Wealth & Money Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound turns patronage into a kind of metaphysical labor contract: money changes hands, and suddenly the buyer isn’t a spectator but a co-producer. It’s a sly bit of revaluation. Instead of treating art as a luxury good that flatters the wealthy, he frames buying as an act that dissolves hierarchy. The patron “makes himself equal” to the artist not by taste or refinement, but by taking on responsibility for the conditions that let art exist at all.

The intent is polemical and strategic. Pound spent much of his career trying to rig a better economic ecology for artists, railing against systems that starved serious work while rewarding mass culture and financial intermediaries. In that light, “needs money” is doing heavy lifting: the transaction is ethically charged because it intervenes at the point where art is most vulnerable to compromise, silence, or abandonment. Patronage becomes less like charity and more like infrastructure.

The subtext is also self-serving in the way great manifestos often are. Pound is flattering the would-be patron, offering them a role with creative glamour attached: you, too, “create.” It’s a pitch to redirect capital toward the avant-garde by recasting consumption as cultural production. And it’s a rebuttal to the modern habit of imagining art as autonomous, floating above material life. Pound insists the opposite: art is built, and building requires funding.