The Death of the Artist and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur

>So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

I think this essay would have been a lot more worthwhile if some effort was spent discussing why we may need a 'vessel for our inner life' and how art used to fill this role but is no longer as able. As a sociohistorical narrative, it seems too pointed and filled with unsubstantiated statements to be useful or interesting in and of itself.

Also, when critics discuss the democratization of "Art" like it's a new and threatening phenomenon, I can't help but think about all of the wonderful art that came out of folk music (of various traditions). There was a time, not so different than the time when Picasso and Joyce were making their Art, when a large percentage of the population played music in their small groups. This lead to an incredible flowering of music as the 20th century progressed, initially quite rooted in the folk traditions (including gospel music, vessels of our inner life indeed). People being people and having a wide range of talent, opportunity and motivation, it seems to me at least that democratization definitely did not prevent geniuses from creating their Art.

I suspect that what these writers are really lamenting is not the fall of Art or of Man but of Critic, as social media ratings threaten their revenue stream.

edit: forgot a 'not'

Okay. So great, because capitalism has absorbed artistic practice in some way into its structure, now artistic practice is capitalistic.

This makes little sense. It's funny to see that capitalist aping of artistic practice is now being regarded as a new era in artistic practice by this guy though.

Art has had a fascinating relationship to capital well before capitalism, but to confuse its continuing ability to survive with some kind of fundamental transformation of the practice is kinda silly.

Yes, okay: what is art?

The answer isn't: commerce. No need to go so far back, but just look to cave paintings to discover that these ideas of economy and capital are only sidelines and contextual footnotes to the practice of art.

People may have a vision of a solitary genius, but that's not how many successful artists work. Going back at least as far as the Renaissance many artists were managing studios of other painters, sculptors, etc who would produce the actual work. A lot of the most famous artists today still work that way. Successful artists are, and have been for centuries, creative entrepreneurs.

This is very link-bait-y.

Declaring the death of anything is usually link-bait, but the death of the artist is absurd. I get the argument, which is basically - the economics have changed a bit.

But this idea that genius is gone and in its place is entrepreneurship, is just so, so silly. All artists are in marketing, sales, and so on, and always have been. Dali was as much a self-promotion genius as he was an artist. Not much has changed except the ability to view the past through the curved lens of history.

Geniuses still exist in all of the arts. Nothing has changed. Nothing is dead.