Bards and Art

[kgauck]

After a while people would become acquaintes with it's presense and it would lose it's effect.

Why do you suppose this? The influence of historical art is far more potent than this. Before modern media, art patronage is the way rulers put forth their public image. While you can find several paintings of nobles, churchmen, merchants, thinkers, and artists, you certainly don't find enough suggesting that they lose their effect. Instead you find several works because the ruler wants a new effect (rulers often adopted very warlike images during war, only to shift to very peaceable images afterward) or because the ruler wants an image that resembles them.

Over very long periods of time you can see art removed, buildings remodeled, and changes being made. This is the useful life of art. But useful doesn't mean that its not working any more. Early in the life of Henry VIII, he might have art emphasizing his Catholic piety, his Spanish marriage, his youthful vigor, as well as other things he wants to project. At some point, Catherine is divorced, Henry has broken with Rome, and he's not young and fit, but the more familiar middle aged and fat. His early art is not so useful. It may still project Henry as a Catholic monarch with a Spanish bride and a friend of that agenda, taking part in that program. But if Henry doesn't want to appear that way, he must remove that art and replace it with art that identifies him as the single sovereign answerable only to God, Protestant, and unencumbered by any wife in particular. And this only considers a small part of Henry's policies and possible images.

Consider that some art is always kept around to associate the current dynast with former dynasts. Richard II surrounded himself with images of Edward the Confessor. Henry VIII liked to use images of Henry V. If Henry VIII is standing in front of a portrait of Henry V who is going to argue against policies reminiscent of Henry V's policies? Rulers already wield such power that people change their opinions to please the ruler, if the ruler begins to augment their power by using beautiful, magnificent objects of art to reinforce their policy choices, does it not follow that it becomes easier for the ruler to intimidate or persuade, and that it becomes harder to defy the ruler.

Since such effects are either skill checks or Will saves, its still possible for higher level characters, especially those with good will saves, like nobles and clerics, to keep their wits about them and make their points, but low level characters and those with poor Will saves will be humbled before greatness.

Although an appropriately great peice of art publicly displayed could have a permanent effect on revenues since visitors would come to see it.

Art tourism didn't begin until the late eighteenth century. A better analogy is the medieval pilgrimage, but the medieval pilgrim wasn't out to see art, but to see relics. The relics might be glorified by art, but in this role, the art is magnifying the relic, not an attraction in itself.

The comodification of art is really a nineteenth century thing.