In Belgium, it is relatively easy to get "artist-statute" which is a subsidized higher monthly welfare income (Basic Income for artists). Belgium runs on the "subsidize-and-conquer" paradigm, the tax burden is one of the highest in the world. The government keeps lower class happy with welfare, the upperclass with culture and mainly business subsidies. The productive middleclass is effectively squeezed.
The art sector here is mostly publicly funded. This too has advantages for our gov: no artists will criticize the subsidizer of their lifestyle, so no real anti-authoritarian culture takes hold. Don't bite the hand that feeds.
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.
The problem with the arts is that nobody really gives a shit. The vast majority of the population doesn't visit the opera or is interested in modern art. Despite a century of government funding the needle hasn't shifted.
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.
That is if you define "The Arts" as specifically "Archaic forms of art too unpopular to survive without subsidies from government or the aristocracy". That's a tautology.
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.
In 19-century Italy, opera was about as popular as pop music today.
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 problem with the arts is that nobody really gives a shit.
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.
I generally understand this sentiment as a couple of my best friends work in theatre industry, although I have no inclination towards anything related to arts. That being said, you don’t need mass market to get second order effects. Especially for tourism industry.
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.
>> vast majority of the population doesn't visit the opera or is interested in modern art.
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.
What you are referring to is not intended for mass consumption. If it were you would be watching a popular music video instead.
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.
If no one gave a shit these venues would close. Instead some of them have been lovingly maintained for a century. What does that say about your reductionist assessment of the world? Are things only valid if they are upheld by the overwhelming majority of the population? Is that a realistic expectation given the things that do in fact influence a heck of a lot more people often have to resort to psychological manipulation over standing on its own merits to do so? Take your head out of the sand and see what the arguments you are making are actually pencilling out to be.
> 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.
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.
Slovenia is similar, but with even more intervention in the form of public grants. We also have no tax breaks for individuals who may wish to support the arts/humanitarian/ngo endeavors. It's all “systemic”.
Which is "fine" as long as a certain ideology controls the government (not always the same party, just the same "network"/ideology).
Now, the quality/quantity of the output is a mater of my subjective opinion, which would only muddy the water.
What isn't is what happened when the opposite ideology took over the government. Suddenly the much lauded ministry of arts became the enemy who chose different artists to subsidize. There were many Pikachu faces that day.
Examples like that are really dispiriting because it points to us not being able to create talented people through nurture.
American society is pretty focused on success, and many of us blame our mediocrity on a lack of effort, bad parenting, the government, etc. The cold truth might be that even with a perfect work-ethic, upbringing and unlimited resources most of us would fail to do anything original or interesting. If you are doing an ok job of sleeping/eating/exercising and you are relatively disciplined you are probably already performing at like ~90% of your potential. Exercising insane discipline to try and squeeze those last few %s out probably isn't going to turn you into some gifted person.
This is why I don't think that government-run UBI is a good idea. We need something to fall back on in case it becomes necessary to do away with a problematic government for a while, not something that the government can use to negatively reinforce the status quo.
Safety nets are for making otherwise dangerous things practical.
> Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.
Of course. 90% of everything is crap, so you are going to pay for a lot of crap art if you want any good stuff. This is the same if you have a completely commercial model, because most people have no taste.
Huh? In the commercial model, why would an individual still pay for "a lot of crap art". What you call "no taste" is just "taste," right? Nobody who gets to pick is going to pick the crap stuff.
I've liked 100% of the art I've ever purchased (that's why I purchased it)
Except that it nearly work only for people acting, dancing and working in « live » art.
If you’re a painter or a sculptor, since you can’t provide proof of engagement length, you were out. That’s getting better but still not a UBI by any means.
They’re poor.
Do we have good contemporary art ? Yes. They’re not subsidized by the government, have to pay heavy taxes as we are and got to have lot of red tape for their enjoyment.
So they move out of Belgium. With a raised middle finger…
Meanwhile this same system is abused by Uber and other major.
Belgium’s tax burden is close to California, they just don’t split it up into a bunch of different categories. However, look at how much a self employed single person retains from their income when doing to comparison and the situation is more clear.
I am a self-employed freelancer and I have done all fiscal optimization possible in BE and my effective tax burden is 37%.
From what I find in Google about CA's total optimized tax burden for a one-man freelance company it is about 28%. And a lot more buying power too probably, but that is hard to compare in.
