Who Pays for the Arts? | Hacker News Reader

Who Pays for the Arts?

esquire.com

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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.

Just make art people actually want to pay for like furry art.

A company already has a world leadership on that. Look into Nutaku.

I do this. http://egypt.urnash.com

Commissions and Patreon subscribers welcome.

>> 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.

Also Morgan Freeman.

Middle American checking in here. Never even heard of 24 and I find your prejudiced view of middle America to be ignorant.

> 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...

>Are you seriously arguing that art is doing more for the world at large than the IT industry? Come on...

Yes? Art has been made for at least 17,000 years, it is a fundamental expression of human consciousness. This is like asking if symbolic thinking or language is more important than IT. Yes. Obviously. The sum of all IT work is a blip compared to the sum total of human expression across our species's existence.

You're right, if IT hadn't been present during the last pandemic, we would have been much worse off. But even if we had apocalyptic human collapse and reverted to a pre-historic hunter-gatherer existence with primitive technologies... people would still be making art.

You are not arguing what you quoted, then. You list things that I agree with - art is important, and it's intertwined with our development. It is, like our LLM buddies would say, crucial on the tapestry of history delving. Or something.

But that is not an argument for art doing more for the world, right now, than the IT industry. In fact, it is the latter that takes art and makes it accessible on a scale that was impossible decades ago. Accessible to the masses, understandable to anyone, and so on. Literature is art. And we now have every piece of human literature at our fingertips. And not just us, I mean almost any human being, including the poorest of the poor. You should look at the impact technology is having in the less fortunate parts of the world - from health care, to supplies delivery, clean water, education, access to information, and so on.

It's one thing to consider art important. It's another to put it ahead in "world impact" than technology.

Virtually every invention in tech was first inspired by art. Does anyone seriously believe that the people who brought us cellphones were not first hardcore Trekkers?

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.

We kind of see same shift happening in real-time with The Beatles at the moment

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".

It was even a whole literary universe, full of intertwining storylines and crossing-over characters!

We’ve lost most of it, but there were tons of works connected to the Iliad. It’s just the last year of a ten year war. The instigation of the war, events in gathering the allies on both sides, the voyage of the Greeks to Ilium, and other battles and skirmishes are alluded to, but not directly covered in Homer’s story. Then there’s the return of the heroes other than Odysseus! We have some of this in surviving tragedies, but know only titles and maybe topics for a whole bunch more.

Then you’ve got all the national myths that connect to it. The Aeneid, the Round Table and broader “Matter of Britain”, et c.

> It was even a whole literary universe, full of intertwining storylines and crossing-over characters!

This is of course true of mythology more generally, not just the Trojan War literary cycle. Mythology was the "fictional universe(s)" of its day, that most cultured people would've been familiar with.

Wasn’t crime and punishment published periodically in a magazine or something like it? What does this have to do with the quality?

The suggestion that serialized/installment novels are similar to your analogy, or a reflection of their quality, is a misconception. Serialized novels were often completed before being released in installments, unlike a so-called comic run. It was often simply an alternative method of publishing.

Other examples of serialized novels include The Count of Monte Cristo, Madame Bovary, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. A Farewell to Arms, for example, was completed entirely before it was serialized in Scribner's. In the heyday of the Atlantic and Scribner's magazines, many of the best American writers would first publish their novels in installments prior to releasing as a single volume. It was considered a mark of success to publish in installments in one of the vaunted literary magazines.

Why did you interpret being compared to a comic or manga as an insult to their quality?

In short, that wasn't my meaning. My line about the quality was in response to the first line of the comment I replied to, where it was said "Even worse, Charles Dickens mostly wrote serialized novels", which makes it seem as if that commenter thought serialized novels were considered of poorer quality than the alternative of publishing in a single volume. My remark about not being similar to a comic run is separate, and is due to how installment novels were not necessarily continual works in progress like a comic.

We should bring back this format. Just like Netflix's "dump all at once" strategy stifles the pop impact of their series, I think you could get more interest in literature by adopting a chapter-by-chapter release cycle. You would need to jumpstart it with some big name authors to draw interest, but I could see it taking off as a format once the ball starts rolling.

Problem with this is that you will get a lot of unfinished works. Sales would be checked regularly and as soon as unpopular chapter hits the market and sales go super low, it gets axed. Netflix itself does that too. Look at all the season 1/2 series out there. Imagine spending a year reading a novel just for it to be axed when it is 70% complete

short runs and one-offs are common in manga before someone gets approved for a full series

It never went away. This is the standard publishing format for fanfiction, webnovels, and so on.

true, but discoverability on the medium is awful right now, and there’s not really a pipeline for getting your webnovel an editor, and translating webnovel success into getting published

> In 19-century Italy, opera was about as popular as pop music today.

Is this true? It was very popular with the people whose accounts mostly make up primary documents from that period. But they were a tiny minority of the population in absolute terms. The population was still primarily rural-agricultural, did that allow access to opera for most people?

There are several extant folk music traditions with continuity to 19th century italy, it seems much more likely to me that most people's music exposure would have been to locally produced folk styles than opera.

Consider the fact that, say, at the time when Verdi was rabidly popular, late 19th century, there was no iTunes, no TV, no CDs, cassettes, or vinyl records, and no music radio. Live performances ruled supreme, among all classes. It's true that opera was a higher-brow entertainment than going to dances, but still a ton of people atteneded opera houses, it was normal, even for not rich. Very certainly not a tiny minority; it was a bit like movies prior to TV.

Speaking of Verdi, he postponed rehearsals of the famous "Donna e mobile" aria until the day before premiere, to keep it a secret, because he predicted (correctly) that it was going to be an instant hit. On release, it basically became a pop song, performed all over the place (recording did not exist, remember). This may give an idea what a hit could look / sound like at the time. BTW it has most features of a modern hit song: a clear rhythm, a simple but catchy and recognizable melody, somehow playful words about the nature of romantic relationships.

