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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Living in a country where the civil servants decide the vast majority of art support (Germany), it's not great. It's just an incentive to please grant readers, rather than an audience. It's just as banal. The difference is that an audience is more likely to know and care about the art form, content, and context. A grant reader rewards what sounds like a good idea on paper.

This is how we get productions like the planet-of-the-apes-meets-star-wars Rigoletto, which played to empty seats at one of the biggest theaters in Germany for years because it was so effective at getting grant money.

Ideally you need both. Attracting and holding an audience is an artistic value, and should be a driver for support. Convincing a neutral outsider with no context is also a useful measure, for art that may not be commercially appealing. Even Nepotism and elitism select for certain dimensions of artistic quality.

Going all in on one system or another is a recipe for cultural death. It's been clear since the ancient Greeks that there is no single definition of "quality", least of all in the arts. A plurality of support mechanisms is needed.

"Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide."

Except that civil servants are making those choices with money they took forcibly from people that don't have a real/significant say in the matter of the taking or what the takings are spent on. In kind it makes it much worse than any decision made by "rich folks". Sure some may agree with those bureaucratic choices, but others are simply giving their cash for no return in value.

Sounds like what you're describing is a government funded by taxes, except using scary sounding verbiage.

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).

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...

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.

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).

> 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?

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.

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

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.

People like roads and parks, actually.

Ah yes, I am truly misanthropic for questioning my 60% tax burden mainly to the benefit of parasitic bureaucrats.

That is a fair point. Maybe taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing sports stadiums either, instead of cities forcibly imposing culture on us. Of course, public funding has an added benefit of being generally accessible to everyone unlike private funding.

> Except that civil servants are making those choices with money they took forcibly from people that don't have a real/significant say in the matter of the taking or what the takings are spent on.

Do you have an alternative idea we could easily disabuse you of?

> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding?

Paper mache turds are gauche. Real artists produce works that are extensions of themselves, capturing the very essence of their being. The texture should be genuine and the scent unmistakably original, challenging conventional aesthetics. True art requires a visceral connection formed through a process of personal evacuation. It's about creating something so authentic viewers can practically taste the artist's commitment.

If it's not visceral, it ain't art: Kiss My Art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWTcAAtMj4

ceci n'est pas une turd

I see what you did there.

I can't tell whether this is serious or satire.

It's a joke about 'mierda de artista' I think.

> Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide.

A lot of the best art in history has been done because of rich people's money and influence. No doubt the 'urinals are art' crowd would disagree with that though.

In much of the history of the world "rich people" have been in fact controllers in one form or another of the public's purse strings; nobility, royalty, religious leaders have been most of the world's rich people, merchants and industrialists are rather new entries into that class.

In other words most of the grand artistic works people point to as being funded by "rich people" were funded by public wealth controlled by those "rich people".

The same argument holds for lots of things: e.g. most pre-enlightenment scientific progress was made by priests (because they had an education and were able to spend time thinking about stuff). This is no longer true because we live in more enlightened times.

Just because rich people used to be the only source of arts funding doesn't make them the best source of arts funding.

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.

"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.

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.

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".

Slovenia has I think a pretty good solution to this: If you are registered as an independent artist, don't have a full-time job, and fulfill some reasonable criteria for being active (art exhibitions per year, poems published, etc), then the government pays you minimum wage. You are welcome and encouraged to freelance (or make royalties) for more.

It's basically UBI for the arts.

Is it? If you are referring to the Slovenian status of “self employed in culture”, it appears to be a way of getting social security contributions paid by the government - not a wage. It requires “exceptional cultural contribution”.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

For some reason, it feels like artists always need to somehow justify their existence. Meanwhile, tech gets billions of dollars of private and public funding. As long as what you're doing in tech fits within the current hype cycle and milieu, then no one blinks an eye.

I'd much rather "throw money away" at the arts rather than waste more money on self-driving cars, fintech, going to Mars, or whatever else the Bay Area thinks will make the world a better place.

They don't think it will make the world a better place, only that it will make them boatloads of money. And lo and behold, an artist whose work holds the same promise won't have to justify anything.

But I think that would be comparing apples with oranges. If we make art with the same motivations that produce tech, is it still art?

Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money.

By all means, donate to your local artist. Tech gets all of this funding because it produces tangible results, tech provides what people ask for. Piss Christ, however ... well, give money to the artist if it pleases you.

There's a sculpture park not too far away from me. It has very large metal polygons, gently rusting. It certainly fits my modern art criteria: is it ugly? Is it incomprehensible?

And then comes the question of "What do you get out of this particular bit of art?" The standard defense is "anything you like." Which sounds great until you realize that only one piece of art is ever required, the rest being superfluous. That one piece is "anything you like," which is congruent with any other piece's identical "anything you like." No need for anything else.

With these sorts of things, modern art is backing itself into a corner. It isn't surprising that people aren't eager to open their wallets.

> Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money.

I reiterate my comment. Scientists and engineers get billions of dollars of other peoples' money, both private and public.

Regarding the rest of your comment, art is not the arts. The arts include theater, music, dance, etc.

Scientist and engineers also need to justify their desire for other people's money.

Generally the justification for that is "I'll make you more money, either in the short run or in the long run."

Somehow, this is the only justification we can get anyone to agree on in the modern world. Should we educate kids? "Sure, as long as its STEM so they can be good taxpayers."

Come to think of it, this is also often the justification for art. Should I buy this piece? "Of course, it will gain in value"

"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.

>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.

I’d trust way more that group of experts to make a decision for me.

Otherwise we’d get Walmarts all over the place

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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