Of course this is personal income from labour via one-man companies ("net take-home"). This does not take into account VAT, capital gains taxes, etc.
> The productive middleclass is effectively squeezed.
That's why I left Belgium. Getting squeezed to the bone to pay for endless leeches producing absolutely nothing that I enjoy or respect: it's not just the arts. Administrations are pathetically inefficient and arbitrary in how they treat people too.
So I already left and now I'm selling everything I have there: a little apartment, one garage, a few items worth a little something.
I'm fully planning on acquiring another nationality and then I'll just abandon my belgian one.
> Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.
Like many I am looking for an exit too, at least fiscally. Right now I am -like many here- territorially bound by family and real-estate.
But the negative economic death spiral has set in here. More people work for the public sector directly and indirectly than the private sector, and the tax burden is ever increasing while services received are dwindling.
In Europe you have two options: Become a parasite or become a host. If neither of those options suit you, you have to get the hell out or live outside of the law and long fingers of the tax collectors.
Being from Belgium, and having gone (suffered) through high-school there, I remember going to see a theater play which was about a red square and a blue circle.
Coincidentally, the "corporate" media in Belgium is also heavily subsidized (as in a significant amount of their revenue is subsidies).
And we also have public media. Yet no credible evidence of the effectiveness of endless subsidies.
If we're going to namedrop economic laws like it means something: Parkinson's law: the art and media sector have become part of the self-perpetuating ineffective bureaucracy.
I'm reading a book called Culture Crash, which is relevant here. I also read Sinykin's Big Fiction a while back, so you could say I've been reading abou the culture industry.
Culture Crash makes this interesting point: Did you know there used to be widely read, culturally relevant, AND Nobel Prize worthy (like actual contenders to win), poets? Unimaginable now but true in living memory. They didn't even have to be attached to a University, financially speaking. Like your male or female co-worker might hear that such an such a poet was coming out with a new book, and buy it, and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
The general point of these books (summarizing a lot here) is that the cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now, and there isn't much left. At this point literature has been "captured" by the University, but it's for a good reason: you can't survive as a fiction writer without it. People complain "but they're so insular" but the truth is: they don't have an alternative. You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.
This is true of other industries too. Music: you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician. You might also be the guy who was the resident expert on classical music for the neighborhood at the store, who would recommend operas conducted by Karajan and the best recordings from Deutsche Grammophone (I remember those guys). Art: you could paint signs or design posters, back when there was a real demand. Writing: you could write for the alternative weeklies (I'd read those) or be a regular journalist, writing as little as one story a day. Movies: you could be a video clerk (I also remember this). And those 'subcultures' were incubators. Quentin Tarantino graduated from the video store in a sense. Who can follow him, if there are no video stores anymore?
So this crisis in nonprofit funding really is coming at the end of a much longer crisis in the arts in general. It should be seen in that context.
I don't think the bohemians you alluded to were so much funded by nonprofits, as by the public at large. 50 years ago we had Bob Dylan as the poet laureate, more or less, of his generation. Today we've got Taylor Swift. Both got big record contracts. No knock against her, but if you want to talk about cultural decay, I think it's more of a demand-side problem. The market will elevate artists who the public are willing to pay for. Yes, a publisher or a producer can "make a market" for something, but Francis Ford Coppola can put $100M of his own money into an art piece and, evidently, no one currently will pay to see it.
The idea that nonprofits should prop up art has always been wrong, in a way. Artists since the Italian Renaissance have produced most of their greatest / most famous works for wealthy patrons, not because governments paid them to do it. (Unless you count the Vatican as a government).
What I'm trying to say is that all art arises from pop culture, and pop culture can engender the height of artistic excellence, if the culture itself has good taste and demands quality. Or, pop culture can be a pit of garbage if the culture has degraded. This is what is meant about the transition from "Ideal" Hellenistic art to art which embodied "Pathos" around the 4th Century BC.
We have transitioned in the past 50 years from a culture which strives for the ideal, to one which worships pathos. That may be the mark of a civilization in decline (based on a relatively limited number of historical examples). But the "fix" isn't more public funding for art that no one looks at or listens to. All great art arose from popular desire for it; you can't force it on a population, or keep it alive if there's no audience.
