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Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

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