Yeah I've considered all that but still you were making a concrete historical claim about a specific time and place and I was wondering if it's true. I still am.

Of course live music was how people accessed music, and generally for this time in most parts of europe we have a strongly attested art music tradition enjoyed by the aristocratic minority and a separate, vastly more popular yet barely attested folk music tradition associated with the lower class rural majority.

The elite wrote about the things that interested them, and their writings make up the vast majority of primary documents from the era. We have to be careful not to accidentally consume their biases along with their information.

> Consider the fact that, say, at the time when Verdi was rabidly popular, late 19th century, there was no iTunes, no TV, no CDs, cassettes, or vinyl records, and no music radio.

Notably though, there was sheet music as a mass-market form of music, so we can tell what was popular - and "opera tunes" definitely made the list, together with theme-and-variations sets based on opera tunes, medleys of opera tunes, parodies based on the tunes, arrangements for countless instruments etc.

> 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.

Isn't that mostly just a change in technology? Taylor Swift and Whitney Houston have to sing into microphones that amplify their voice electrically, whereas opera singers obviously don't; they just sing the way public singing was done for much of recorded history. To some extent, the point of opera and classical music (which also features unamplified instruments) is a kind of historical reenactment; of keeping performance practices alive that have a very long history of their own.

Audio amplification also exists on operatic stages, even very prominent [1]. Moreover, you can get very good, wonderful, excellent recordings of basically any classical opera, both old and modern performances, for a pretty acceptable price. For watching, you can have pretty captivating video recordings with really good sound.

It's still a niche product compared to recordings of, say, Taylor Swift (who is also an excellent performer).

[1]: https://thespaces.com/sydney-opera-house-emerges-with-a-whol...

Yes but the performance practice is way different. Modern pop singing uses a "crooning" performance style that's totally unfeasible without the modern microphone and electric amplification. Even musicals singers can afford to clearly "belt out" their tunes without dangerously straining their voice, because it will always get amplified as a matter of course. Opera singers don't have that luxury.

This isn't even necessarily true. High art is the basic research of culture. You'd be amazed at how many elements from your fave this-or-that are copped (often wholesale) from some obscure piece of media. Often, that reference lifts the latter out of obscurity, and everyone pretends that they knew it was groundbreaking and brilliant all along. "The favorite artist of your favorite artist," is a real concept.

An example : Darren Aronofsky's now-famous cribbing of Satoshi Kon's work, back when anime was mostly thought of as, "Sex and violence, Pokemon, and Miyazaki (if you even knew of Miyazaki)." And even that's kind of the tip of the iceberg. Decades-old expressionist films, little-known performance and video art, paintings, music, fashion; unless you really know the landscape, how can you tell what is and isn't influencing culture down the line? How much of your experience in the world of 2024 was shaped by the proclivities of teenagers on IRC and 4chan in 2004, just trying to make each other laugh?

[Insert that monologue from The Devil Wears Prada]

Thank you, that's a nice take!

As J.L.Borges aptly noted, a serious artist produces not only successors but also predecessors. (Regarding Miyazaki, I could not miss an animator who was praised so highly by Kurosawa. I learned about the rest of anime later.)

But my point was more narrow: however beautiful The Magic Flute or Barber of Ceville or even Carmen may be, they are sort of stuck in a particular point of cultural space, you can't materially change them without leaving the genre that defines them. This is not specific to genres that became high-brow "refined art"; you can't play a rock-n-roll like it's 1957 either, it will only resonate among the fans of the genre / period, not very numerous now. With that, both opera and rock-n-roll were once the epitomes of wide, overwhelming popularity, each at their time.

I agree about lineage. This is basically how culture grows and develops. The past is absolutely not worthless, but no cultural epoch is a final destination. Rainbow in 1970s, Jethro Tull in 1990s, and Master Boot Record in 2020s all directly quoted baroque music, but each of them did that differently, and not exactly the way an authentist ensemble would play it.

>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 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.

I’m no expert, but iconoclasm is a pretty common trope in western music, and it tends to come with some amount of disdain for audiences.

Mid-career, Duke Ellington chafed under the racist and unadventurous expectations of his audiences, and charted a new musical path, making music that was primarily aimed at pleasing other musicians. Many of these compositions are now jazz standards.

In modern classical music, 20th Century figures like Boulez, and even earlier composers like Wagner thought their audiences were hopelessly sentimental and complacent, and worked intentionally to disturb them. A great many of the household names in modern classical music meet this description, and they certainly set the direction of classical music to follow.

Now to my point: I think some of these artists made good, enduring art. But if we look at the media in which they worked — Jazz and Classical music — these forms are, I regret to say, completely culturally irrelevant. They’re dead media; the only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games, and jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point. It’s hard not to see some truth in the above post’s sense that the net result of these artists’ influence was a kind of wish granted by the monkey’s paw. They set out to destroy the idols of their day and succeeded, and the long run outcome was essentially suicidal.

I wonder if we need to re-examine the trope of the iconoclast, in hopes of finding new artistic pathways that are capable of expressing new ideas and asking new questions without destroying the traditions that give rise to them.

The "you are all awesome" or "say hello to new york" or "hands up all my people" are waaay more common. Actual real world artists go out of their way to please paying audience to the max.

Fan service is a thing for the exact same reason.

"...In modern classical music..."

Stravinsky should probably be the start of your argument, and someone like Cage/Reich as your midpoint and Glass as your populist revisionism endgame/full circle. Gould on Igor Stravinsky, followed by Bernstein/Gershwin/Copeland, if you want to get deeper into the new world bastardisation of the genre.

