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Comment by timmaxw | Hacker News Reader

The non-wealthy regularly pay for books, music, movies, video games, etc. Hollywood is a $40B/year industry. All these industries follow a model of "make a work of art, then sell infinite copies"; this makes it possible to sell the copies at reasonable prices. These prices are appropriate, and the non-wealthy pay them.

The "high art" world, on the other hand, fetishizes the original physical work of art. If an expert painter spends weeks on a painting, then they must sell it for enough money to cover "weeks of an expert's income"; so of course only wealthy people will be able to afford it. How is this price more "appropriate" than the prices that non-wealthy people pay?

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Non wealthy people are largely not willing to pay for books, movies, videogames (I will admit to not knowing about music) what it actually costs to make them. The industries are able to sidestep this by underpaying (all but the highest profile) artists and massively scaling up marketing budgets, but people routinely underestimate the time and effort involved in producing art, even the "infinite copies" version.

> Non wealthy people are largely not willing to pay ... what it actually costs to make them

The general public pays enough money to pay the artists' salaries, plus the marketing budget and all the other costs. Otherwise Hollywood would go out of business.

Yes, but the artists salaries are typically insufficient to actually support their lives. Hollywood exists because enough people are excited enough by the idea of working for Hollywood that they're willing to accept fairly subpar working conditions and pay to get a chance to do what they love. Art is almost universally subject to a "passion tax".

Perhaps some of those people aren't quite as talented as they would like to think they are?

I'm not sure how that creates an obligation in the, uhh, 'non-wealthy', that they just don't appreciate art and should be paying those people more by paying more for media.

There's plenty of room in Hollywood budgets to make a movie that doesn't require the leads to make $30M each while underpaying extras. I think you're railing at the wrong "enemy".

I'm not railing at anyone. I'm saying that if people want more of a say in what kind of art is made, they need to be willing to spend more money on art, and spend it more thoughtfully. If they're only willing to spend very small amounts of money, and only on art that has been thoroughly vetted by the wealthy taste-makers, then they're only going to get what they wealthy taste-makers think is good.

Sorry, the GP has it right. I've worked in that industry, and (like lots of other industries) there's plenty of money (even selling the output at "normal people" prices) sloshing around to pay everyone involved a decent wage. Instead, most of the proceeds are extracted by the people who have the most power. That this will (in the long-term) cripple the entire enterprise (I think we're already seeing it) is not a concern for those making the money now.

There are many forms of art. In many cases people can get for themselves cheap reproductions and could plaster their bedrooms with it if they ever wanted. Or if that is not good enough for them and they can't get original works of some famous expensive artist then they can find some starving ones and get their works.

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