In Belgium, it is relatively easy to get "artist-statute" which is a subsidized higher monthly welfare income (Basic Income for artists). Belgium runs on the "subsidize-and-conquer" paradigm, the tax burden is one of the highest in the world. The government keeps lower class happy with welfare, the upperclass with culture and mainly business subsidies. The productive middleclass is effectively squeezed.
The art sector here is mostly publicly funded. This too has advantages for our gov: no artists will criticize the subsidizer of their lifestyle, so no real anti-authoritarian culture takes hold. Don't bite the hand that feeds.
You'd think Belgium would have some impressive world-class artists, since so many can work unbothered by the oppressive forces of market trends. Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.
The problem with the arts is that nobody really gives a shit. The vast majority of the population doesn't visit the opera or is interested in modern art. Despite a century of government funding the needle hasn't shifted.
The first thing any artist should realize is that they live in a bubble. You're not going to change the world. As for market forces: our beloved Rembrandt did commission work he had a very expensive lifestyle to fund.
That is if you define "The Arts" as specifically "Archaic forms of art too unpopular to survive without subsidies from government or the aristocracy". That's a tautology.
Hip hop music isn't getting government subsidies. DeviantArt isn't getting government subsidies. Etsy isn't getting government subsidies. Youtubers aren't getting government subsidies. The Marvel Cinematic Universe isn't getting (many) government subsidies.
> Marvel Cinematic Universe
Apparently comedy is thriving as well too.
This. Modern music. Woodworking. Digital illustration. Pottery. All very much thriving.
In 19-century Italy, opera was about as popular as pop music today.
As an artist, you certainly can change (some of) the world if you do art which people care about. If you do refined academic portraits, or [adjectives expunged] postmodern art, only a bubble is going to care. If you do art like, say, Banksy, a lot more is going to care. If you sing in classical opera, only a narrow (but usually wealthy) circle of opera goers will care. If you sing like Taylor Swift or like Whitney Houston (who had a powerful, opera-worthy voice), you may have a much wider effect.
And from the 1920s to the 1960s, jazz was pop music. It isn't seen quite as highbrow or obscure as opera, but at least in the US, you are far more likely to hear jazz (and opera) on public radio and not commercial stations. It's the standard cycle of popular entertainment from popular entertainment to "art". Charles Dickens wasn't writing "great literature" in his age, he was writing popular literature akin to someone like John Grisham today.
Even worse, Charles Dickens mostly wrote serialized novels that were published weekly in a newspaper.
The closest modern equivalent is a weekly comic book (or manga) that gets turned into a graphic novel after its run.
Speaking of modern terms, I suppose the Iliad's "books" would be named "episodes", and the Odyssey would be "the next season".
We kind of see same shift happening in real-time with The Beatles at the moment
>The problem with the arts is that nobody really gives a shit.
It'a almost as if divorcing the artist class from having to care about public opinion was a bad idea.
If you want this to change, the solution is painfully obvious. End the subsidies, force them back on the open market. Remove open disdain for the audience as an option.
Open disdain for the classes lower than the audience's is the entire point of art appreciation.
Open disdain for audience is rarely in the mind of the artist and often in the mind of someone that doesn't like what they created and for some reason interprets this as an attack.
Many artists have a small audience in mind and that is quite reasonable.
Just make art people actually want to pay for like furry art.
I do this. http://egypt.urnash.com
Commissions and Patreon subscribers welcome.
A company already has a world leadership on that. Look into Nutaku.
This is the realest comment and I bet at least 25% of the HN crowd are actually furries themselves.
Edit: the downs mean its true ^_^
> The first thing any artist should realize is that they live in a bubble.
It is my experience that everyone lives in bubbles. They form the lens that filter our perception of other people's existence.
Unfortunately, my bubble isnt subsidized.
What you are referring to is not intended for mass consumption. If it were you would be watching a popular music video instead.
That does not mean however that it has no effect on popular culture.
Popular music scenes transition seamlessly into avant-garde music circles where I live and I would assume in most metropolitan areas. And youth culture has always been experimenting of course.
If you only looked at the most prestigious outlets of modern art you may well be missing the connection just like you might miss it if you looked only at the dirtiest punk venues. But that does not mean that it is not there.
More boldly: Lana Del Ray would have probably not happened without Musique Concrete, Ambient, Field recordings happening first.
>> vast majority of the population doesn't visit the opera or is interested in modern art.
Never in history has this been any different. "High" art has always been the domain of a narrow few and, frankly, those few want it to remain that way. But that isnt all art. Movies are art. Modern music is art. The vast majority of the population consumes an immense amount of art, i'd argue more than any time in history. It just isnt the high art of galleries and opera houses.
the person you are replying to claims an artist wont "change the world". you couldn't ask for a more "hacker-brained" take on culture. what, sitting around on our computers building dinky little apps does more than movies, film and music?
To this day I maintain Obama wouldn't have been electable if not for the black president on "24" getting middle America used to the idea.
> you couldn't ask for a more "hacker-brained" take on culture. what, sitting around on our computers building dinky little apps does more than movies, film and music?
Uhhh, yes? Can you imagine a global pandemic of 2020s magnitude happening in, say '94? Would the world at large have fared as well as we did without the "dinky little apps" like click-to-get-food and click-to-stock-warehouses and click-to-develop-rna-vaccines and click-to-work-remotely and click-to-talk-to-family and click-to-watch-anything and click-to-stay-sane? Are you seriously arguing that art is doing more for the world at large than the IT industry? Come on...
This is why I don't think that government-run UBI is a good idea. We need something to fall back on in case it becomes necessary to do away with a problematic government for a while, not something that the government can use to negatively reinforce the status quo.
Safety nets are for making otherwise dangerous things practical.
Pray tell, what enlightened incorruptible entity would enforce and organise UBI?
What enforcement is needed? Either you opt in to accepting the UBI currency, or you don't. If there's an enforcer involved then you've got government UBI.
As for issuing the tokens, there are a variety of UBI systems that handle that without a centralized authority. CirclesUBI and Idena come to mind. Admittedly some work is needed here, but the technical barriers are not the hard part.
The hard part is establishing the collective political will to build a culture around accepting them, otherwise it's just meaningless numbers.
> You'd think Belgium would have some impressive world-class artists, since so many can work unbothered by the oppressive forces of market trends. Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.
I don't really know enough to dispute this, but this statement is setting off alarm bells as a thought pattern that would be easy to fall into but hard to falsify. Most artistic output in the world is mediocre and irrelevant. Seeing the same from Belgium is not enough to say the policy is not working.
Belgium has about the same population and GDP as Ohio. Genuine question: how does the "artistic output", however you want to measure it, compare between Belgium and Ohio?
Note that I am not claiming this is any way "worth it", especially with your comments on the middle class which seem to be echoed by other Belgians. I'm only asking about the actual artistic output in isolation.
You would think policy makers have an obligation to track this, but they don't. There are no studies, KPIs or attempts at tracking effectiveness of subsidy policy.
The burden of proof should be on the policy maker and subsidized.
My wife works in public procurement for research, but there too suggesting such a thing is taboo.
This is of course by design: subsidies are a political tool for passivation of opposition, soft bribery and economic channeling of economic and societal outcomes. The less oversight and transparency the better.
The Flanders region only got a publicly and centralised database of (some) subsidy channels in 2019, after decades of liberal and right-leaning people lobbying for transparency.
There is no such initiative for our federal government.
Except that it nearly work only for people acting, dancing and working in « live » art.
If you’re a painter or a sculptor, since you can’t provide proof of engagement length, you were out. That’s getting better but still not a UBI by any means. They’re poor.
Do we have good contemporary art ? Yes. They’re not subsidized by the government, have to pay heavy taxes as we are and got to have lot of red tape for their enjoyment. So they move out of Belgium. With a raised middle finger…
Meanwhile this same system is abused by Uber and other major.
> Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.
Of course. 90% of everything is crap, so you are going to pay for a lot of crap art if you want any good stuff. This is the same if you have a completely commercial model, because most people have no taste.
Huh? In the commercial model, why would an individual still pay for "a lot of crap art". What you call "no taste" is just "taste," right? Nobody who gets to pick is going to pick the crap stuff.
