Except for the absence of Novocain and The New York Times, there were advantages to the artist living in medieval times compared to the artist living today. In that earlier era, a carver or a stained-glass maker was as necessary to society as was a baker or a carpenter, and his work was highly valued.

     As an ordinary member of the community, he was not treated differently than any other worker, and more important, did not consider himself to be different. There was no fine art with its embellishments in the Middle Ages — all art was commercial art. It was a less stressful environment in which to work. Except, of course, for The Plague.

     Today, fine artists are a unique, often distrusted class, and their work is viewed with suspicion or neglect except by a small knowledgeable elite. Art is usually considered a cosmetic addition to our lives, an embellishment that we could do without. That is a great loss. So much hoopla and so much public relations attends being a fine artist today, that the stress to provide something unique, arcane or outrageous pressures artists to provide work that panders to an enigmatic and fashionable market. Add to that an artist’s reputation as an abstruse person and the hyperbole in which some artists themselves engage, and the artist’s life can become a burden.

     That’s why I am satisfied with the current state of art for commerce, which sort of parallels the role of the arts in the Middle Ages. Salaried and free-lance artists today do not have tenured employment, neither are they given grants of financial aid, but they are offered vast opportunities to make art for a living. For an artist, doing his chosen work is the most satisfying state of affairs. True, much of the commercial work that wins awards (including my own) in the cacophony of exhibitions is often not the most worthy. True, the proportion of good to bad in commercial art is a great deal of bad to very little good — perhaps the same proportion as in fine art or politics or motorcycle maintenance.

    An advantage of doing unsanctioned commercial art, rather than accredited fine art, is that commercial art is part of our culture: it is widely understood and has no need of critics, or art appreciation courses, or esthetic explanation. The artist can therefore eschew notoriety, and can develop within a system that regards him as a necessary — sometimes a valuable — producer of useful goods, and not as a melancholy outsider.

     No one has been able to show that the Bohemian life has produced work of a more lasting nature than that of the unknown piece-workers of Chartres, say, who did not feel constrained to sign their work. (It has been suggested that the masons who sign their work at St. Sophia did so in order to get paid.) Andy Warhol’s drawings of shoes for Andrew Geller advertising were as good as anything he had done for art galleries later.

     Art for commerce has been abused because it can make artists economically comfortable — a hopelessly middle-class failing. But Herbert Muller has written that “Plumbing is not necessarily fatal to the good life, or poverty or misery essential to spiritual elevation.” Or, as Tevye the milkman said, more wistfully, “It is not a great shame to be poor. On the other hand, it’s not a great honor, either.”

     My experience in the business of art for commerce has been sanguine: I have not seen the predatory behavior that is endemic in the garment and in the entertainment businesses. Compared to them, working in advertising and publishing is like working in a monastery.

     Which was another clever medieval invention.