Matching Mixed Media: I Continue to Be Obsessed With Bringing Back Renaissance Style Patronage
I think if you’re reading this, you probably accept that “creatives should get properly compensated for their work” is not just a reasonable thing to aspire, but something that we should be actively doing. The arts are a time capsule. An encapsulation of values of an era, of an instance, of a cross section of an individual. Society needs arts not just for entertainment but as a means to express and archive.
But beyond paying and tipping well for commissions, there’s a step above arts patronage I want to eventually aspire to which is (as the title already gave away) Renaissance Styled Patronage: A blank check, a carte blanche, funds to not just live but live to create.
In the capitalist framework, we don’t have a pure example of this, but we do have a couple different examples that highlight how badly I want to have access to a horde of cash to enable silly things. So let’s start with:
HBO Max’s Last Week Tonight & The Rehearsal
I’m grouping these two today mostly because I want to talk about another network that more closely embraces my hope, and HBO Max (formerly Max formerly HBO Max) for the most part is subject to the wildest whims of Zaslav. However, for whatever reason, John Oliver and Nathan Fielder are given free reign to do absolutely wild things.
Among some favorites from Last Week Tonight, include John Oliver commissioning a chainsaw artist to make a statue of a lettuce hulk (a fundamentally weird sentence)…
His team rebranding of a minor league baseball team…
And his campaign to completely derail/dominate the Bird of the Century vote.
And I don’t want to spoil Nathan Fielder’s endeavors when it comes to fixing aviation safety, but the fact that his is able to do so under the guise of an HBO Max comedy series with what can be be described as an immense amount of financial backing.
These are examples of what happens when creative people have resources to follow their whims. I’m sure there are constraints I’m not aware of, but it feels better watching these shows than a lot of other these days. Which goes four times for the other example we have.
Dropout.tv’s Entire Corpus
If you told me a decade ago that from the ashes of CollegeHumor, the best streaming service from a content per cost different would arise, I’m not sure I’d believe you.
But as it happens, when you let improv comedians follow their wildest whims and dreams it makes for fantastic television. And for $6 ($5 if you’re a legacy subscriber) a month, there is so much to consume.
Appropriately (casually), the latest Gamechangers episode is largely around funding ridiculous ideas to go viral on social media.
The entire line up of programming reflects the interests of the cast whether it’s Jordan Myrick’s innovative (unhinged) take on cooking competitions)…
Or Brennan Lee Mulligan leveraging his only marketable skills in a staggering array of genres.
Now, this is not true Renaissance Patronage. Dropout is a business that relies on its subscribers to generate revenue that factors into their profit sharing model. But you can see the logical jump here. Dropout’s success is a shining example of what happens when you give creators a stable foundation and the resources to do things that excite them.
[Editor’s Note: This post was originally written on July 15. On July 28, Dropout released a new episode of Gamechanger titled “Who Wants to Be…?” which I think is actually just Renaissance Patronage at this point.
The Dropout fan favorite breaks down the moment he realized this Game Changer was all about him, and what he did next: ‘That’s the time when you want to be perfect, because something perfect just happened to me.’ https://www.vulture.com/article/jacob-wysocki-dropout-game-changer-interview.html?utm_medium=s1&utm_campaign=vulture&utm_source=bluesky
— Vulture (@vulture.com) 2025-07-29T00:10:31.008Z
So… good on you Dropout.]
My Dream…
is to buy an apartment building wholesale and offer free housing for creatives. Give writers and artists a couple years to focus on making things. Pay them for teaching classes to the community and beautifying spaces.
Crowd funding is great. Businesses putting their employees in positions to excel is great. But I can’t help but picture a world where more artists gets a chance to make instead of toil in the capitalist hellscape.