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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

> Royal Society of Arts

I really want to know what their interest is here... high-arts certainly don't depend on cash-tips the way that seedier types of artistic expression do...

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Here are the first two sentence from their Wikipedia article[1]:

>The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), also known as the Royal Society of Arts, is a London-based organisation committed to finding practical solutions to social challenges.

>Founded in 1754 by William Shipley as the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, it was granted a Royal Charter in 1847, and the right to use the term "Royal" in its name by King Edward VII in 1908

So they have a focus beyond the arts and the "royal" in their name seems to purely be a historical quirk of the British Monarchy and not any real connection to the government. It sounds mostly like a think tank that would put out exactly this type of report.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_of_Arts

Artists are more likely to deal with cash because a lot of the way they operate is way more similar to (or often, idenitical to) the local handyman or emergency plumber or marketstall holder than the concept of 'artist' pushed on us through the media (although that isn't necessarily a myth, just very much not the norm and a sort of absolutely minute spin-off of the whole industry).

They also do a lot of negotiating and haggling. Art as a business can get quite complicated financially even at low levels of income so we end up back at the whole thing about how at a basic level budgetting is easy if you physically have the money in front of you

Art sales and donations are used for money laundering and tax evasion. That's why the quality of art has no relation to its price anymore.

Modern art streamlined this business (since it can be mass produced quickly) and NFTs streamline this even further.

Yet FinCEN allows artists to just make paintings as they please, and their trade is unregulated. Shocking!

> Modern art streamlined this business

Not a fan of po-mo then, I take it?

I'm a fan of some, but it's a subjective thing, isn't it? Don't you think that maybe perhaps some of the "auction prices" and "appraisals" are a bit more "objective"? Can nobody on this website think outside the box?

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