I've liked 100% of the art I've ever purchased (that's why I purchased it)
Belgium’s tax burden is close to California, they just don’t split it up into a bunch of different categories. However, look at how much a self employed single person retains from their income when doing to comparison and the situation is more clear.
I am a self-employed freelancer and I have done all fiscal optimization possible in BE and my effective tax burden is 37%.
From what I find in Google about CA's total optimized tax burden for a one-man freelance company it is about 28%. And a lot more buying power too probably, but that is hard to compare in.
Of course this is personal income from labour via one-man companies ("net take-home"). This does not take into account VAT, capital gains taxes, etc.
There’s a ton of different ways to do these kinds of comparisons, but I’m unsure how you could end up with a single number here:
> CA's total optimized tax burden for a one-man freelance company it is about 28%
CA’s tax burden varies wildly based on a host of factors. However the simple calculation for a freelancer filing as a single person making 50k = 24.6%, 100k = 32%, 150k = 36.5%, 300k = 40% which some people actually pay. https://www.upwork.com/tools/freelance-tax-calculator
According to that calculator my CA tax burden ratio would be 29.7% so seems the websites I read were not far off the mark.
Ahh ok that makes sense. Comparing vs equal income in nominal or PPP dollars is reasonable though it’s going to make CA look better vs income percentile.
Healthcare costs, VAT vs sales tax, and various deductions definitely matter in practice but further muddle the comparison.
Ireland has this as well but it's still in a pilot programme:
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
2,000 artists were selected with prior portfolios as well as control group for comparison. It will be revised in 2025.
Slovenia is similar, but with even more intervention in the form of public grants. We also have no tax breaks for individuals who may wish to support the arts/humanitarian/ngo endeavors. It's all “systemic”.
Which is "fine" as long as a certain ideology controls the government (not always the same party, just the same "network"/ideology).
Now, the quality/quantity of the output is a mater of my subjective opinion, which would only muddy the water.
What isn't is what happened when the opposite ideology took over the government. Suddenly the much lauded ministry of arts became the enemy who chose different artists to subsidize. There were many Pikachu faces that day.
Is there some articles about this? I'd love to read more.
> The productive middleclass is effectively squeezed.
That's why I left Belgium. Getting squeezed to the bone to pay for endless leeches producing absolutely nothing that I enjoy or respect: it's not just the arts. Administrations are pathetically inefficient and arbitrary in how they treat people too.
So I already left and now I'm selling everything I have there: a little apartment, one garage, a few items worth a little something.
I'm fully planning on acquiring another nationality and then I'll just abandon my belgian one.
> Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.
Totally.
Like many I am looking for an exit too, at least fiscally. Right now I am -like many here- territorially bound by family and real-estate.
But the negative economic death spiral has set in here. More people work for the public sector directly and indirectly than the private sector, and the tax burden is ever increasing while services received are dwindling.
I've often wondered if a colony in some of the unclaimed lands of Antarctica could soak up everyone who is fed up with the death spiral of productivity in the west.
You'd meet some interesting people if nothing else.
For an unhealthy length of time (definitely since c. 2009 and arguably since the 90s) anyone with economically interesting skills was better of emigrating to the US, and many of these "best and brightest" did. I think the ceiling where you're better off in the US (or a few other Western states) is getting lower and lower, especially since the last few years have starkly shown just how unwilling and resistant to change the central european populace truly is. Right now you can still leave without huge exit taxes (unless you happen to own a company, most don't). I'm guessing as the brain drain keeps picking up pace, we'll see hefty exit taxes targeting basically everyone starting in 5-10 years.... after all, when people leave, they won't be able to pay 70% (~50% taxes and mandatory insurance, 30-40% rent or a mortgage, whose principal directly went to some old dude) of their income into your young-to-old wealth transfer system where they don't get anything out. So when they wanna leave you, you gotta make them pay dearly!
Abusive relationship? Not at all!
In Europe you have two options: Become a parasite or become a host. If neither of those options suit you, you have to get the hell out or live outside of the law and long fingers of the tax collectors.
> Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.
This is what I'd expect from a country where the EU bureaucracy is HQ'd
> no artists will criticize the subsidizer of their lifestyle
They do. Do they get attention on corporate media so you hear about them though?
> You'd think Belgium would have some impressive world-class artists
... It does. Are they given exposure in corporate media?
> so many can work unbothered by the oppressive forces of market trends
Being able to afford basic necessities does not, in fact, make artists immune to the "oppressive forces" of the market.
> mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.
Ie, Sturgeon's Law.
Coincidentally, the "corporate" media in Belgium is also heavily subsidized (as in a significant amount of their revenue is subsidies).
And we also have public media. Yet no credible evidence of the effectiveness of endless subsidies.
If we're going to namedrop economic laws like it means something: Parkinson's law: the art and media sector have become part of the self-perpetuating ineffective bureaucracy.
I'm reading a book called Culture Crash, which is relevant here. I also read Sinykin's Big Fiction a while back, so you could say I've been reading abou the culture industry.
Culture Crash makes this interesting point: Did you know there used to be widely read, culturally relevant, AND Nobel Prize worthy (like actual contenders to win), poets? Unimaginable now but true in living memory. They didn't even have to be attached to a University, financially speaking. Like your male or female co-worker might hear that such an such a poet was coming out with a new book, and buy it, and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
The general point of these books (summarizing a lot here) is that the cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now, and there isn't much left. At this point literature has been "captured" by the University, but it's for a good reason: you can't survive as a fiction writer without it. People complain "but they're so insular" but the truth is: they don't have an alternative. You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.
This is true of other industries too. Music: you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician. You might also be the guy who was the resident expert on classical music for the neighborhood at the store, who would recommend operas conducted by Karajan and the best recordings from Deutsche Grammophone (I remember those guys). Art: you could paint signs or design posters, back when there was a real demand. Writing: you could write for the alternative weeklies (I'd read those) or be a regular journalist, writing as little as one story a day. Movies: you could be a video clerk (I also remember this). And those 'subcultures' were incubators. Quentin Tarantino graduated from the video store in a sense. Who can follow him, if there are no video stores anymore?
So this crisis in nonprofit funding really is coming at the end of a much longer crisis in the arts in general. It should be seen in that context.
I don't think the bohemians you alluded to were so much funded by nonprofits, as by the public at large. 50 years ago we had Bob Dylan as the poet laureate, more or less, of his generation. Today we've got Taylor Swift. Both got big record contracts. No knock against her, but if you want to talk about cultural decay, I think it's more of a demand-side problem. The market will elevate artists who the public are willing to pay for. Yes, a publisher or a producer can "make a market" for something, but Francis Ford Coppola can put $100M of his own money into an art piece and, evidently, no one currently will pay to see it.
The idea that nonprofits should prop up art has always been wrong, in a way. Artists since the Italian Renaissance have produced most of their greatest / most famous works for wealthy patrons, not because governments paid them to do it. (Unless you count the Vatican as a government).
What I'm trying to say is that all art arises from pop culture, and pop culture can engender the height of artistic excellence, if the culture itself has good taste and demands quality. Or, pop culture can be a pit of garbage if the culture has degraded. This is what is meant about the transition from "Ideal" Hellenistic art to art which embodied "Pathos" around the 4th Century BC.
We have transitioned in the past 50 years from a culture which strives for the ideal, to one which worships pathos. That may be the mark of a civilization in decline (based on a relatively limited number of historical examples). But the "fix" isn't more public funding for art that no one looks at or listens to. All great art arose from popular desire for it; you can't force it on a population, or keep it alive if there's no audience.
Upvoted for being one of the best comments in the discussion I've read so far -- I'm sure there's something relevant going on that's similar enough to a transition from some sort of ideal to pathos.
But the part about nonprofits is possibly orthogonal to the issue and may even be wrong in the opposing direction. Why would pathos overtake everything? Honestly it's what I'd expect to happen in the wake of two simple developments:
1) most media engagement moves from text, which requires the engagement of the mind, to video/audio, which can run on a much higher volume of feels/vibes alone. I don't think it's a coincidence that we had a print culture up through a half century ago when there were popular poets (Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski, maybe even WH Auden) and now we get to your comment which, representative of the times, will subtly shift to popular performing songwriters as if they're the same thing.