Is this really a "degradation" in popular taste, or is it a change in the demographics that dominate the demand side? While there's apparently been some studies on the demographics of Swifties, it's much more difficult to produce the same for Bob Dylan 50 years ago. My impression though is that the initial core demographics (driving the fame) of Bob Dylan's music were young adults of both sexes, while the initial demographics of Taylor Swift's music were teenagers, overwhelmingly female. The demographics have different interests, with the interests preferred by Dylan's demographics being considered deeper and more intellectual by the cultural zeitgeist. It makes sense that target demographics of popular music would have been older back in the day, since buying records required some sort of record player, which was a significant investment. Today, there's practically no investment to listen to music via a streaming service.
Upvoted for being one of the best comments in the discussion I've read so far -- I'm sure there's something relevant going on that's similar enough to a transition from some sort of ideal to pathos.
But the part about nonprofits is possibly orthogonal to the issue and may even be wrong in the opposing direction. Why would pathos overtake everything? Honestly it's what I'd expect to happen in the wake of two simple developments:
1) most media engagement moves from text, which requires the engagement of the mind, to video/audio, which can run on a much higher volume of feels/vibes alone. I don't think it's a coincidence that we had a print culture up through a half century ago when there were popular poets (Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski, maybe even WH Auden) and now we get to your comment which, representative of the times, will subtly shift to popular performing songwriters as if they're the same thing.
Like one of Patrick Rothfuss' characters said: “Remember this, son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.”
2) And that means when the market becomes the dominant social mediator, what finds its way through culture? What sells. What sells most broadly? What touches people's hearts. What touches people's hearts? Vibes/feels, or pathos, as you say. And then we do stupid things with our markets like Spotify that magnify the problem by eroding marginal success, bifurcating into go-pathos-big or go home as the option.
Your own comment is a great illustrator of just how much market-as-mediator is readily thought of as the way to understand the issue. Do we want other ideals? Then we need other cultural institutions that explore, circulate, and foster values/ideals beyond the market. And at least some of them would necessarily be non-profits. And while they'd need to go beyond subsidizing pre-popular work (including perhaps some never popular) and into various forms of popular education, subsidy would be part of what they'd do. There can't be an audience for something that is never produced.
Yes but at the same time the music industry exists as a capitalistic machine that forms public taste and interest through sheer force of marketing - it’s easier to have one mega artist like Taylor performing one huge show in every city to capture all of the disposable income for music in one go, rather than have lots of competing artists and dilution and effort to create a range of cultural product. Competition is a sin remember? The music industry understands this nowadays. “The public wants what the public gets” in the words of Paul Weller / The Jam. There isn’t a free market of music and ideas. The market is closed and offers only a small number of products, and everyone else has to stand outside of the market giving out their art for free.
There are plenty of full-time writers outside of universities. Most of them are self-published genre writers. There's a solid core of six figure writers, and a smaller but non-trivial number of seven figure writers. They don't get awards, they don't teach (usually), but they earn a decent living.
What's happened over the last century or so is a huge shift towards the middle of the bell curve. Culture used to be gate-kept and handed down, which meant a much smaller number of talents could be become household names, with an income to match. Generally there was a concept of quality based on exceptional creative imagination and craft. That rubbed off onto genre work, so it was still an influence there.
Now it's become corporatised, so the only metric is income, which pushes everything away from risk and novelty towards lowest common denominator satisfaction for middle-of-the-bell-curve readers. Currently that means trope-heavy checkbox romance with plenty of explicit sex for women, and militaristic scifi for the relatively few men who still read, with a bit of overlap for formulaic thrillers and police procedurals.
This is possible in fiction, where the market for sexy romance seems insatiable.
But there are similar things happening in music and visual art. The audience for those is much smaller, and the barriers to entry much lower, so there's a perfect storm of mediocre people trying to sell their work on social media to a shrinking audience in a global free-for-all, while the scene is being eaten alive by generative AI. And a tiny, tiny number of global mega-artists get most of the attention, income, and marketing budgets.
The only subcultures are online, so they're much more diffuse and lack the lynchpin gatekeepers and networkers who curated and promoted the most interesting work.
Throwing funding at the arts is a band aid for this. It's a structural issue caused by a forced shift in values away from shared community towards compulsive individual hustle as a value in itself.
>and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
I'm too young to remember this for poetry, but it certainly was true for music, TV shows, and movies for long after it was true for poetry. People are still talking about The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, various highly-successful movies from the 60s-00s (Lord of the Rings for instance), TV shows like Game of Thrones, etc. However, I'd say it's less true today, but TV for instance seems to have lot of this still going on with people talking about various high-caliber shows like The Expense, Silo, etc. I think poetry simply went the way of theater: other art forms surpassed it in popularity, though it still has its niche audience: New York's Broadway is still quite popular. And people spend lots of money on music concerts.
