What if we fund artists the way we fund startups?

ellegriffin.substack.com

7 points·tndl··4 comments

Because the expensive art market is entirely fraudulent, and on top of that it’s a 0 sum game.

Art has no intrinsic value. It’s only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it, and in auctions it’s not unusual for the sellers to bid the price up themselves, to artificially increase the value.

Especially beyond a point in the low millions, it's just too tempting to forge the art. The intrinsic value for a painting is for it to change a wall, sometimes alter a space you could say, and it does that very well in many cases. But not if it becomes so expensive you can't turn your back to it.

This article seems to be claiming that somehow artists in the past got more money than artists now, and that simply is not true.

It’s survivor bias - we hear about these well funded artists because they were well funded. Other artists in the past could earn a living by doing portraits, etc to pay the bills - if they got lucky and became successful then they could do things outside of the norms. Nowadays the job of portraits, etc has been largely taken over by photographers, who use that to pay bills.

There has not been a historical period where just anybody could decide “i want to be an artist”, and then do just that and yet have enough money to pay bills, etc

>What if we fund artists the way we fund startups?

Um.... That is what Labels and Record company does. Steve Jobs seems to understand the music industry better than anyone else on the planet, it was true 20 years ago and still true today.

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