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.
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.
Apparently comedy is thriving as well too.
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.)
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.
The closest modern equivalent is a weekly comic book (or manga) that gets turned into a graphic novel after its run.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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]
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.
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.
Many artists have a small audience in mind and that is quite reasonable.
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.
Fan service is a thing for the exact same reason.
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.
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).
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.
Thanks to many artists being incapable of abstaining from Xitter loggorhea, we definitively know this to be false.
Poverty seasoned Foie Gras art.
Commissions and Patreon subscribers welcome.
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.
It is my experience that everyone lives in bubbles. They form the lens that filter our perception of other people's existence.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.