Was music in the '60s and '70s better than music today? Probably not.
If you were able to time travel back to then and listen at some random time to a radio tuned to a pop station you'd hear a lot of OK songs, a smaller number of good songs and bad songs, and a few great songs. Just like if you listened to some stream of a wide selection of recent music.
Is music from the '60s and '70s that you are likely to hear today better than most recent music? Probably.
Listen to an oldies stream and it likely is to just include those songs from then that were great or good, and it will be drawing from several years.
Same thing happens with TV. Old sitcoms like "Frasier" are as good as the best being produced today. Same with even older shows like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "I Love Lucy". But there were a heck of a lot of other sitcoms from the same times that are almost forgotten.
With sitcoms the old sitcoms we might still see are probably more likely to be great than the old music we still hear today, because old sitcoms have an additional filter to get past. You'll probably only see them today if they had enough episodes to be worth syndication.
They typically show one episode a day and they want to be able to go several months before wrapping around. Even with having more episodes per year back then than we typically have now (~32 then, ~24 now) the show would have to last at least 3 years to get enough episodes for syndication. Many a show that was great or near great and would have become great in season 2 or 3 has been killed by its network for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the show.
(I no longer watch anything on Fox other than sports and reality shows because of that. After "Firefly", "Futurama", "Terra Nova", and "Lucifer" I learned my lesson. I don't care how great people say a Fox show is now, I will either wait until Fox cancels it and watch it on streaming if people tell me that it got a proper series finale, or I might consider watching entire seasons before that but only if those seasons ended at points that would be good stopping points. "Terra Nova" and "Lucifer" ended on huge cliff hangers).
What do you mean by cultural infrastructure? I think I agree with the general thrust of the argument but I’m fuzzy on the particulars.
For example, the video rental store has been replaced by a multitude of sources: Netflix et al, torrent sites, YouTube, Twitch. It’s never been easier to make a film and distribute it to a lot of people, yet I can’t deny a sense of loss from the demise of the video store. What is the difference here?
My hypothesis:
Lack of geographically local experts.
We've merged more and more into a megasociety. In a geographically distributed society, the power law for quality is more forgiving. You can be the best local band and make a living.
Now that we have ultra-efficient communications, there's less room for "mid-tier" art. Local art gets outcompeted by whatever the top stuff is among a much greater national or international population.
Because of this, there's also less of a breeding ground for maturing artists, or for experimental styles in isolated areas (think California surf rock, or NYC Salsa, etc). There's no place to go if you're not the best.
There was also something about scarcity driving exploration. You'd go to the video store for a certain movie, it wouldn't be available, so you'd grab something else. Now when you hear "X is on netflix" you go there and there are infinite copies, so you're never forced to explore. The only time it really happens is when your streaming service of choice doesn't have the specific thing you're looking for.
I remember the same thing happening in music stores. You'd go to buy a tape/CD and it wouldn't be in stock, but you'd be primed to buy one, so you just start browsing until you found something that looked interesting enough to buy.
The video store provides all the advantages of a physical place. Bookstores were probably more of a popular hangout spot than video stores, at least for me, but record stores were great for meeting like-minded people with deep knowledge of music. Video stores were at least similar in that the staff were often pretty happy to talk shop with you. My best friend from college worked at a Blockbuster and somewhat amazingly met the singer Pink there and got us invited to a party. That's the kind of thing that could almost be the plot of a movie and it can't happen browsing Netflix.
One day I will write the longest rant about "the academization of the arts"; today is not that day, but boy when it comes I will make lots and lots of enemies. It's a fight I am looking forward to, because I am passionate about the fine arts and I have some serious beef with the people that led to the current state of affairs.
Can't wait to read that, I'll gladly take up arms on your side.
The "academies" are mostly incubator for future bureaucrats, professors and bullshitters. I've seen so much talented artists get their spirits broken when they entered the world of Academics, where your art is less important than "He was a student of Mr. Z who was an apprentice of Mr. X which was a semi-relevant local artist".
I've worked with "digital art" teachers (famous academies) who didn't understand video formats, image formats, compression or had any taste in discerning what's good and what's bad.