Like one of Patrick Rothfuss' characters said: “Remember this, son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.”
2) And that means when the market becomes the dominant social mediator, what finds its way through culture? What sells. What sells most broadly? What touches people's hearts. What touches people's hearts? Vibes/feels, or pathos, as you say. And then we do stupid things with our markets like Spotify that magnify the problem by eroding marginal success, bifurcating into go-pathos-big or go home as the option.
Your own comment is a great illustrator of just how much market-as-mediator is readily thought of as the way to understand the issue. Do we want other ideals? Then we need other cultural institutions that explore, circulate, and foster values/ideals beyond the market. And at least some of them would necessarily be non-profits. And while they'd need to go beyond subsidizing pre-popular work (including perhaps some never popular) and into various forms of popular education, subsidy would be part of what they'd do. There can't be an audience for something that is never produced.
Is this really a "degradation" in popular taste, or is it a change in the demographics that dominate the demand side? While there's apparently been some studies on the demographics of Swifties, it's much more difficult to produce the same for Bob Dylan 50 years ago. My impression though is that the initial core demographics (driving the fame) of Bob Dylan's music were young adults of both sexes, while the initial demographics of Taylor Swift's music were teenagers, overwhelmingly female. The demographics have different interests, with the interests preferred by Dylan's demographics being considered deeper and more intellectual by the cultural zeitgeist. It makes sense that target demographics of popular music would have been older back in the day, since buying records required some sort of record player, which was a significant investment. Today, there's practically no investment to listen to music via a streaming service.
Mostly agreed, but imo Taylor Swift’s music trajectory is kinda similar to Beatles.
Swift’s fanbase has been mostly teenage girls, who now grew up, and now her concerts are filled with women in their 20s and 30s, as well as plenty of guys (though still a minority).
Beatle’s fanbase at the time of their rise to fame? Also predominantly teenage girls. Take a look at the photos from any of their concerts in the prime age. And then there are those infamous photos with crowds (that were almost entirely teenage girls) pretty much hysterically crying in the audience upon seeing their idols.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It is probably a controversial take, but if anything, I would consider Taylor Swift’s core audience these days being way less “culty” and less homogeneous than that of the early Beatles (despite, indeed, being one of the most “culty” fanbases of the present times). And I am saying this as someone who is as far from a Swift fan as one can be. I only know a few of her top songs, and they are pretty catchy/fun, but I simply don’t have much interest in it overall. Can’t deny that she is doing a great job all around though.
Calling it now: a few decades down the road, Taylor Swift will exist in the cultural zeitgeist in a similar way to how Beatles are revered many decades after their breakup in the present times (assuming she stays on her current trajectory).
I think you're right. I'd add that it's sound to invest in a younger demographic when there are more young people, more customers, who are more impressionable, for a longer term return. With companies trying to get the most from their investment, I'd expect this strategy to drive the market towards less complex, and less interesting media.
>> 50 years ago we had Bob Dylan as the poet laureate, more or less, of his generation. Today we've got Taylor Swift.
50 years ago the top selling single was "The Way We Were" by Barbra Streisand and the top selling album was a Carpenters singles collection.
Yes but at the same time the music industry exists as a capitalistic machine that forms public taste and interest through sheer force of marketing - it’s easier to have one mega artist like Taylor performing one huge show in every city to capture all of the disposable income for music in one go, rather than have lots of competing artists and dilution and effort to create a range of cultural product. Competition is a sin remember? The music industry understands this nowadays. “The public wants what the public gets” in the words of Paul Weller / The Jam. There isn’t a free market of music and ideas. The market is closed and offers only a small number of products, and everyone else has to stand outside of the market giving out their art for free.
The internet exists.
For a while I had a website where I put my music, with a Stripe button for donations.
Now, I didn't make as much money as T.Swift, but I chalk that up my music being not quite as polished (still working on getting access to a multi-million dollar recording studio with a $10,000 microphone and $500,000 mixing console staffed by a team of world-class music producers, sound engineers and hit makers like her), not because some capitalist mega-machine is keeping me down.
I guess I'm more of a believer in the 1,000 true fans [0] mindset.
[0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
PS: oh, and I dig the Jam reference. I'll be Going Underground if you need me ;)
How many true fans do you have?
the cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now
In many areas of the arts, the infrastructure you speak of was controlled by oligopolies: local broadcasters with allotted bandwidth, record distributors who only worked with certain labels, an insular book industry that favored certain types of literature and nonfiction and poetry, magazines which promoted a "cultural conversation" but overwhelmingly favored artists who happened to live in or near New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo.
Some great art came out of that environment, but there was a lot of garbage that made its way past the gatekeepers because of broken incentives, bias, and outright bribery.
Few artists made a living solely from their art. Almost everyone had a day job - Phillip Glass driving a taxi, Cormac McCarthy doing odd jobs, Gene Wolfe editing Plant Engineering magazine. And those are the ones who eventually hit escape velocity.
The interesting stuff was happening at the margins - the alternative weeklies you mentioned, the independent presses, the music scenes in second and third tier cities, the artists in remote locales driven to do what they needed to do and hopefully could connect with audiences, albeit small ones.
>and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
I'm too young to remember this for poetry, but it certainly was true for music, TV shows, and movies for long after it was true for poetry. People are still talking about The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, various highly-successful movies from the 60s-00s (Lord of the Rings for instance), TV shows like Game of Thrones, etc. However, I'd say it's less true today, but TV for instance seems to have lot of this still going on with people talking about various high-caliber shows like The Expense, Silo, etc. I think poetry simply went the way of theater: other art forms surpassed it in popularity, though it still has its niche audience: New York's Broadway is still quite popular. And people spend lots of money on music concerts.
Time is a great filter.
Was music in the '60s and '70s better than music today? Probably not.
If you were able to time travel back to then and listen at some random time to a radio tuned to a pop station you'd hear a lot of OK songs, a smaller number of good songs and bad songs, and a few great songs. Just like if you listened to some stream of a wide selection of recent music.
Is music from the '60s and '70s that you are likely to hear today better than most recent music? Probably.
Listen to an oldies stream and it likely is to just include those songs from then that were great or good, and it will be drawing from several years.
Same thing happens with TV. Old sitcoms like "Frasier" are as good as the best being produced today. Same with even older shows like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "I Love Lucy". But there were a heck of a lot of other sitcoms from the same times that are almost forgotten.
With sitcoms the old sitcoms we might still see are probably more likely to be great than the old music we still hear today, because old sitcoms have an additional filter to get past. You'll probably only see them today if they had enough episodes to be worth syndication.
They typically show one episode a day and they want to be able to go several months before wrapping around. Even with having more episodes per year back then than we typically have now (~32 then, ~24 now) the show would have to last at least 3 years to get enough episodes for syndication. Many a show that was great or near great and would have become great in season 2 or 3 has been killed by its network for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the show.
(I no longer watch anything on Fox other than sports and reality shows because of that. After "Firefly", "Futurama", "Terra Nova", and "Lucifer" I learned my lesson. I don't care how great people say a Fox show is now, I will either wait until Fox cancels it and watch it on streaming if people tell me that it got a proper series finale, or I might consider watching entire seasons before that but only if those seasons ended at points that would be good stopping points. "Terra Nova" and "Lucifer" ended on huge cliff hangers).
What do you mean by cultural infrastructure? I think I agree with the general thrust of the argument but I’m fuzzy on the particulars.
For example, the video rental store has been replaced by a multitude of sources: Netflix et al, torrent sites, YouTube, Twitch. It’s never been easier to make a film and distribute it to a lot of people, yet I can’t deny a sense of loss from the demise of the video store. What is the difference here?
My hypothesis: Lack of geographically local experts.
We've merged more and more into a megasociety. In a geographically distributed society, the power law for quality is more forgiving. You can be the best local band and make a living.
Now that we have ultra-efficient communications, there's less room for "mid-tier" art. Local art gets outcompeted by whatever the top stuff is among a much greater national or international population.
Because of this, there's also less of a breeding ground for maturing artists, or for experimental styles in isolated areas (think California surf rock, or NYC Salsa, etc). There's no place to go if you're not the best.