"only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games"

You mean the two dominant forms of funded and marketed media in the contemporary age? What argument are you tryin to make exactly?

"jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point"

I mean there's so much to unpack and address there it's hard to even know where to start - so I'll talk about my own direct experience in the European Domestic market. Jazz accounts for about 1% of streamed music (about the same for Classical) but accounts for closer to 5% of ticketed live music in Ireland and the UK.

There's also a huge cross-pollination in the UK Jazz/Hip-Hop scene - with particular emphasis on Grammy award winner Venna and his collaborations with the likes of Knucks etc... The South London jazz scene is also similarly dominated by the likes of drummer Yussef Dayes and keyboardist Kamaal Williams, who do a huge amount of collaborations and released the seminal 'Black Focus' album, as well as featuring on cultural touchpoints like Boiler Room etc...

London Jazz Festival pulls in 100,000 people alone annually. 2023 Guinness Cork Jazz Festival attracted over 100,000 visitors in a Metro area of 300,000.

Yeah, as I said I’m not an expert, but I did choose Wagner instead of Stravinsky to be provocative ;). It’s an important point, often missed, that the decline of classical music from public relevance to background music begins in the excesses of Romanticism. Wagner really did think his audiences and most of his composer contemporaries were a bunch of drooling morons. While he is now considered “canonical, but a bit of a Nazi,” in his time much of his music was received as the insult he intended. Stravinsky was more good-natured, had his whole neo-classical thing (which is very underrated imho), and really, I think, just wanted to establish his independence from Rimsky-Korsakov.

As for jazz, I love and play jazz music. I don’t disagree that there are excellent and innovative jazz musicians, and I think the acceptance by jazz musicians of rap music is a positive, if overdue development. That said, I read your words, and I see described exactly what I meant: a genre with a peripheral cultural presence, that means nothing in the lives of anyone outside of a small, dedicated fan base. Certainly nothing approaching it’s time as a cultural protagonist, which remains indisputably in the past (but may it rise again).

> Open disdain for audience is rarely in the mind of the artist

When they say "don't buy it" I take them at their word. I just wish my stolen tax money didn't also fund them.

>Open disdain for audience is rarely in the mind of the artist

Thanks to many artists being incapable of abstaining from Xitter loggorhea, we definitively know this to be false.

Open disdain for the classes lower than the audience's is the entire point of art appreciation.

'Open disdain'? 'Entire point'? Wow, you learn something everyday!

using the market as a benchmark for whether art is worth pursuing is absolutely hilarious. this is your brain on capitalism folks

why bother thinking for yourself what art is enjoyable or not when you can let The Invisible Hand do it for you?

That’s one way to interpret the post. Another is that there used to be substantial permeability between high and low culture, and now there isn’t. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to suggest that least part of this divide originated in a misguided retreat on the part of high culture from the hoi-polloi.

> low culture

Poverty seasoned Foie Gras art.

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.

> 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.

You'd be surprised.

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.

This. Modern music. Woodworking. Digital illustration. Pottery. All very much thriving.

> Marvel Cinematic Universe

Apparently comedy is thriving as well too.

The article under discussion, though, isn't about arts that are surviving as for profit businesses--which includes all of the ones you mention. IT's about arts that aren't doing that. Those are the forms of art that the GP comment was about.

>>The Marvel Cinematic Universe isn't getting (many) government subsidies.

Maybe not US subsidies, but I'd bet that there are some Canadian film and tax credit logos at the end of most credit reels. When you film/edit/design/create on an international scale, you pick up lots of local tax credits. Also probably UK/Scotland credits too. Heck, the 2005 reboot of DrWho was backed by Canadian government money. (Just check the final credits.)

Those are usually granted by local governments to increase local revenue, not lower it. It's how one jurisdiction can attract more investment relative to another.

If no one gave a shit these venues would close. Instead some of them have been lovingly maintained for a century. What does that say about your reductionist assessment of the world? Are things only valid if they are upheld by the overwhelming majority of the population? Is that a realistic expectation given the things that do in fact influence a heck of a lot more people often have to resort to psychological manipulation over standing on its own merits to do so? Take your head out of the sand and see what the arguments you are making are actually pencilling out to be.

I generally understand this sentiment as a couple of my best friends work in theatre industry, although I have no inclination towards anything related to arts. That being said, you don’t need mass market to get second order effects. Especially for tourism industry.

Not everyone who visits NYC goes to a Broadway show, but they know of the industry and how it attracts the talent. Not everyone who goes to Berlin dances their night out till 6am, but they know of it. These subsidies help to create the image of the city, and in some sense help the residents to identify with their surroundings. I understand it’s a bit lame, but I don’t mind some of my tax dollars going into an industry that I never directly benefit from.

> 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.

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.

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.

The percentage of amount paid->amount received is not the appropriate number as it excludes the (very different!) tax rates on various kinds of consumption, however, it is reasonably straightforward to end up with a single number for the purposes of comparison - metrics like the total of all taxes/tarrifs/fees/etc vs total of all production(GDP).

Taxes vs GDP runs into the issue of ownership of assets not being limited to a single country. When Walmart/Amazon/etc pays taxes and issues a dividend some of that money is diverted from US stockholders but ~40% is diverted from foreign entities.

It’s an inherent advantage of corporate taxes over income taxes, you simply get more resources from the same burden on your citizens.

> This does not take into account VAT

For the viewers at home that is 6% on food, and now electricity (how kind daddy govt), and 21% on everything else. So this tax burden is in fact higher.

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.

Why would you even need or want "UBI currency" for UBI? Just give people money.

That sets up a problematic power dynamic. Whoever is doing the giving has power over whenever is doing the receiving.

