As I munched on breakfast and listened to Houston NPR, as I do, I heard that the Fort Worth Opera had commissioned an opera about John F. Kennedy's final morning before the Dallas motorcade. (If you know more about librettists and opera than I do, you can get more details from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.)

Commissioned, eh?

In the historical era of my academic focus, the early Italian Renaissance, visual and musical artists were tradespeople—craftsmen similar to, say, stonemasons. They worked for hire. Wealthy people employed artists to create music, sculpture, paintings, and the like—and they specified the subject matter: "Hey, Donatello, how 'bout you sculpt me a cocksure, victorious David?"

I'm sure artists created occasional works on their own out of passion or for practice, but that wasn't the norm, and most certainly they didn't expect to earn a living that way. This is not unlike most of us, who may enjoy what we do for a living, yet would rarely do it without a source of compensation.

How times have changed.

Today, artists sometimes work on commission, but most work according to their passions. Modern art is a form of expression. We consume art to understand what the artists say.

There's something quirky about this. As the balance shifted from predominantly commissioned art to predominantly artist-driven subject matter, artists needed to have deep thoughts. Or, at least, over the course of the transition, we more heavily credited them with big ideas. In fact, in many areas, the quality of the artist's thinking has overtaken the level of his technical skill when it comes to art criticism and appreciation.

Is this a good thing?