In one way that's true: An artist has to appeal to a global audience. A global audience does have a taste for local weirdness, but there's a lot less economic basis for locally weird things to spawn and germinate when every video goes online instantly. On the other hand, local weird shit blows up all the time on the internet into cross-cultural global phenomena. So it's not that it stopped existing, just that the economic model has changed.
Definitely an important factor. Industrial scale can wipe out diversity and with it subtlety, which in cultural terms means impoverishing artistic vocabulary and range.
> more and more into a megasociety.
My dim view is that it's just a rapacious monopolistic society. Why are there only three (four-ish) cell phone carriers in the US? Why are there only two app stores? Three (four-ish) major music platforms? The internet should have brought a diversity of choice that has failed to materialize because enforcement of monopoly laws in this space has been nascent and aggressively fought against.
> Local art gets outcompeted by whatever the top stuff is among a much greater national or international population.
It's the lack of access to infrastructure. Look at ticketmaster. You have to be this giant internationally recognized act to be able to afford the grift they're going to apply against you and your fans. The mid teir acts just can't access this space without financially or legally ruining themselves.
It's similar to the labor market. Monopolies _do_ make for more efficient consumer experiences. They completely _destroy_ the labor market to do this. Gains don't come from nowhere. It's no different for communications. Why are there only 6 major consumer ISPs? And look at who we let own some of them.
> there's also less of a breeding ground for maturing artists
I don't think that's true. There are cities where the venue spaces have been bought out and there are few places where these artists could draw a paying audience. It's not true everywhere though, and in those places, local artistry still thrives, but they run into the next problem...
> There's no place to go if you're not the best.
I think back to the 70s to 90s period of music. It was _incredibly rare_ that a new artist had a "good first album." It was usually barely tolerable, but you could see the kernel of something, something worth _investing_ in. Bruce Springsteen famously didn't make "good music" until his third album. Like anything else it takes time, experience, a little assistance, and long tours all across everywhere to build up the fan base.
Once the pipeline of Talent Agencies -> Production Companies -> Studio Companies -> Venue Ticketing got built you didn't need to do any of that anymore. You could literally grab 5 guys from a mall and _force_ them to be a hit in a few months. Being "the best" simply wasn't a factor anymore, they monopolized everything, why would they bother? Managing "the best" artists is a legal and marketing nightmare. Scumming up pretty girls and boys from malls and locking them down in embarrassing contracts is so much easier.
Anyways there are viable talent pipelines that still exist, but they need real investors, which they can only get if we break up the monopolies that prevent them from functioning somewhat properly, as they used to.
> enforcement of monopoly laws in this space has been nascent and aggressively fought against.
Monopoly laws in every space, since the ‘70s. Chicago School judges in the mid and late ‘70s changed the criteria for the government to pursue antitrust enforcement, so now it’s damn near impossible. The results were predictable.
There are plenty of full-time writers outside of universities. Most of them are self-published genre writers. There's a solid core of six figure writers, and a smaller but non-trivial number of seven figure writers. They don't get awards, they don't teach (usually), but they earn a decent living.
What's happened over the last century or so is a huge shift towards the middle of the bell curve. Culture used to be gate-kept and handed down, which meant a much smaller number of talents could be become household names, with an income to match. Generally there was a concept of quality based on exceptional creative imagination and craft. That rubbed off onto genre work, so it was still an influence there.
Now it's become corporatised, so the only metric is income, which pushes everything away from risk and novelty towards lowest common denominator satisfaction for middle-of-the-bell-curve readers. Currently that means trope-heavy checkbox romance with plenty of explicit sex for women, and militaristic scifi for the relatively few men who still read, with a bit of overlap for formulaic thrillers and police procedurals.
This is possible in fiction, where the market for sexy romance seems insatiable.
But there are similar things happening in music and visual art. The audience for those is much smaller, and the barriers to entry much lower, so there's a perfect storm of mediocre people trying to sell their work on social media to a shrinking audience in a global free-for-all, while the scene is being eaten alive by generative AI. And a tiny, tiny number of global mega-artists get most of the attention, income, and marketing budgets.
The only subcultures are online, so they're much more diffuse and lack the lynchpin gatekeepers and networkers who curated and promoted the most interesting work.
Throwing funding at the arts is a band aid for this. It's a structural issue caused by a forced shift in values away from shared community towards compulsive individual hustle as a value in itself.
That's a very naïve and nostalgic retelling of history. Artists have always been very dependant on money, and art has been a very hard to access pursuit. I'd say the opposite is true: it is now more accessible than ever.
> Like your male or female co-worker might hear that such an such a poet was coming out with a new book, and buy it, and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
I do still occasionally read books based on word of mouth, they're just not "high" culture.
E.g., Dungeon Crawler Carl, or the Murderbot series.
I guess that puts me in the same camp as the commoners who were supposedly one of Shakespeare's target audiences.
>You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.
If you work at a University are you really a full-time writer though, you do have classes to teach.
At any rate there is one other choice, which would be crime. If you're a good enough criminal you can spend little effort in your trade and still have plenty of time for reading and writing. And if you're caught and do time you can devote that time to literature. Crime also gives you a more interesting subject to write about than University life - it was good enough for Verlaine and Rimbaud.
This is of course half facetious, as you have to be somewhat determined to take that course, and probably also have some other problems.
Or there could be an UBI.
when I was like 21 I read a piece of advice by Anna Wintour to aspiring couturiers - get a day job.
I have a day job as a programmer, it's pretty chill, lets me make music. And write code for more "artsy" stuff in my spare time, which I mentally liken to Renaissance painters painting portraits for money.
I'm considering going back to school for a maths PhD at some point, that would also be a pretty nice day job.
relevant Derek Sivers post: https://sive.rs/balance
One day I will write the longest rant about "the academization of the arts"; today is not that day, but boy when it comes I will make lots and lots of enemies. It's a fight I am looking forward to, because I am passionate about the fine arts and I have some serious beef with the people that led to the current state of affairs.
Can't wait to read that, I'll gladly take up arms on your side.
The "academies" are mostly incubator for future bureaucrats, professors and bullshitters. I've seen so much talented artists get their spirits broken when they entered the world of Academics, where your art is less important than "He was a student of Mr. Z who was an apprentice of Mr. X which was a semi-relevant local artist".
I've worked with "digital art" teachers (famous academies) who didn't understand video formats, image formats, compression or had any taste in discerning what's good and what's bad.
I've been to art fairs where the most discussed thing is "price per square meter of a painting" instead of the actual emotional value itself. Fairs where most sought after items were "abstract spray of paint #3" style things by Academics who have lost all inspiration and are hard to differentiate between strip-mall furniture store 4.99$ paintings.
Complaining to these people gets you - "oh but you don't understand art". Complaining to actually talented artists gets you the same visceral disgust I feel when seeing that shit.
Burn the academies, free the art.
Interesting. I have insight on this one:
> you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician.
That is still true and I am not sure if it's any less true, than it ever was.
For one, a lot of musicians are playing more instruments (I suspect because instrument prices have fallen) so there's less need for a dedicated musician.
Also experimentation has gotten a lot cheaper: You can do a lot of recording at home. When you don't need to rent a studio at high rates, you don't need someone who can deliver in an hour.
Then, of course, there's the digitalization of music: You have virtual instruments and you have sample libraries at your disposal. Somebody makes and uses those – but usually not the studio musician.
What it comes down to is that more musicians can support themselves off of making music than ever before. This part is not a crises in the arts, not in general, or at all, but a shift in how the arts are created, where and who exactly a "studio musician" is today.
Poetry sucks. short form video is a new form of art that is popular. I feel like so many of these takes confuse "things have changed since i was young" and "art is dead"
I think you made a good point with "short form video is a new form of art", but it's diluted by the "poetry sucks". Your very first words are doing what you accuse others of - not understanding specific media.
What i meant was to show that this person seems to think poetry going away is bad in some objective sense as opposed to just something they liked. Both are totally arbitrary opinions and have nothing to do with death of art or anything like that
There was never a possibility of making a living of poetry. In order to survive as an author, you need to make a bestseller list at least once (preferably, multiple times). Barring some rare exceptions, I don't think any book of poetry was ever best selling. In Eastern Europe, that was the lure of Communism for very many poets - the Communism government guaranteed them cushy upper-class lifestyle, in exchange for doing what they love, i.e. writing poetry (as long as it didn't criticize the system of course and, at least once in a while, writing on a theme decided by Ministry of Culture). Whereas they remembered how, under capitalism, they all needed jobs and poetry was just a hobby. That was true 100 years ago and is still true today.