And you'd want it as an alternative for cases where the other money is questionably legitimate. Like if the people who control its supply have stopped acting in the best interest of the people who use it.

If anything, that's an argument in favor of UBI - it reduces this power by making the giving unconditional. If every citizen is automatically entitled to their equal share, what power dynamic is there, exactly?

If some centralized entity is responsible for disseminating the income, they can threaten to stop, or they can threaten to cut people off.

So I agree, universal solves the problem, but you're not going to get universal from a bureaucracy. You've got to bake it into the design, similar to how backed-by-gold is baked into the design of the money we're currently using. It needs to be legitimate because it's universal, rather than being legitimate because you got it from somebody who has a lot of guns and has promised to behave themselves.

I'm very pro-UBI, I just don't think that saying pretty please to the government is the way to get it.

> backed-by-gold is baked into the design of the money we're currently

Where do you get that idea from? The Federal reserve flatly denies it: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12770.htm

The US came off the gold standard in 1933. I'm pretty sure no country uses it now.

Sure, we took the actual gold out of it--but we've still got bankers creating money by issuing loans, bankers who are restricted in doing so by notions of scarcity which are pretty much arbitrary, and who have no reason to care whether they're helping or hurting the rest of us so long as they turn a profit and don't break the law. It's the same design as we had in 1933.

It's a system that works, more or less, I just think it would work better if it had some alternatives to compete against. Alternatives would give the powerful a reason to care about non-monetary outcomes.

The government is not some random entity, though. If the bureaucrats don't actually follow the laws written for them, they can be fired (through courts if needed). If the legislators threaten to repeal the laws, they can be voted out.

Yeah, there is some selective pressure on the level of individual bureaucrats, but it's like a bee hive: the individual bees are only part of the story.

The whole thing has aggregate behavior, and we're going to be better off if we develop a way to shape that behavior independently of how we deal with individual bureaucrats.

If somebody offers you money that was issued by an organization that has been bombing your neighborhood or poisoning your water you should be able to reject it and still have other options, because to accept it is to contribute to the continued economic power of your enemy such that they can keep harming you. That's independent of whether you're in a position to have the relevant politicians fired.

Some people confuse hammocks for safety nets.

So what? The subsidy exists to support the tiny minority who might produce something worthwhile. As it is not possible to decide who this might be ahead of time the subsidy has to be given to all of them. This is essentially the same mechanism used in the provision of universal primary education; it would be a lot cheaper for the state if there were a trivial method of identifying those who would make the most of it so that it could be provided for them and just send the rest to sweep chimneys or beg on the streets.

> So what?

It's arbitrary and unfair.

> This is essentially the same mechanism used in the provision of universal primary education;

I don't know if giving free money to adults who consider themselves artists is the same as ensuring children have access to vital education services. Educating children also ensures there's more a chance they'll contribute rather than be a client/dependent of the state.

Why doesn't the state fund everyone's hobby? I play golf - they should subsidize some of my greens fees. I might end up writing an amazing book that uses my golf experience to push a narrative about the different types of people you meet on a golf course, but we're all "just people" or some nonsense. You never know, it might become a cherished cultural artifact.

> Why doesn't the state fund everyone's hobby?

Yes, why not?

Perfect! But instead of giving people money they didn’t earn we’ll instead cut taxes so people have more take home money to pursue the things they’d like to.

Cutting taxes doesn't help someone who doesn't have any money.

I agree with your premise, but golf is a bad example.

Golf is heavily subsidized. It's the poster child of a sport that wouldn't exist if it had to pay fair taxes or abide by free market pressures.

There are a handful of activities that cater to the elite like an 'artist subsidy'. Golf makes the list.

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.

> 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 subsidizer to ensure the purported goals of spending tax many are met.

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.

That strikes me as likely to do more harm than good, and research is a good example. We already have major problems with research quality because publication quantity has risen as important metric. I can't think of a metric for art quality that wouldn't introduce all sorts of terrible incentives and disincentives.

So the alternative is nothing? If someone's receiving funding to create art, asking them to show that they've done something with that money and that they're not just buying booze/drugs and throwing parties for them and their friends with the money that the government is giving them to create art doesn't seem like asking too much.

Given my understanding of the modern state of Art, they would simply pivot to making the parties be the artform.

Well, as long as I'm invited :)

That seems like a false dichotomy to me. Aren't there more ways to run things than a binary "user narrow numeric KPIs" vs "people doing absolutely anything"?

Why?

What is the harm in letting people live their lives producing art without a freaking OKR tracking their output?

I always find it fascinating how people assume that if you're not slaving away making someone else richer, it's a problem.

The argument is always something in the lines of "I'm paying for it". Well, we all know that if the only people actually making money out of our society paid their fair share, we'd be able to subsidize programs like these and much more without a problem.

People contribute to society in ways other than working. We simply choose to not value any of it in today's society.

It's not like these people are buying yachts, right? It feels so petty to me when we complain about helping out people with the bare minimum.

How do you know they are in fact ‘producing art’ without keeping track via some system?

There are too many subsidy receivers for anyone to ever visit in their life, even if they spend 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year visiting them.

You can pay prizes after the fact for especially impressive art. Or even award grants in advance for especially impressive art-proposals. Similar to how we fund most academic research. That's likely to be a lot more effective than generalized subsidies if most art turns out to be just mediocre and forgettable.

The question is whether or not this money could serve Belgians better if spent elsewhere, even with the exact same goal of supporting artists. We measure outcomes because it ties up a finite resource.

> 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.

Reminds me of education. Being from the most educated jurisdiction in the most educated country, everyone is sure we need to fund it, but nobody seems to know what we get from it. The usual suspects (stronger economy, more engaged society, more progressive socially, etc.) that everyone loves to attribute to education lag behind much of the rest of the much-less-educated world...

