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Comment by antiterra | Hacker News Reader

Art isn't and shouldn't be rare. Market value is orthogonal to the quality of artistic experience a work can provide.

The real service would be promoting a more sophisticated consumption of art that hasn't yet been turned into currency for the super rich.

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I'm not convinced, my friend. Much of the best art ever created is one of a kind. You can see pictures of it, or replicas of it, but the art itself is as rare as it gets. Original creations are by definition must be created in the singular becore they can be distributed. Value, after that, is a strange and complicated thing when it comes to art, especially nowadays.

As for promoting a more sophisticated consumption of art, what do you have in mind, and how could the Wu have contributed?

This reminds me of the HN discussion on Banksy [1]. Because he works in grafetti, his art is also ephemeral. (Until people decide to go out of their way to preserve it, that is; the same will probably happen here.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6581899

The live performances would still be "rare" just like a unique work of art. Recorded music is akin to a poster or a copy of a statue, it allows many more to benefit from the creativity of the creator instead of just a select privileged lucky few.

I didn't mean that good art can't be one of a kind. I meant that art as a whole isn't a rare resource.

Also, what if the art is a photograph?

As for art consumption, that's a big topic, but I wish we made an effort to find relevance to our own lives for something we learn or recognize in art. We do this relatively well for music. We recognize metaphors and themes for betrayal, redemption, and shame in songs.

When it comes to visual art or literature, we become suspicious when someone suggests we could interpret someone's hair being dyed as a benediction. We worry about the artist's intent to show symbols, but barely recognize them if the intent is clear. The Syfy TV series "Caprica" had an unclothed woman suggestively holding an apple in its ads, but how many people consciously recognized it as biblical allegory?

[1] http://www.impawards.com/tv/posters/caprica.jpg

This is romantic but unrealistic. By its nature, Art tends to resist the isn'ts and shouldn'ts.

What does that even mean? You can express anything as an "isn't."

I think you're on the right track, but "should" to me suggests one's values, and art is chock full of values.

It's just that the values in the particular piece don't match up with the above poster's...

My disagreement is with the sentiment of this quote: "The main theme is music being accepted and respected as art and being treated as such."

I don't believe that turning more artistic mediums into investment vehicles is really a path to respect and acceptance. In fact, I think people believing they deserve music for free comes from the acceptance and respect they already have for music; they consider it vital.

Owning something rare is a pleasure in itself.

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