> There was never a possibility of making a living of poetry.
Yes there was, but it got killed by outsourcing [1].
art is subjective, you need to really think about it, and reflect on it, to engage with it and enjoy it at its greatest depths. For some, this exercise is part of the joy of art. It's like discovering new things, every time. Discovering and considering things in subjective art is almost addictive, and it's very fulfilling.
but that's a lot of mental energy. Intellectual laziness would prefer things be black and white, correct or incorrect, good or bad, and then once things are sorted into one of those binaries, lean back and stop thinking about it because it's now sorted. Once everyone's decided that the Rothko paintings are just big blocks of a single colour, they're easy to make and boring to look at, then there's no further thought needed.
I feel like generative AI art is kindof a culmination of this: the idea of artists and creative people deserving to live and be supported simply by the things they contribute to society in the form of art and humanities, because it isn't hard labour or a trade, is laughable to the point of genuine hostile animosity. It's hard to even describe it until you've experienced it. Seeing people get angry at artists or writers or creators and thinking them being paid for the art they create is unfair: they produce it like a cow makes milk, so why the hell should they be paid for what they'd be making anyway? And if an artist labours to create their art it's more valuable and "better" than someone who piles candy in a corner and writes a story about it resembling how their gay partner was slowly diminished by AIDS. Anyone can do that!
I wish I knew how better to instill appreciation of art and artists in people. Seeing AI generated picture enthusiasts laugh and jeer openly at the artists whose pieces comprised its dataset in the first place as useless and that they're going to starve now has left a bitter taste in my mouth.
I think you and share all of the same premises about art, and I'd love to get a drink and have a conversation... But: Please don't use Rothko as a negative example! Have you seen any Rothko pieces in person? They are by no means solid blocks of color (though some do look it in reproduction), and they grab my attention immediately. Like, they dominate any room they're in, and pull me back towards them over and over again. It's hard to articulate, but there's something both stimulating and restful about his canvases. Especially after walking through a gallery, or a city, where my visual senses can get overloaded, standing in front of a Rothko is like an immensely welcome psychic reset. I used to walk across the bridge to the Tate Modern specifically to go stand in the Rothko room for a while.
I realize that's all subjective taste, but I'm hardly the only person who reacts to him that way. You're right that lots of people assumed the secret was "hey, it's just large blocks of color", but none of his imitators produce anything like his effect on me. There's something else going on with his work.
I'm always torn by this.
If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding?
But should all art have commercial appeal? Do we force all artists to be marketers first and foremost? Are we going to get better art because of that?
The age-old question: how do we decide what is "good"? If we train a bunch of experts on the entire history of art and let them decide, then we seem to get decisions that are based around those experts competing amongst themselves for intellectual snobbery points. But if we let the masses decide, then we get art that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide.
Maybe we train an LLM to decide what deserves funding for us, and move one step closer to The Culture.
Living in a country where the civil servants decide the vast majority of art support (Germany), it's not great. It's just an incentive to please grant readers, rather than an audience. It's just as banal. The difference is that an audience is more likely to know and care about the art form, content, and context. A grant reader rewards what sounds like a good idea on paper.
This is how we get productions like the planet-of-the-apes-meets-star-wars Rigoletto, which played to empty seats at one of the biggest theaters in Germany for years because it was so effective at getting grant money.
Ideally you need both. Attracting and holding an audience is an artistic value, and should be a driver for support. Convincing a neutral outsider with no context is also a useful measure, for art that may not be commercially appealing. Even Nepotism and elitism select for certain dimensions of artistic quality.
Going all in on one system or another is a recipe for cultural death. It's been clear since the ancient Greeks that there is no single definition of "quality", least of all in the arts. A plurality of support mechanisms is needed.
"Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide."
Except that civil servants are making those choices with money they took forcibly from people that don't have a real/significant say in the matter of the taking or what the takings are spent on. In kind it makes it much worse than any decision made by "rich folks". Sure some may agree with those bureaucratic choices, but others are simply giving their cash for no return in value.
Those civil servants execute laws that are, at least ideally, democratically decided upon. In contrast to private concentrations of wealth making arbitrary decisions.
And many of those laws are forcibly denying people from access to something when it is declared "private property".
The civil service is legally protected from the influence of democracy and the legislature has by and large ceded the real implementation of law to the civil servants themselves.
That's plainly not true, at least in EU public education, which I am most familiar with. Most official rules and protocols for professionals in public universities and schools are part of the law and not arbitrary decisions from a manager. These laws are chosen democratically and are revised relatively often, with major overhauls every ~5 years, for better or worse.
These institutions are also constantly dependent on grants and budgets that need to be approved by the elected government.
The lack of flexibility can be a bit oppressive at times, and there can be severe penalties for ignoring rules, even on small protocol lapses, since they are the law. But it's mostly fine in practice, it's not a significant bottleneck to efficiency.
The result is that public education is generally much higher quality than private education. Private ones just tend to be for students with grades that are not high enough to get in a competitive public programme, not that they are very competitive, there's plenty of room. The qualifications required from professors also tend to be much higher in public education than in private, and they get more room to breathe to focus on their specialized courses and research, whereas private professors are overworked and used in areas they are not qualified in.
And the difference between the top and bottom educational institutions is so negligible that top-performing students can happily stay local and be successful. Perhaps there is a difference in the network you might acquire, but not in the quality of education.
In Belgium art grants are basically determined by committees of peers organized by largely politically independent bureaucrats at the many different levels of government we have.
It's all navel gazing, entrenched interests and nepotism. Effectively the art sector is given tax money to perpetuate their own interests with limited democratic control.
Yes indeed, I was directly answering the parent comment, but the post is about "Who pays for the arts?" so you have a good point, I've read your other comments as well.
Generally subsidising art properly seems like such a fundamentally hard problem. I think a good policy would be to balance how much is given to popular art, fringe art and academic art, and have very different criteria to judge their merit.
I think they all have value, and I cannot see a better way of making decisions about "academic" art unless it is by their peers, however elitist that is. This can be counterbalanced by promoting some popular art, which is judged against its, well, broad popularity, a bit more democratic, but that has plenty of perverse incentives too. And what about "fringe" art? The truly innovative stuff. There is really no way to judge the merit of that by contemporaries, so perhaps we should prioritize helping people that can prove their commitment to an artsy lifestyle and have consistent output, whatever it is, as long it is not too derivative.
But think about what actually democratic art subsidising would be, having elected officials only in charge of it: effectively propaganda for the party that is currently in power.
There is a similar problem with funding science, which I believe is much more dangerous and has an enormous impact. You either have peer committees judging scientific merit by whatever criteria they feel is valid with no accountability, or you focus on performance metrics (citations, papers in reputable journals...), or again you have unqualified elected officials making rather arbitrary decisions based on public perception. They are all kind of terrible, it's such a hard problem. I guess the solution, again, is counter-balancing the terribleness of each option against the others, which is kind of what we are doing now. And it is terrible, but it kind of consistently works, quite inefficiently. But relative to what? Is there something better?
A free market of voluntary transactions solves this problem
Sure partially, that is working well too, but there are many things in arts and sciences that have long-term societal value and don't perform well in markets.
That's the whole reason why subsidies are a thing, and they are extremely effective for all kinds of common good. Indeed, that's the whole point of governments generally, to enforce the common good that falls through the cracks of market dynamics (and well, to ensure a fair market in the first place).
Sounds like what you're describing is a government funded by taxes, except using scary sounding verbiage.
It's only taken by force from misanthropes. The average person understands that collective action is a positive, and participates without the threat of force.
You can’t really believe this. If taxes were optional, people would not pay. How much do you really believe people gift the government?
https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.h...
Of course nobody would pay, because then the government would be exposed to the free rider problem just as badly as every organization that’s not a government is. That’s not a sign that people don’t want to pay taxes if everyone is also (having to) pay taxes. It’s a coordination problem.
Consider that lots of people regularly and voluntarily give a certain percentage of their income to their religious institution, without any kind of enforcement structure. There is a belief that such practices are good, right, and required. And it must be a strong belief, because people do love their money.
