. The difficulties are they don't understand why. So there is a fashion element, a luxury consumption element, and that's okay, and no one should deny it, but that’s the only element they know about. Where the main purpose is to create a sense of place and of nobility for your family line, in other words, a sense of identity. So not just art, but art of your ancestors, not just architecture, but architecture that is also your home. We believe that many high net worth families suffer from not understanding this and, if they do, they do not know what kind of art or what kind of architecture to patronize to achieve the effect.

Many steaders happen to be in the cutting edge circles of the emerging America, which means that coincidentally, we know guys who should be patronized, not just for their art of their architecture, but as consultants for architecture. Most of these guys are not poor. They have their own careers, their own employment, but they are still underemployed geniuses in the aspect that their genius is, it's something they're doing as amateurs on their own on the side. We know these people. It is very possible you can have a home that is not just wealthy, that doesn't just proclaim that you've arrived, but that has a spiritual power to it, that is the kind of thing that keeps your descendants being your descendants, proud to be part of your family, moved to be part of your family, willing to sacrifice, willing to pass it on themselves.

Now that is not the only form of art patronage. In fact, we would say that it's should probably be not the first form of art patronage that a family should explore. Poetry, music, writing, even movies are probably uniquely able to be created these days and have the ability to reach remote descendants.

We ourselves are currently writing material for our own children, great grandchildren, great great grandchildren. Any one can do this. But the odds of one person having the talent to both do that and also to build a commercial empire, make a fortune, found a house are slim. This is where patronage comes in.

Let's talk about how this would work.

First of all, is the market opportunity there. For sure, we were talking recently to the founder of the Passage Press. He was offering a contest with about $10,000 total worth in prizes. For fiction for example, first prize would be $1,000, second prize is $500. Given the work involved these are not munificent sums. He still was overwhelmed with submissions, including submissions from people who had not a lot of interest in his niche, in his political-cultural niche, people who would normally not want to be tarred with the association with a someone that the Guardian has labeled a far right, far right figure. And although the Guardian is pretty loose about who they label as a far right figure, that's still not a connection that most people would seek for, but the market for fiction is so bad that he was overwhelmed with submissions, including from many professional writers.

Sidebar on why you can get quality writers for very cheap. If you don’t care why, skip this.

Writing is cheap, partly because it's a lottery.

The very top guys make a lot of money.

Take the successful writer of Monster Hunter International. Not at the J.K. Rowling’s level, but definitely quite successful. He jokes about burning piles of cash just to enjoy the fumes. He went from struggling to rolling in cash, and he's going to keep rolling in cash. Someone like Brandon Sanderson, again, not a world famous writer of legend, but definitely commercially a writer of the Top Rank casually decided to do his own Kickstarter, and instantly made millions of dollars for a few novels. Not bad work if you can get it. If you can get it. The vast majority of writers, even professional writers, can't. Even extremely high quality writers because the public doesn’t have infinite attention for reading books. (Notice that a truly high net worth family could probably afford to hire even Sanderson or Correia and the like if they wanted). For writers, second place is scraps. But writers still try, because there's that dangling prize.

Even more importantly, they just feel compelled to. They have ideas. They want to write things.

The rewards are also low, because there's prestige associated with writing. If you make it, you get a lot of attaboys, and that can substitute for cash, to some extent.

What that means is that almost all writers, including serious writers with real talent, are either people who are doing it as a hobby and would love to have the credibility of an actual customer, or people who are fighting for scraps. If you look at even some of the more successful writers on Amazon, which is has killed most of the market for print and for digital so writers have to go on Amazon, even for a very successful book they're getting a few thousand, maybe $5,000 $10,000. It is ever thus.

What this means is that a high net worth family, a great family, a great house, could have a bespoke novel from a quality writer who sympathizes with their project and who would put in the time to get to know them, almost certainly for $50,000, probably for less, guaranteed for $100,000. In fact, for $100,000 they could have a bespoke novel that was never published elsewhere, that was limited just to them and their family, or a bespoke play, or so on. They could almost certainly get a series of short stories, quality short stories, quality culture generation, interesting, of whatever genre they wanted, of whatever cultural level--high culture, low cultural, genre fiction, middle brow fiction, something in between, naval, cowboy, epic poetry--that would cost $5,000 to $10,000.

You'd have to know so who to talk to. Average Millennial Irony Scribbler might not be the fella

Hit us up. We know people. This isn't a business that we're doing. We have no financial stake here, but we can find someone to put you in touch with, probably a businessman or a lawyer or programmer or a professor or an accountant who's been writing on the side, who understands things about American truth and beauty that exclude them from the traditional publishing world, but the things that make them unfit for a New York publisher make them fit for you.

And when you find this guy he would be tickled pink, just to get paid to do something that he already feels compelled to do, even if on an hourly basis it may not even be as much money as they get from their normal career.

You're a high net worth family, your income, not your assets, your income is, say, five to ten million a year or more. And for $50,000 you can get a novel. For a couple of multiples of that, multiple novels, until you find a good one, a great one.

That's identity formation, that is family culture in spades.

That's a family culture that could squat 500 pounds.

You could get poems or poetry for peanuts.

You could probably do a bespoke children's book from 500 to 1000. Maybe more, with the illustrations. But something like this is easily in the reach of most families. You could probably afford it on a salary.

Music ditto. Maybe $10,000 at the high end.

You could probably have a movie made for around $500,000.

An epic, an epic, historical fiction about your family.