> The burden of proof should be on the policy maker and subsidizer to ensure the purported goals of spending tax many are met.

The burden on policy markers is simply to keep the bosses (i.e. the general public) happy. The burden of proof rests on the public at large to justify their goals to the policy makers, perhaps, but is that really necessary? If the people want something arbitrary because it makes them feel good, why not? The universe doesn't care.

>You would think policy makers have an obligation to track this, but they don't.

Its not for the policy makers to descide what is good art or not.

> Genuine question: how does the "artistic output", however you want to measure it, compare between Belgium and Ohio?

Has any Belgian artist in the past forty years been as impactful as Bill Watterson?

If you set the limit to 40 years it's a bit arbitrary, but you can still catch some of the late production of Asterix and Obelix and the Smurfs. For movies, Jean-Claude Van Damme is in, but he made most of his career in the US. I am not into electronic music, but I have at least heard the name Stromae.

40 years just misses (by 1 year) the last of Herge, the creator of TinTin, which is one of the more iconic comics of the last 100 years (Asterix and Obelix and the Smurfs are also in that group of course).

Part of Ohio is in Appalachia, intersecting culturally with West Virginia. There's a big tradition of folk art - music, crafts, etc.

Most folk artists are, by global standards, mediocre and irrelevant. But I don't think anybody really cares.

Could the same be true for Belgium?

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.

> 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)

But you didn't purchase 100% of the art that was produced.

> Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.

And always has been: ninety percent of everything is crap.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

The situation you describe in the first paragraph applies to pretty much most of EU. At least the western states.

The powers that be decided, the ambitious middle class has to foot the bill for everything.

> mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.

Surely that is also true of countries where it is not subsidized?

Examples like that are really dispiriting because it points to us not being able to create talented people through nurture.

American society is pretty focused on success, and many of us blame our mediocrity on a lack of effort, bad parenting, the government, etc. The cold truth might be that even with a perfect work-ethic, upbringing and unlimited resources most of us would fail to do anything original or interesting. If you are doing an ok job of sleeping/eating/exercising and you are relatively disciplined you are probably already performing at like ~90% of your potential. Exercising insane discipline to try and squeeze those last few %s out probably isn't going to turn you into some gifted person.

Being from Belgium, and having gone (suffered) through high-school there, I remember going to see a theater play which was about a red square and a blue circle.

That's all I remember. It was horrible.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

I think some of this aggregation is due to economies of scale, though.

> You could literally grab 5 guys from the mall and __force__ them to be a hit in a few months.

This is sort of a corollary to my hypothesis. Since we have a megasociety, everyone has access to music from everywhere, but limited time. There’s too much music being produced. So we now have a signaling game (advertising and marketing) to determine who people listen to. Signaling games will naturally be dominated by capital.

In terms of breeding grounds for local music, where are you thinking? Nashville?

> to determine who people listen to.

You've ignored the fact that discovery is now a new service component that really didn't exist before. We can tag music and artists and we can automatically discover related music and artists very easily. All the major services do this. Think of an expanded and federated (all the way back to the artist) open source version of this.

There's no reason to think that the previous model somehow produced the most efficient way of "determining who people listen to." It was almost certainly suboptimal. It's no surprise then that this suboptimal model was more or less copied onto the internet and all new players bought out so no new model could be revealed.

The lack of available artistry and market for it extends through multiple levels, and in this case, right into the software stack that _should_ exist for artists to self publish and for listeners to automatically discover.

> You've ignored the fact that discovery is now a new service component that really didn't exist before. We can tag music and artists and we can automatically discover related music and artists very easily. All the major services do this. Think of an expanded and federated (all the way back to the artist) open source version of this.

This is a good point. We have gone from diffusion-constrained to search-constrained. No clue what to make of that. I would submit to you that the amount of time people have to consume art has not changed, and that improved search now pushes people to consume the globally best art rather than niche content. Are there any domains or platforms that you think do a good job of surfacing specific niche content? Or am I misunderstanding your point?

>There's no reason to think that the previous model somehow produced the most efficient way of "determining who people listen to." It was almost certainly suboptimal. It's no surprise then that this suboptimal model was more or less copied onto the internet and all new players bought out so no new model could be revealed.

It's not about efficiency. I think the current system is more efficient (hence economies of scale). It's just that the rent extraction/profits are concentrated among the platform owners rather than spread out among local venue owners and artists.

> The lack of available artistry and market for it extends through multiple levels, and in this case, right into the software stack that _should_ exist for artists to self publish and for listeners to automatically discover.

I agree it should be possible, the problem is setting up the incentives correctly.

edit: clarity

> It's not about efficiency. I think the current system is more efficient (hence economies of scale). It's just that the rent extraction/profits are concentrated among the platform owners rather than spread out among local venue owners and artists.

Chiming in again. In some ways, this is "efficiency". Serving the globally best stuff is more efficient. The problem is we are trading exploration/variety for exploitation/efficiency. Reasonable minds may differ as to how that should be handled.

Definitely an important factor. Industrial scale can wipe out diversity and with it subtlety, which in cultural terms means impoverishing artistic vocabulary and range.

There was also something about scarcity driving exploration. You'd go to the video store for a certain movie, it wouldn't be available, so you'd grab something else. Now when you hear "X is on netflix" you go there and there are infinite copies, so you're never forced to explore. The only time it really happens is when your streaming service of choice doesn't have the specific thing you're looking for.

I remember the same thing happening in music stores. You'd go to buy a tape/CD and it wouldn't be in stock, but you'd be primed to buy one, so you just start browsing until you found something that looked interesting enough to buy.