Second, taxes are not a gift or donation, nor is the government just taking them from you. They are payment for services. It's true that you are locked into a business transaction with the government, but it's meant to be a fair exchange. And unless you are incredibly wealthy, you have a favorable rate in the sense that the services you receive are worth more than what you're paying for.
> without any kind of enforcement structure.
it's peer pressure. Just because the force isn't voilence doesn't mean there isnt a reinforcement structure.
> They are payment for services.
so back to the art grants - are they services the citizens really want?
People like roads and parks, actually.
At least for now people haven't at large elected politicians who would eliminate taxes.
If you rob Peter to pay Paul. You get Paul's vote.
What is robbery is defined in law, and by law taxation is not robbery.
Probably the least convincing argument you could put forward
Ah yes, I am truly misanthropic for questioning my 60% tax burden mainly to the benefit of parasitic bureaucrats.
That is a fair point. Maybe taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing sports stadiums either, instead of cities forcibly imposing culture on us. Of course, public funding has an added benefit of being generally accessible to everyone unlike private funding.
> Except that civil servants are making those choices with money they took forcibly from people that don't have a real/significant say in the matter of the taking or what the takings are spent on.
Do you have an alternative idea we could easily disabuse you of?
> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding?
Paper mache turds are gauche. Real artists produce works that are extensions of themselves, capturing the very essence of their being. The texture should be genuine and the scent unmistakably original, challenging conventional aesthetics. True art requires a visceral connection formed through a process of personal evacuation. It's about creating something so authentic viewers can practically taste the artist's commitment.
If it's not visceral, it ain't art: Kiss My Art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWTcAAtMj4
ceci n'est pas une turd
I can't tell whether this is serious or satire.
It's a joke about 'mierda de artista' I think.
I see what you did there.
> Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide.
A lot of the best art in history has been done because of rich people's money and influence. No doubt the 'urinals are art' crowd would disagree with that though.
In much of the history of the world "rich people" have been in fact controllers in one form or another of the public's purse strings; nobility, royalty, religious leaders have been most of the world's rich people, merchants and industrialists are rather new entries into that class.
In other words most of the grand artistic works people point to as being funded by "rich people" were funded by public wealth controlled by those "rich people".
The same argument holds for lots of things: e.g. most pre-enlightenment scientific progress was made by priests (because they had an education and were able to spend time thinking about stuff). This is no longer true because we live in more enlightened times.
Just because rich people used to be the only source of arts funding doesn't make them the best source of arts funding.
That's true, but I posit that today's richs aren't the same as before. I'll even go further and claim that culturally speaking, the middle class doesn't exist anymore; at least in Western Europe.
They may have more money, but they're statistically the same Spotify/YouTube/TV slop addicted zombies as the class under them, perhaps with just a little less sportsball and more vapid traveling to "discover ze world and culture and stuff <3".
If you’re referring to Fountain, it was more of a statement about the art world than something with intrinsic value that requires funding to preserve imo. Those kinds of things can be done with duct tape and a banana.
They're largely in 100% agreement, eg: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2...
wouldn't have happened without rich people's money and influence.
"Best" art in history is a relic of past powerful people's taste and ambitions. And of the preservation of it (still today, there are fools that willingly destroy/erase remnants of art or culture).
The difference is that today, civil servants/"democratic" structures/the "free" "market", through intent or fate, are also some of the powerful ones.
The point would be to find a structure of power that allows each and every one to express themselves fruitfully for/to the whole.
Thankfully there are 8 billion people on the planet, each with different art tastes, and hence a different definition of what is good art.
So all of your versions are ok and coexist. There is a market for your turd, for people-art and for you elite-driven art and for many others.
In other words... No, if you can't attract and audience, there is no funding. But there is an audience for many things.
Yeah, I agree. But that does mean that the primary skill of a good artist is finding that audience... y'know, marketing. Is that what we want?
this may be an overly optimistic take, but I'd argue that much like with software (indeed, we can consider software to be art, especially if we look at video games), the really good stuff tends to need very little marketing because it resonates with very many people in a powerful way, and those people it resonates with tend to share it with others. For example - Doom. I don't think during those days the primary skill of id software was "marketing". They made a really good game, and it kinda sold itself.
> how do we decide what is "good"?
We don't. Individuals do.
Attempts to arrive at an objective notion of good are always motivated by a desire to extract rents from the group. Got 'em with the ole "greater good" trick.
I’d trust way more that group of experts to make a decision for me.
Otherwise we’d get Walmarts all over the place
I guess a corollary to your question would be at what point should we let old forms of art die? New forms of art are being constantly created, and if we gave each form equal funding, art funding would increase forever. Since it must remain constant (or decrease) some forms must lose funding. Perhaps they will even go extinct as a result.
This is not an either-or question.
Let the public decide, and you get popular art. Let the rich people decide, and you get whatever art the elites value. And also have some public funding, and you get the kind of art experts and some politicians value.
Let the rich decide by their own preferences. Let the public decide by their own preferences. Take money from the public and give it to politicians and bureaucrats so they can decide for the public. The first two make sense. The last does not.
But there is an argument that some people are truly experts in art, they have studied it and made it their life's work. That we should allow them to make the decision for us, because they will be able to make better decisions. We do this in a lot of other areas, after all.
> We do this in a lot of other areas, after all.
Other areas are not so subjective.
Amount of art knowledge isn't subjective, it's a testable and verifiable metric. And the idea that all subjective tastes should be equally valued is a relatively recent invention from within the last generation or so that isn't taken very seriously outside of entry level art appreciation groups.
You can have whatever subjective response to art you'd like, but whether your response should be considered as serious insight and commentary into the structure, context, and significance of that art depends on how much time you've spent studying the field and honing your ability to read artworks.
If the only music someone listens to is top 40, I don't think I care very much what they have to say about Bartok. If the only paintings someone is familiar with are the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh, they're not qualified to speak about an Imhof painting. Someone wearing Walmart doesn't have anything interesting to say about Demna. You get the idea.
I think the common response to this is that it is elitist and exclusionary... But we are elitist and exclusionary in most other fields too. Nobody would listen to the engineering opinions of someone who can't name a programming language. Art is more experiential, sure, but not all experience or cognition that arise from experiences is of equal insight.
And how is that enforced for engineering? The answer is it actually isn't. Anybody is free to build their own product and sell it. And the public chooses to buy only products built by professional engineers because they are better. Why can't we do the same with art? If these "experts" are as good as they say they are, they should be able to win in the free market. We don't need the government to take money from the public to support them.
Art preference is entirely subjective. They might be experts on describing and knowing about historical art, but they have no more lgegitimacy in their preference than anyone else.
> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding?
Slovenia has I think a pretty good solution to this: If you are registered as an independent artist, don't have a full-time job, and fulfill some reasonable criteria for being active (art exhibitions per year, poems published, etc), then the government pays you minimum wage. You are welcome and encouraged to freelance (or make royalties) for more.
It's basically UBI for the arts.
Is it? If you are referring to the Slovenian status of “self employed in culture”, it appears to be a way of getting social security contributions paid by the government - not a wage. It requires “exceptional cultural contribution”.
That's a great answer. Is it working? Is Slovenia producing more/better art as a result?
For some reason, it feels like artists always need to somehow justify their existence. Meanwhile, tech gets billions of dollars of private and public funding. As long as what you're doing in tech fits within the current hype cycle and milieu, then no one blinks an eye.
I'd much rather "throw money away" at the arts rather than waste more money on self-driving cars, fintech, going to Mars, or whatever else the Bay Area thinks will make the world a better place.
They don't think it will make the world a better place, only that it will make them boatloads of money. And lo and behold, an artist whose work holds the same promise won't have to justify anything.
But I think that would be comparing apples with oranges. If we make art with the same motivations that produce tech, is it still art?
Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money.
By all means, donate to your local artist. Tech gets all of this funding because it produces tangible results, tech provides what people ask for. Piss Christ, however ... well, give money to the artist if it pleases you.
There's a sculpture park not too far away from me. It has very large metal polygons, gently rusting. It certainly fits my modern art criteria: is it ugly? Is it incomprehensible?