The only limit is imagination.

No one is trying to supercharge their great house with cultural patronage.

It’s another crown in the gutter.

But You Can’t Hire Creativity

Now let's talk about a possible objection here--the creative process. A lot of people think rightly that if you just hire a writer and tell them what exactly what you want, the results are likely to be mediocre. They feel that for good stuff there's a creativity involved. That’s some right--you want creativity, okay, true, but even at that level of purely just executing what they are told, the results are likely to be better than you think.

There is a lot of craft on the craft side of writing, and some quite competent writers have done some pretty good work to some very specific specs. True genius isn't something you can buy anyway. You can buy quality, but genius is just like lightning strikes. You go back and look at Casablanca, for example. It was more the product of some very quality people and some quality actors and some quality script writers making a bunch of movies than it was any particular attention to that one movie. Specifically, it's the old anecdote, which, as far as we've been able to chase down is true, of the study of an art class where they divided the students in half, and one group, they told them to spend all their time trying to make the best possible piece of art they could, and the other group they told to make the most pieces of art they could. And consistently, the group that did the most, their best piece was better than the group that tried to do the best. What this means for you as a patron who is trying to get huge multiples of alpha trying to kick start your family culture and identity and loyalty by leaps and bounds, is that your best bet is just to take several runs at it. You can and do spend more on a truck. if you absolutely insist on a masterpiece, your best bet is just to have multiple tries.

But that's not all, because you don't need a masterpiece to have something that's very good, and most creators can work with you to create something that is very good, even if you are giving them lots of instructions and requests. Now there should be a back and forth, they know things that you don't about how to do it. That's why you're hiring them. Most gifts are not all found in the same person, but that back and forth process is part of the creative process, and we have plenty of models of it in the great patrons of old, who a lot of times were getting in arguments with their artists to give them instructions, and the artists were sometimes ignoring it, sometimes working with it. It was all a big tussle, but what came out of it were works that everyone knows, iconic works of genius.

Attention and interest and potential impact are inspiring for a writer or other creator. The fact that you want them is probably also going to unleash creativity.

How Would This Work

But you don't really need a work of genius to create family, identity and loyalty. You just need something well done, and it doesn't have to be all about your family. You don't have to dictate it. Your family and things and places and memories that are important to your family can be setting. They can be background. Things that are important to your family can be part of the themes.

Let's take a detective novel. Let's say you want a detective novel that involves your family, kids in your family for generations to come will read growing up, and it helps create that sense of prestige, identity, sense of your family as something admirable and lofty even, so you hire a good detective writer, someone that you've talked to people about, you've consulted to get to. This is a guy who really understand, who gets families, who gets what's really important. He's not an ideologue with an ax to grind like too many artists, since our institutions have filtered out the other kinds.

You and your family don't have to be the characters in the detective novel. You don't have to come up with a plot around yourselves, or at least, you don't have to be the main characters. Probably you're not going to be the murderer or the detective or the victim. Could be, but you don't need to be to have a book that still really speaks to you and to who you are. It takes place in your region, in your religion. Settings and locations that are important to you are important to the story. Some members of your family and people that you know and care about are side characters. The main characters meet and interact with them. Things that you value are critical to the story. Your family values are reflected as themes. Your kind of virtue is rewarded in the story, is vindicated.

That is powerful, and that is something that a good writer can do for you.

There is this idea that the good artist is reaching down deep into their soul, wrestling with their inner demons, and by some inscrutable black box process, creating a unique piece of art, and nobody can tell them anything, and that's just 19th century propaganda from the Romantic era for the most part. There is a black box sometimes, but the artist doesn’t know anything more about it than you do. But much of the creative processes is wrestling with the world as a back and forth with outside influences, and those outside influences might as well be you and what you want. Great art is like a startup, the number of startups that end up doing what the startup founders thought they were going to do is not zero, but it's pretty close. For sure, a majority of successful startups, the one that that create great work, have ended up doing something differently than what they thought when they started. And true art is the same.
If you reach out to hire a writer, he or she's not going tell you, well, I have this idea of what to do, and that's what's going happen. And if they really insist on that, find another one. No problem. There's plenty of writers out there and they each have different temperaments. Temperaments are as numerous as sagebrush in the desert.

The Vision

Let's picture it. You're the founder of the family and the fortune. You've still got it, but you have wisely turned over many of the operations to your children and grandchildren, you're enjoying an honorable old age as the family patriarch, you still provide input and counsel. You have a couple of irons in the fire because you have that drive. But most of your family project, family enterprise, is your family. You are working for decades and generations now. You are in your stately old home. It's actually fairly new, but has the feel of a stately old home, there's sort of lifting of the spirits that happen with people who enter. Here in your study, one of your great grandchildren is flopped on a rug by a fireplace, and they're reading a book, and it's your book, one you arranged to be made, and they're delighted in it. Every once in a while, they tell you, “Great Grandpa, now they're right here now, they're at this house!” Or “Great Grandpa, they're going out to the ranch now!” Or “Great grandpa, you know that saying that you always say, that saying is in this book!” And there's so much more that they're not saying, that they're absorbing subconsciously, that’s seeping into their bones.

And a few years later, you're older now, so is the child, they're visiting you as a teenager, you're giving them some life advice, and it clicks. They say, I know exactly what you mean, just like in that book that I read, that's what you're talking about.

And now you're dead and now you're gone. And your voice speaks on from the pages of a book.