The video store provides all the advantages of a physical place. Bookstores were probably more of a popular hangout spot than video stores, at least for me, but record stores were great for meeting like-minded people with deep knowledge of music. Video stores were at least similar in that the staff were often pretty happy to talk shop with you. My best friend from college worked at a Blockbuster and somewhat amazingly met the singer Pink there and got us invited to a party. That's the kind of thing that could almost be the plot of a movie and it can't happen browsing Netflix.

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.

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?

... 3 ? maybe? I'm working on it (:

If you think a $10,000 microphone and a $500,000 mixing console and a team of people to.man them is what's standing between you and Taylor Swift level polish, I'd argue that is is the capitalist mega-machine keeping you down. If it weren't for capitalism, you'd have access to those things and be able to give your music that kind of polish.

Of course, in this day and age, access to quality gear and talent doesn't that quite that much money. Garage band isn't just the name of the recording software, but also a statement on how accessible technology has made being a musical artist.

>The internet exists.

Yeah, that's the problem if we're talking about cultural relavance. We all have accedd to 24/7 on demand media, and that inevitably means we will form our on cultural bubbles based on taste, community, etc. There really isn't any single TV show these days that everybody watched compared to Breaking back in the '10's, or The Wire in the 00's, or Friends in the 90's.

We're a culture more specialzied than ever and lonlier than ever. Especially if you don't like Sports (pretty much the last remaining "cultural media"). That also makes it much harder to get the 1000 true fans you linked to (interesting read, thanks!).

Kind of tangential, and I know this is taking the number too seriously but: it doesn't help that 1000 true fans can no longer sustain an artist either. I want to work on my own game, and even if I could somehow get away with 1000 copies sold at $30 (basically pricing myself at the top of indies)... I wouldn't even make minimum wage in California. With no benefits!. and of course that's before the platform cuts and potentially paying for any tools I use. And assuming I work alone on all this. Making more monetization in games these days is still a controversial topic evolving in real time.

1000 true fans more became 10000 true fans these days. Thanks, inflation.

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.

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.

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).

> 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).

The Beatles, after getting early popularity with teenage girls via stuff like "She Loves you", "I wanna hold your hand" etc., moved on to more ambitious music for adults. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Taylor Swift's equivalent of the White Album...

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.

>> 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.

Based on the comment’s reference to Bob Dylan, I imagine they were more discussing the 60s, so it would be helpful to see what were the top selling things 60 years ago in 1964.

The best selling album of 1964 was the soundtrack to the musical "Hello, Dolly!". The best selling single was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles. Dylan at least made it to the top album charts (as he did in 1974 and in every decade since) but not the top 100 singles chart. Barbara Streisand beat him out in 1964 too with "People" at #11.

There's a ton of great music on the top 100 singles chart from '64 ("I Get Around by the Beach Boys, "Where Did Our Love Go" and "Baby Love" by the Supremes, "Twist and Shout" by the Beatles, "The Girl from Ipanema" by Getz and Gilberto, "Little Honda" by the Hondells, "Leader of the Pack" by the Shangri-Las, "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks, "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen, most importantly and influentially "Surfin' Bird" by the Trashmen), but not much poet laureate material. I guess the closest would be "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals, there was a book written on the history of that song.

Most of the best popular music is repetitive, loud, stupid and obnoxious (see, for example, "Surfin' Bird"). Poet laureate type popular music is hard to pull off. Tom Waits did it, he would have gotten my nomination for United States Poet Laureate in the '80s and '90s. Taylor Swift sold more records with "1989" than Tom Waits has done in his entire career (14,000,000 for Swift's "1989", 4,000,000 for Tom Waits career to date).

Thanks for expanding on that!

>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

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.

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.

>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).

>Was music in the '60s and '70s better than music today? Probably not.

Yes, it was absolutely better. This "it's just your age" thing is BS. The entire music industry back then was different; bands were discovered by record company agents, not manufactured by them. And Auto-tune didn't exist either, so if someone was a great singer, you knew it was real and not just computer-generated fakery like now.

Similarly, you can't say that music of the, say, 1890s, was just as good as music from the 1970s. They were fundamentally different: recorded music basically didn't exist in the 1890s.

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.

It still sucks that most people's lives have to be spent in work-jail. There could be so much art.

> 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.

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 used Rothko as an example of a famous and in my opinion highly underrated artist that those who "hate art" love to use an example of "bad art" because "anyone could just do that". Of course his pieces are breathtaking and once you're aware of the process of how they're created it changes them forever for you.

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].

[1] http://www.watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This is some kind of bizarre reflexive libertarian outburst to my comment that had little to do with the role of government.

Firstly, lots and lots of people use government-engineer built apps. I pay for the products of government engineering contracts every time I tap my phone to enter the subway. Car commuters use it every time their plate is scanned to cross a government-built bridge. Often the same companies that carry out government, tax-payer funded contracts are also taking on contracts in the open market.

Governments fund non-profits like art museums because these institutions, while existing within the free market, provide a public good that most agree ought to be as accessible as possible. To that end, the non-profit model allows for museums to guide themselves based on an ethical mission (usually having to do with providing accessible art and culture) rather than a profit-driven market strategy. They are still private, so the board has autonomy from government oversight, but they have tax structures and funding structures that position them as utilities rather than business ventures.

Museums, like for-profit ventures, still compete for funding, they still compete for relevance and cultural capital, and they are still beholden to providing a service that people care about. Fantasizing about slashing government budgets doesn't really make sense here. The government is taking money from people to fund museums because if we all pay $100 a year to arts funding in our taxes, we get to go see sculptures from 2500 years ago in a palatial building attached to a giant park for free... Without group buy in, that same experience might be stratified to only the very wealthy.