And then comes the question of "What do you get out of this particular bit of art?" The standard defense is "anything you like." Which sounds great until you realize that only one piece of art is ever required, the rest being superfluous. That one piece is "anything you like," which is congruent with any other piece's identical "anything you like." No need for anything else.
With these sorts of things, modern art is backing itself into a corner. It isn't surprising that people aren't eager to open their wallets.
> Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money.
I reiterate my comment. Scientists and engineers get billions of dollars of other peoples' money, both private and public.
Regarding the rest of your comment, art is not the arts. The arts include theater, music, dance, etc.
Scientist and engineers also need to justify their desire for other people's money.
Generally the justification for that is "I'll make you more money, either in the short run or in the long run."
Somehow, this is the only justification we can get anyone to agree on in the modern world. Should we educate kids? "Sure, as long as its STEM so they can be good taxpayers."
Come to think of it, this is also often the justification for art. Should I buy this piece? "Of course, it will gain in value"
fr nothing pisses me off more than people saying that only STEM education is valuable
I would actually argue that STEM education is generally harmful in that it acts like it's the only thing important. Honestly, engineering and technology is mainly made difficult by engineers themselves, who have little influence from other fields.
"and why do you want more money?"
"because it'll make me happy"
"why not just buy this lovely [painting/poem/record] instead, it'll directly give you joy"
No one said otherwise. But let's be honest. Do they really currently have to justify things to such a degree that artists do?
The National Endowment for the Arts' budget is less than $200 million. Here's the approximate budgets for scientists and engineers:
* NASA: $23 billion
* NSF: $10 billion
* DARPA: $4.3 billion
* DoD: $780 billion (a lot of which goes to defense contractors and laboratories)
* The self-driving car industry has spent around $50 billion. And what have we got out of that industry that justifies that spending?
* Cryptocurrency startups are expected to get around $12 billion in funding in 2024. What have we got out of it that justifies that budget?
* Scientists got $5 billion dollars to smash around particles and play with statistics.
When it comes to funding, scientists, engineers, and tech-related endeavors have it extremely easy, and no one places the demands on the tech industry that they do on other industries.
ideally the economy is nice and efficient and is optimized so that everybody can afford to live a decent life while having plenty of money to spare, which they can spend however they want, and which they will in practice spend on lots of arts and culture.
Instead we have an economy that is ruthless about costing as much as everybody can afford, and a culture that when there's more resources wants more and bigger stuff, leaving little surplus for culture, which often has to be funded with ads and grift because it is counterintuitive to fund it directly.
at least we've still got government-backed culture like arts councils and grants ... without that we'd be even more desperate.
but if you want a lot more art, make food, rent, education, and healthcare affordable, so that people have time and resources left over and don't feel the financial anxiety of capitalism breathing down their neck.
A great of deal of history’s greatest works of art have been produced by artists in dire personal circumstances.
KMFA is a non-profit, listener-supported classical music station that has been broadcasting for over half a century. They also stream their content for the web:
Whats surprisingly missing from this conversation, and only hinted at in the article, is that there a massive new infrastructure for funding "the arts" today that did not exist 20 years ago. Youtube, instagram, and tiktok allow many more people to pursue creative pursuits and find audiences for their work than before. The people who succeed on these platforms may call themselves creators, but a lot of them are artists. IMO the people who refuse to use the new tools, or do so unseriously find it hard to fund themselves.
I agree, they certainly are artists. Perhaps artists that are good at making content for that particular platform, though. A painter who is dedicated to her craft wouldn’t be able to dedicate as much time getting good at YouTube’s algorithm. How can we support those people?
I see what you are saying and agree to a point, but you don't have to become excellent at 10 minute long form youtube videos to sustain yourself, for example you can create 2 minute behind the scenes videos on tiktok instead or simply share images of your paintings on instagram. artists can be creative about building audiences.
Here are some local NYC artists/groups i follow in order of followers:
https://www.instagram.com/secret_riso_club/ https://www.instagram.com/sahanabanana/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/naomi.basu/?hl=en
I don't have any firsthand experience in this subject, so I could be wrong.
However, from my limited understanding of the YT algorithm, it rewards consistency.
If you make at least one new video every week, and each video is "well recieved", i.e. most of the people who click on it finish it, and ideally like it/subscribe to your channel as well, the algorithm will start pushing your stuff on the "recommended" list.
How much do Alphabet, Meta & ByteDance pay these folks?
They don't need to, they help with distribution you can add a link to your work, or patreon.
For a lot of people this is a better alternative than the old gatekeepers of yore, small or local magazine editors and tastemakers who may for whatever reason hold you back
This is not a "framework for funding the arts" as you mentioned earlier. If you're not getting paid, you're just working for free to build the library of those sites. At best, one can think of it like buying an ad. But, you're also at the mercy of an algorithm which may hold you back for whatever reason and also corporate policy that may remove your content for whatever reason.
I didn’t see any mention of how the actual “rich people” have changed from a hundred years ago to today. The industrialists of yesteryear tended to care about what high society valued and subsequently funded cultural projects. Carnegie Hall (essentially the top destination for classical musicians) or the Carnegie Library system are prime examples.
Compare that to today, where many of the newly rich are from tech or finance. They don’t seem to care at all about supporting culture or the arts, instead focusing on politics, medicine, or their own pet causes.
This has to be a major factor, and also explains why Bezos Hall or Gates University of the Arts seem like completely implausible things to exist today.
I think it is not the rich people that has changed but the artists.
Suppose the reason that rich people bought art in the old days was mostly to gain respect and status from other people (and personal pleasure secondly).
Art like a Vermeer painting is good at that: everybody can see it is a good painting and many people would want such a painting in their home.
But modern art (including architecture) is often only understandable in narrow artist circles and not by people at large. Most people look at modern art and wonders if this is a piece of art or some junk that needs to be thrown out.
So modern art fails at making the population give the rich person higher social status.
Example: A rich guy in Denmark built a new opera house (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Copenhag...) to replace the old one (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Royal_Da...). I think the attempt at improving status failed with the new building.
This interpretation is the style of Clayton Christensen: The Theory of Jobs To Be Done https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/clay-christensen-the-theory-of-jo...
So it might be that the rich people has concluded that currently is is not possible to create "public works of art" that would increase the rich peoples social standing.
Well, a few things:
1. The term here should be contemporary art, not modern art. Modern art refers to art from roughly 1890-1960. Typically people that don’t know much about contemporary art and claim it’s all stupid make this basic mistake, which highlights their ignorance of the subject.
2. The contemporary art market is absolutely driven and perhaps even survives because of rich people. So much so that artworks have become financial instruments.
The difference, which is what my comment was trying to get at, is that the ultra rich, society-defining wealth tends to come from the tech world and generally has little interest in arts or culture. For example the entire contemporary art market is only about 65 billion, which is orders of magnitude lower than tech. https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/art/collecting/art-ma...
3. Even then, this is only “art” and not “the arts” as a whole. So I don’t think it’s very comprehensive of an answer.
One related conclusion I came to awhile ago, and wrote a short post on, is that it’s very difficult to invest in “public art” vs. “private art.” I wrote more about it here:
https://onthearts.com/p/modern-culture-is-too-escapist-part
But the most relevant part for this discussion is this:
Today, if a wealthy benefactor wanted to emulate a Renaissance patron and fund an architect or artist to create a new town square or city park, it’s unclear how he or she would even go about doing so. There don’t appear to be any financial instruments specifically designed for rewarding investors that fund integrated artworks. The design of the public space would almost certainly be watered down and subject to various governmental councils and community groups. Hostile attitudes toward the wealthy would probably result in the park being vandalized, if it were actually built.
Consequently, it is much easier and more creatively rewarding to instead spend a few million on a rare painting or backing a film project. Put simply, there are very little incentives for the wealthy to fund integrated arts.
Even then, though, this is already a subset of the potential wealthy founders of art, a subset that largely excludes most of the tech billionaires that don’t care about art culture at all.