I've been to art fairs where the most discussed thing is "price per square meter of a painting" instead of the actual emotional value itself. Fairs where most sought after items were "abstract spray of paint #3" style things by Academics who have lost all inspiration and are hard to differentiate between strip-mall furniture store 4.99$ paintings.
Complaining to these people gets you - "oh but you don't understand art".
Complaining to actually talented artists gets you the same visceral disgust I feel when seeing that shit.
the cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now
In many areas of the arts, the infrastructure you speak of was controlled by oligopolies: local broadcasters with allotted bandwidth, record distributors who only worked with certain labels, an insular book industry that favored certain types of literature and nonfiction and poetry, magazines which promoted a "cultural conversation" but overwhelmingly favored artists who happened to live in or near New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo.
Some great art came out of that environment, but there was a lot of garbage that made its way past the gatekeepers because of broken incentives, bias, and outright bribery.
Few artists made a living solely from their art. Almost everyone had a day job - Phillip Glass driving a taxi, Cormac McCarthy doing odd jobs, Gene Wolfe editing Plant Engineering magazine. And those are the ones who eventually hit escape velocity.
The interesting stuff was happening at the margins - the alternative weeklies you mentioned, the independent presses, the music scenes in second and third tier cities, the artists in remote locales driven to do what they needed to do and hopefully could connect with audiences, albeit small ones.
That's a very naïve and nostalgic retelling of history. Artists have always been very dependant on money, and art has been a very hard to access pursuit. I'd say the opposite is true: it is now more accessible than ever.
> you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician.
That is still true and I am not sure if it's any less true, than it ever was.
For one, a lot of musicians are playing more instruments (I suspect because instrument prices have fallen) so there's less need for a dedicated musician.
Also experimentation has gotten a lot cheaper: You can do a lot of recording at home. When you don't need to rent a studio at high rates, you don't need someone who can deliver in an hour.
Then, of course, there's the digitalization of music: You have virtual instruments and you have sample libraries at your disposal. Somebody makes and uses those – but usually not the studio musician.
What it comes down to is that more musicians can support themselves off of making music than ever before. This part is not a crises in the arts, not in general, or at all, but a shift in how the arts are created, where and who exactly a "studio musician" is today.
>You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.
If you work at a University are you really a full-time writer though, you do have classes to teach.
At any rate there is one other choice, which would be crime. If you're a good enough criminal you can spend little effort in your trade and still have plenty of time for reading and writing. And if you're caught and do time you can devote that time to literature. Crime also gives you a more interesting subject to write about than University life - it was good enough for Verlaine and Rimbaud.
This is of course half facetious, as you have to be somewhat determined to take that course, and probably also have some other problems.
when I was like 21 I read a piece of advice by Anna Wintour to aspiring couturiers - get a day job.
I have a day job as a programmer, it's pretty chill, lets me make music. And write code for more "artsy" stuff in my spare time, which I mentally liken to Renaissance painters painting portraits for money.
I'm considering going back to school for a maths PhD at some point, that would also be a pretty nice day job.
> Like your male or female co-worker might hear that such an such a poet was coming out with a new book, and buy it, and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
I do still occasionally read books based on word of mouth, they're just not "high" culture.
E.g., Dungeon Crawler Carl, or the Murderbot series.
I guess that puts me in the same camp as the commoners who were supposedly one of Shakespeare's target audiences.
There was never a possibility of making a living of poetry. In order to survive as an author, you need to make a bestseller list at least once (preferably, multiple times). Barring some rare exceptions, I don't think any book of poetry was ever best selling. In Eastern Europe, that was the lure of Communism for very many poets - the Communism government guaranteed them cushy upper-class lifestyle, in exchange for doing what they love, i.e. writing poetry (as long as it didn't criticize the system of course and, at least once in a while, writing on a theme decided by Ministry of Culture). Whereas they remembered how, under capitalism, they all needed jobs and poetry was just a hobby. That was true 100 years ago and is still true today.
Poetry sucks. short form video is a new form of art that is popular. I feel like so many of these takes confuse "things have changed since i was young" and "art is dead"
I think you made a good point with "short form video is a new form of art", but it's diluted by the "poetry sucks". Your very first words are doing what you accuse others of - not understanding specific media.
art is subjective, you need to really think about it, and reflect on it, to engage with it and enjoy it at its greatest depths. For some, this exercise is part of the joy of art. It's like discovering new things, every time. Discovering and considering things in subjective art is almost addictive, and it's very fulfilling.
but that's a lot of mental energy. Intellectual laziness would prefer things be black and white, correct or incorrect, good or bad, and then once things are sorted into one of those binaries, lean back and stop thinking about it because it's now sorted. Once everyone's decided that the Rothko paintings are just big blocks of a single colour, they're easy to make and boring to look at, then there's no further thought needed.