You seem to think it is politicians deciding what art people see. In reality, it is arts experts pitching the relevance of their expertise to secure funding and outputting culturally significant material to justify their existence in the same way software engineers make themselves appealing for government contracts.

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.

What do you think about the tax deductibility of charitable donations then? To me, it seems to be the worst of both worlds. You are still using tax money to fund some activity, but instead of having public control with checks and balances, you let rich people decide how the tax money is used.

It can be argued that tax deductions for donations make sense, if the government is already using money for similar purposes. You then get a greater effect from the tax money, at the expense of losing control over it. But if it's not the government's job to support the arts, then all donations to the arts should be made with after-tax money.

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.

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"

"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"

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.

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.

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?

>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.

it's more a reflection of modern business than anything else. you can objectively lay out a market analysis, profits projection, etc. and get a guaranteed minimum users. Those are things businesses love to hear.

For Art, You can in fact do all the things above too. But the market analysis has less confidence because because art itself is a premium. Someone can say they want X art, but if times get hard or moods shift, it's the first thing to be discarded.

It's really hard to build in a "need" for a specific art like it is tech. That manipulation is sadly a big part of business.

> 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

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.

ceci n'est pas une turd

> 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.

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.

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.

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".

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".

"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.

Doom and the shareware model are interesting examples in this context, especially given that Doom is now open source.

The average video game studio makes two games and goes broke. Most video game makers are living on their savings hoping for that one hit. Meanwhile the AAA studios are busy being complete arseholes, ripping their customers off, mistreating their staff, and generally being examples of the worst kind of capitalist.

I don't disagree with you. But I do think that this is a really bad model for funding video games creation, and gives us the worst of both worlds: indie developers are struggling and don't create their best games because they can't afford to, while AAA developers rip us off with mtx and loot crates because they're not in it to make money not great games.

So I'd argue that we should try to avoid this for the art world ;) And if we can, find a better way of funding video game creation while we're at it.

It is what we got. You will have a hard time as an artist if you don’t curate your personal brand. Even authors need a TikTok and your social media clout is something publishers will ask about before they sign you.

can't mix together funding and audience. 1 prince liking your thing and appointing you as a royal artist is different than 100k people liking your thing on twitter but never paying a cent to you for anything.

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.

That's a great answer. Is it working? Is Slovenia producing more/better art as a result?

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”.

"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.

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...

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

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?

As someone living in US, a significant part of my taxes is used to bomb some people overseas for no good reason that I can think of. The value of that "service" for me is effectively negative (it makes another 9/11 that much more likely).

People like roads and parks, actually.

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.

If that were true no one would ever round up to save puppies at the grocery store. Yet people do. They throw money in the tithe at church and into the musicians instrument case and into the panhandlers cup. Not everyone does of course but enough people do where these things happen every day.

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?

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).

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.

is that so? I have no idea what the % is. Maybe it's very small.

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.

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.

> 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

Things get easier to grasp when you drop the idea that all human action must be profitable. In fact we can and should subsidize things that are not profitable but are beneficial either on the individual or collective level. No one is getting rich off of these subsidies for art, but the subsidy might mean they can now devote some of their day to organic thought rather than the capitalist rat race we find ourselves in. Maybe on aggregate this will lower population stress levels and lead to improved population health outcomes.

I agree, but it doesn't answer the question.

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.

I don't think you have been to a university recently, considering it seems like literally everything has some donor's name attached to it - including the actual professors themselves. This is an actual professor's title: "Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Sequoia Capital Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering"

Also Stanford literally has a building named after Bill Gates: https://www.cs.stanford.edu/about/gates-computer-science-bui...

None of those things has anything to do with art. They are all engineering schools.

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.

Working on it! Though the concept is new and fledgling. Free non-profit arts publications aimed at giving exposure to featured emerging artists like your example. Donor funded and aimed at not extracting money from the artist themselves.

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.

With respect to the very literal reading of "funding the arts". A number of these platforms do in fact pay you a share of revenue. Youtube, and spotify are both platforms that artists, and new artists are paid on and can use for exposure.

For the other platforms, yes you need to a do a little more work to make it a living, but the broader point is its much easier today for a much wider range of artists to get exposure than it was before, yes there are vagaries of the algorithm and yes some content will not be favoured, that doesnt mean it isnt a better situation today than before

As for "working for free" this is a very reductionist view. The relationship can provide value for both parties, you may disagree about the split of value and who benefits more but there are plenty of artists who have become popular without paying for ads.

I recently read Cory Doctorow's "Chokepoint Capitalism" and William Deresiewicz's "The Death of the Artist" which both decry the sentiment that somehow Big Tech has been a boon for artists.

The reality is that anti-competitive practices in these companies has made them more of an extractive monopoly rather than a market to connect artists and art "consumers." To your point on revenue sharing, both Youtube and Spotify have laughable revenue shares to the point that even well known musicians have to tour nonstop to make ends meet. At what point does "exposure" benefit the artist more than it benefits the platform for having free art?

Those books sound interesting, ill have a look!

I am sympathetic to the idea that the revenue share isn't great, and I also agree that there are anti-competitive practices, and the market would do well with more competition. But i do think its the wrong starting point to believe views or listens on these platforms should be enough to sustain a creative career for most artists.

As you alluded too, even amongst the most well known musicians they make a lot of their income from touring, my perspective here is that these platforms when well used give you exposure, then with a linktree / beacons link an artist can develop a relationship with some of their audience that provides further opportunities to fund themselves.

Its a great question to ask when the "exposure" benefits the artists more, and when it benefits the platform more, i'd personally love to see some quantitative analysis of that. My suspicion is for most small artists with audience sizes of less than 100k people (in the west, the calculus is probably different in the rest of the world) the benefit to the artist is really great. For someone like Taylor swift it benefits the platform more, but at that point she can negotiate directly

>As you alluded too, even amongst the most well known musicians they make a lot of their income from touring, my perspective here is that these platforms when well used give you exposure, then with a linktree / beacons link an artist can develop a relationship with some of their audience that provides further opportunities to fund themselves.

