On sponsors and land art

Land art first began in the 1960s coinciding with the global environmental protection movement. Artists created many large-scale artistic landscapes in natural settings and initiated intense argument about the relationship between nature and human culture. The general understanding of land art is: it is the betrayer of tradition ¿studio - museum¿ system with the goal to rebel against and flee from commercialized control. They have every reason to refuse sponsorship which is part of ¿the capitalism artistic mechanism¿. However, reality is the opposite. This article studies the role of sponsors for the land art. On one hand, land art betrays the traditional ¿studio - museum¿ system; on the other hand, patronage reflects a social relationship in art. The paper aims to probe into this seemingly contradictory sponsor problem in land art.