I feel like generative AI art is kindof a culmination of this: the idea of artists and creative people deserving to live and be supported simply by the things they contribute to society in the form of art and humanities, because it isn't hard labour or a trade, is laughable to the point of genuine hostile animosity. It's hard to even describe it until you've experienced it. Seeing people get angry at artists or writers or creators and thinking them being paid for the art they create is unfair: they produce it like a cow makes milk, so why the hell should they be paid for what they'd be making anyway? And if an artist labours to create their art it's more valuable and "better" than someone who piles candy in a corner and writes a story about it resembling how their gay partner was slowly diminished by AIDS. Anyone can do that!
I wish I knew how better to instill appreciation of art and artists in people. Seeing AI generated picture enthusiasts laugh and jeer openly at the artists whose pieces comprised its dataset in the first place as useless and that they're going to starve now has left a bitter taste in my mouth.
I think you and share all of the same premises about art, and I'd love to get a drink and have a conversation... But: Please don't use Rothko as a negative example! Have you seen any Rothko pieces in person? They are by no means solid blocks of color (though some do look it in reproduction), and they grab my attention immediately. Like, they dominate any room they're in, and pull me back towards them over and over again. It's hard to articulate, but there's something both stimulating and restful about his canvases. Especially after walking through a gallery, or a city, where my visual senses can get overloaded, standing in front of a Rothko is like an immensely welcome psychic reset. I used to walk across the bridge to the Tate Modern specifically to go stand in the Rothko room for a while.
I realize that's all subjective taste, but I'm hardly the only person who reacts to him that way. You're right that lots of people assumed the secret was "hey, it's just large blocks of color", but none of his imitators produce anything like his effect on me. There's something else going on with his work.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
> 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?
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.
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”.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
I didn’t see any mention of how the actual “rich people” have changed from a hundred years ago to today. The industrialists of yesteryear tended to care about what high society valued and subsequently funded cultural projects. Carnegie Hall (essentially the top destination for classical musicians) or the Carnegie Library system are prime examples.
Compare that to today, where many of the newly rich are from tech or finance. They don’t seem to care at all about supporting culture or the arts, instead focusing on politics, medicine, or their own pet causes.
This has to be a major factor, and also explains why Bezos Hall or Gates University of the Arts seem like completely implausible things to exist today.
I think it is not the rich people that has changed but the artists.
Suppose the reason that rich people bought art in the old days was mostly to gain respect and status from other people (and personal pleasure secondly).
Art like a Vermeer painting is good at that: everybody can see it is a good painting and many people would want such a painting in their home.
But modern art (including architecture) is often only understandable in narrow artist circles and not by people at large. Most people look at modern art and wonders if this is a piece of art or some junk that needs to be thrown out.
So modern art fails at making the population give the rich person higher social status.
So it might be that the rich people has concluded that currently is is not possible to create "public works of art" that would increase the rich peoples social standing.
1. The term here should be contemporary art, not modern art. Modern art refers to art from roughly 1890-1960. Typically people that don’t know much about contemporary art and claim it’s all stupid make this basic mistake, which highlights their ignorance of the subject.
2. The contemporary art market is absolutely driven and perhaps even survives because of rich people. So much so that artworks have become financial instruments.
The difference, which is what my comment was trying to get at, is that the ultra rich, society-defining wealth tends to come from the tech world and generally has little interest in arts or culture. For example the entire contemporary art market is only about 65 billion, which is orders of magnitude lower than tech. https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/art/collecting/art-ma...
3. Even then, this is only “art” and not “the arts” as a whole. So I don’t think it’s very comprehensive of an answer.
One related conclusion I came to awhile ago, and wrote a short post on, is that it’s very difficult to invest in “public art” vs. “private art.” I wrote more about it here:
But the most relevant part for this discussion is this:
Today, if a wealthy benefactor wanted to emulate a Renaissance patron and fund an architect or artist to create a new town square or city park, it’s unclear how he or she would even go about doing so. There don’t appear to be any financial instruments specifically designed for rewarding investors that fund integrated artworks. The design of the public space would almost certainly be watered down and subject to various governmental councils and community groups. Hostile attitudes toward the wealthy would probably result in the park being vandalized, if it were actually built.