I mean, you repeat the oldest joke in the art industry. "we'll pay you in exposure". While doing nothing that a proper publisher/distributor/producer would do to help give that exposure. Especially on a platform with a perverse incentive to aquire artists instead of foster them. History's been very cruel to this concept and bringing it up these days will simply be seen as a dogwhistle. It more or less only benefits the "golden child" and extracts from everyone else.

In addition, at what point does an Artist stay and artist and instead becomes an entrepreneur who sings on the side as an ad? I feel like this core society has pushed to have artists rely on not their craft, but business acumen to make ends meet is an inherently toxic one develop by... who else? existing businessmen. Then this sentiment of business spreads to your audience as you are called a "sellout". Becuase yes, you are literally selling out merch instead of what audiences value.

It's just a backwards model all around.

>i'd personally love to see some quantitative analysis of that.

if you want to dig around for the rev share, that can help. But from what I've seen: even people well above 100k can struggle to pay rent depending on their location. these platforms incentivize a constant stream of content, which is incompatible with most traditional art.

And like much of history, artists get a small portion of that money.

Also, a lot of the traditional arts are very hard to monetize. Just ask any animation youtube channel. The biggest fundings are for personalities, not necessarily the art they make nor consume. But I suppose being an influencer is an art in and of itself.

>IMO the people who refuse to use the new tools, or do so unseriously find it hard to fund themselves.

if you're being paid to react to art in an ungenuine way rather than provide your own art, are you still an artist?

Youtube and co. are also big rich people who influence trends. I'm not surprised some people don't want to cease their craft simply to please an algorithm.

When they say "the arts", they generally mean high status arts.

The things young people like rarely fit into that category.

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).

Algorithmic thinking and optimizing one's life (whether in a video game, workplace, or in a hobby) lives rent free in my mind. It's prevalence and inertia has made my life only miserable, yet it's so hard to escape when almost everything your sold on is to optimally squeeze your life.

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.

The artists themselves do, in the era of easy creation we are all conceptual artists now.

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.

Ha! Thanks. Irony's so easy to miss on the internet - and this topic especially seems to attract "non-sensible" responses on this board, so my antennae are a bit too finely tuned.

Time to go touch grass. :-)

a problem is the people involved in The Arts are more interested in being prescriptive about what people should like instead of discovering what we in fact desire.

we make this same mistake in tech all the time, building things we think other people should do instead of what they want, shopping it around to "get funded," without any customer traction, and then ending up on some government services vehicle just to get enough money to keep making the same mistake and hoping maybe the state will mandate our solution to someone. It's every non-US startup ever, and it comes from the same welfare state mentality that produces the funded Arts nobody cares about.

the main people who support artists are the market makers who connect audiences, dealers, managers, distributors, marketers, students, and collectors. trying to replace "aristocrats and corporations," with another patron just continues the cycle of dependency and paternalism that produces the same token flattery nobody wants.

if you want better art, learn what it means to make a market, and then grow one.

I agree with this, having interacted with a number of artists, a lot of what is produced simply isn't that great, different or interesting.

Of course if creating things makes you happy go for it, but don't expect to be able to live off of that.

> a problem is the people involved in The Arts are more interested in being prescriptive about what people should like instead of discovering what we in fact desire.

The thing that grinds my gears is that they do this by trying to redefine language. They don't come out and say "you should like X". They say "X is beautiful" (and if you think otherwise, you're obtuse/privileged/etc). Nevermind what beauty used to mean, since it's just a cultural artifact of a capitalist white patriarchy, and you don't want to be associated with that, do you?

What one considers beautiful stops being an instinctive felt sense coming from within, and becomes just an empty statement used for signaling others how sophisticated/class-aware/etc you are.

It's pure neurosis, and I'm not surprised such disembodied people have trouble actually creating beauty.

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?

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:

https://www.kmfa.org/

I’m surprised no one has posted this gem from Yes, Minister

https://youtu.be/Zl0aEz34A4o?si=D9RcUnMq0oI370Lg

but did Shakespeare ever get a subsidy? /s

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.

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.

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.

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).

Sounds like the kind of thing children tell each other in the playground.

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.

https://www.miho.jp/en/

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.

It is in some ways equivalent to a One Piece. Ultiamtely, people want legacy, and what better way to have people talking about you centuries later than by suggesting you have this huge treasure buried somewhere that no one can ever find?

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.

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.

I don’t think loving art is easy at all. I still haven’t completely learnt how to do it

Even better.

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."

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.

> 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.

This sadly only reinforces that old sterotype of the snooty "better than you because you can't see things MY way" artist. I apologize on behalf of the community.

Giving the benefit of the doubt, art can be enjoyed in many forms, not just visual... It's definitely a choice of words though. That said, I do agree with the sentiment that people should "experience" art. But yeah, they did sound dismissive in the reply...

> fret over some nonsense about the 'economics' of art,

I mean, rent doesn't pay itself. Maybe it will one day but I'm not expecting it in my lifetime. Leisure hobby's go by the wayside as the economy does.

I have art I want to display, but I also have a family to care for. The best way to optimize that is to do art as a job. And if it sacrifices my cred as an "artist", so be it. My goal is simply to share what I like, and the steps to make what I like are a neat challenge as well. I don't seek prestige in that traditional artists' sense

>You can find this world aligned with your tastes

Mine's in video games, so I'm still stuck at a screen for now. I do want to one day visit those video game mueseums, but it's out of my budget for now (darn economy!).

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