Just focusing on movies, my sense is that money isn’t the big issue, it’s the lack of prestige involved in art that’s really killing it. The necessary conditions for creating great art is an elite group (that holds significant societal power), that ranks, discusses and promotes all the excellent art being released in a year. They give great artists prestige and some money but money is the smaller part of the equation. Instead of this what we have now is a mass market art where art gets ranked by the millions/ billions it brings in, and so we are fed with a never ending fill of Marvel Slop/ Franchise movies and rarely risky, through provoking movies. And when we do have such a movie, we have no effective way of showering its creators with prestige. The Oscars used to play this role, but now apparently most voters don’t even watch the Oscar movies and so it’s corrupted beyond repair.
Besides the Oscar crowd is filled with actors and the maximum prestige an actor can give to another actor is limited greatly. Compare it to an Oscar crowd filled with heads of state, industry etc like a royal court of the past and that would be an insanely strong incentive to produce great art.
I think the internet and the general ascendancy of computer science,and algorithmic thinking has a part to play in this. There is a certain notion of efficiency (perhaps also expressable as convenience) which has become a well trodden path to success in the market. This has been widely beneficial of course, but amongst it's side effects are a marginalisation of anything other than the most focused, popular artistic offerings. (Think Mr Beast, Taylor Swift etc).
In the UK, throughout the 80s various rock bands were getting government subsidies for their music. We call it Rock on the Dole. Many people do argue this led to the rise of music from that era.
yep, I've heard very good arguments for this.
No one would expect an artist to say anything sensible about technology...
"Sensible" in what sense, or on what scale?
You probably shouldn't ask an artist about a useful formula for concrete, or to troubleshoot your jacquard loom, or which js framework to use: that's what engineers are for. But the products of those tools will be more successful if someone other than an engineer has input into the building's proportions, or the cloth's colors, or the page's layout. That's all art, and imminently sensible - even by the most nakedly commercial definition of "sense".
At a larger scale, and just to pick the least controversial and most popular on this board: did Ridley Scott and Matt Damon say nothing sensible about technology in The Martian? Or Neal Stephenson in, like, anything?
At a still larger scale, artists have always engaged with the ways technology changes society (or, in fact, the way that technology changes art) - in celebration and in warning, in observation and in speculation, and in all modes between. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire is an easily-graspable example.
Often artists are wrong, of course, as anyone (including technologists and venture capitalists) can be, but that's very different than not "sensible".
I agree with you. Please note the ellipsis at the end of my original statement. Sorry it wasn't clear, but it was said with irony.
The powerful and/or rich. Same with the sciences.
EDIT: However individual contributors "fund" the arts and sciences by their work; those can of course come from people of any social status.
It makes sense for everyone to fund the sciences though because we all benefit from it as we saw very clearly with the mRNA vaccines for covid most recently. Other examples include semiconductors, the internet etc.
But it's hard to see how I benefit from someone making a messy bed because it's 'art'. (That is a real example. A literal messy bed. 'My Bed' by Tracy Emin.)
Individual people don't fund the sciences though. As in, they don't direct funding to the sciences. That's done by representatives of some kind - who fit into the "rich and/or powerful" category.
The artists themselves do, in the era of easy creation we are all conceptual artists now.
All I can think of while and after reading this article: Socializing Risk. Why exactly should I, as a citizen, pay for random art pieces indirectly through taxes? I already do, but I question the practice. To simply answer the headlines question: "Who Pays for the Arts?" How about the consumers pay for what they want to consume?
A classical philosopher once told me that many ultra-wealthy people have ancient papyrus scrolls hidden away in their collections -- full of ancient Greek and Roman knowledge currently unknown to the outside world.
Keep the value up by keeping it secret. Or at least keep your bragging rights with fellow ultra-rich apex parasites.
If I heard someone brag about depriving the public of historical documents, I'd see them as nothing more than slime. Even the Vatican Secret Archive is finally getting digitized https://digi.vatlib.it/
So nation states and colonist regimes are allowed to accumulate wealth/booty but a private citizen is "depriving the public of historical documents"?
Depends on if either put theirs on display.
Sounds like the kind of thing children tell each other in the playground.
I dunno—quite a few things that are true about (at least some set of) rich people also have that kind of ring to them. I wouldn’t be surprised.
If you're ever in Kyoto, be sure to check out the Miho Museum to see what one billionaire family's private collection of works from antiquity looks like. I don't recall any papyri, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit if they have things tucked away that aren't ever on display.
Wouldn’t the value be a lot higher if it wasn’t secret? Or is it the risk confiscation/opprobrium?
Example of something valuable with secret contents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Shaolin
That's importantly different, unless the existence and authenticity of the scrolls is public and only the contents are secret (which is not what I understood the commenter to be suggesting).
People in this thread will spend more time deciding if they agree or disagree with various aspects of this article, fret over some nonsense about the 'economics' of art, or paint with broad brushes a world they do not understand... instead of doing what they really ought, which is to close the spreadsheet/terminal/pitch deck and...
SEE
ART
Loving art is extremely sexy, sophisticated, fun, complex, challenging, and indulgent. It also breaks you out of a rut, gives you totally bonkers 'out there' fresh ideas, helps you be less of a self-centered human.
Anyone can do it.
The more interested and involved you are in up-and-coming artists –people who are struggling to make it in that world – the better. You can go to a gallery show once a week, or buy every art book you can get your hand on, or dedicate your next vacation to visiting a world class museum.
You can find this world aligned with your tastes - maybe you like abstract expressionism, maybe you like bronze sculptures of cowboys, maybe you like slutty polaroids. There are niches nested in niches, one you'll be comfortable in and ones you won't be, (which is even better, to be uncomfortable).
BTW you can start this journey on the internet but it cannot be fully realized from the comfort of a screen. You will have to go outside, be near other humans, smell the glue and the wine and the turpentine of real art; what better excuse is there? Oh and one more thing, since this is HN: stupid AI art isn't art at all, for the reasons above and more.
SEE
ART
Going to a gallery and smelling glue and wine and turpentine is a fine thing to do but it’s not like it is The Worthwhile Thing To Do. Reading magazine articles and thinking about them is a fine thing to do sometimes too.
How pedantic. Obviously it's not the smelling, it's the experiencing and the socializing and the development of taste, immersed in the qualia of meatspace.
> what they really ought, which is to close the spreadsheet/terminal/pitch deck and... SEE ART
I ought'nt.
People really tend to overvalue "art" (whatever that may be).
small minds do, certainly
> SEE > Anyone can do it.
I am blind. Should I feel offended, or was that an unintentionally exclusionary statement?
heh.jpg
Judging from your dismissive reply, I assume it was an intentionally exclusionary statement from a person taken prisoner by their visual cortex.
I don’t think loving art is easy at all. I still haven’t completely learnt how to do it
I reckon learning how to love art is a lot of what I’m doing when I’m engaging with art. Maybe loving the feeling of learning to love art… is loving art? It does seem to be the case that people who can’t at least tolerate, if not enjoy, that process, very much do not love art.
Possibly I’m doing it wrong, though.
I often work with artists. From musicians, to stage and theater, illustrators and animators, dancers, choreographers, sculptors, craftsmen, and more. I work with galleries and museums and on occasion collaborate to build exhibits, but most of what I do is with people.
I describe what characterizes an artist as someone who pursues virtuosity of the fundamentals. You can't show up when you want and slack your way off into it. No one will work with you. Often, artists are driven to work harder to compensate for stereotypes, because no one sees the work or effort it takes to create the possibility to do art. It's why I think average people should be asked to perform at the Olympics alongside the athletes- our perception is relative, otherwise parents wouldn't get into fights over little league games.
Loving art can start with finding resonance with people who do art, with the things they do or produce, or with the tools of art. The more you practice it, the more you will be able to appreciate the challenges and rewards of it. Seeing people light up in anticipation to see what comes out of the kiln, the way their hair stands on end when they hear the roar and feel the blast of heat during an iron pour, or discussing a hilariously bad stage reading with the cast makes you feel connected to humanity in a way that looking at oil paintings in a sterile gallery without an art history background and a vested interest in museum studies just can't.
People that have a derisively low opinion of artists are often uncomfortable with being vulnerable. Sometimes, they're too empathetic, and the thought of being up on stage, under the pressure to perform, being a perpetual object of criticism or ridicule is too much for them. They'd rather imagine flighty, spoiled slackers than have to feel through the burdens of familiar uncertainty and failure. Because following every "Anyone could do that" is the unspoken "...but I didn't."
Even better.