Consequently, it is much easier and more creatively rewarding to instead spend a few million on a rare painting or backing a film project. Put simply, there are very little incentives for the wealthy to fund integrated arts.
Even then, though, this is already a subset of the potential wealthy founders of art, a subset that largely excludes most of the tech billionaires that don’t care about art culture at all.
I don't think you have been to a university recently, considering it seems like literally everything has some donor's name attached to it - including the actual professors themselves. This is an actual professor's title:
"Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Sequoia Capital Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering"
Whats surprisingly missing from this conversation, and only hinted at in the article, is that there a massive new infrastructure for funding "the arts" today that did not exist 20 years ago. Youtube, instagram, and tiktok allow many more people to pursue creative pursuits and find audiences for their work than before. The people who succeed on these platforms may call themselves creators, but a lot of them are artists. IMO the people who refuse to use the new tools, or do so unseriously find it hard to fund themselves.
I agree, they certainly are artists. Perhaps artists that are good at making content for that particular platform, though. A painter who is dedicated to her craft wouldn’t be able to dedicate as much time getting good at YouTube’s algorithm. How can we support those people?
I don't have any firsthand experience in this subject, so I could be wrong.
However, from my limited understanding of the YT algorithm, it rewards consistency.
If you make at least one new video every week, and each video is "well recieved", i.e. most of the people who click on it finish it, and ideally like it/subscribe to your channel as well, the algorithm will start pushing your stuff on the "recommended" list.
I see what you are saying and agree to a point, but you don't have to become excellent at 10 minute long form youtube videos to sustain yourself, for example you can create 2 minute behind the scenes videos on tiktok instead or simply share images of your paintings on instagram. artists can be creative about building audiences.
Here are some local NYC artists/groups i follow in order of followers:
Working on it! Though the concept is new and fledgling. Free non-profit arts publications aimed at giving exposure to featured emerging artists like your example. Donor funded and aimed at not extracting money from the artist themselves.
And like much of history, artists get a small portion of that money.
Also, a lot of the traditional arts are very hard to monetize. Just ask any animation youtube channel. The biggest fundings are for personalities, not necessarily the art they make nor consume. But I suppose being an influencer is an art in and of itself.
>IMO the people who refuse to use the new tools, or do so unseriously find it hard to fund themselves.
if you're being paid to react to art in an ungenuine way rather than provide your own art, are you still an artist?
Youtube and co. are also big rich people who influence trends. I'm not surprised some people don't want to cease their craft simply to please an algorithm.
They don't need to, they help with distribution you can add a link to your work, or patreon.
For a lot of people this is a better alternative than the old gatekeepers of yore, small or local magazine editors and tastemakers who may for whatever reason hold you back
I think the internet and the general ascendancy of computer science,and algorithmic thinking has a part to play in this. There is a certain notion of efficiency (perhaps also expressable as convenience) which has become a well trodden path to success in the market. This has been widely beneficial of course, but amongst it's side effects are a marginalisation of anything other than the most focused, popular artistic offerings. (Think Mr Beast, Taylor Swift etc).
Algorithmic thinking and optimizing one's life (whether in a video game, workplace, or in a hobby) lives rent free in my mind. It's prevalence and inertia has made my life only miserable, yet it's so hard to escape when almost everything your sold on is to optimally squeeze your life.
Just focusing on movies, my sense is that money isn’t the big issue, it’s the lack of prestige involved in art that’s really killing it. The necessary conditions for creating great art is an elite group (that holds significant societal power), that ranks, discusses and promotes all the excellent art being released in a year. They give great artists prestige and some money but money is the smaller part of the equation. Instead of this what we have now is a mass market art where art gets ranked by the millions/ billions it brings in, and so we are fed with a never ending fill of Marvel Slop/ Franchise movies and rarely risky, through provoking movies. And when we do have such a movie, we have no effective way of showering its creators with prestige. The Oscars used to play this role, but now apparently most voters don’t even watch the Oscar movies and so it’s corrupted beyond repair.
Besides the Oscar crowd is filled with actors and the maximum prestige an actor can give to another actor is limited greatly. Compare it to an Oscar crowd filled with heads of state, industry etc like a royal court of the past and that would be an insanely strong incentive to produce great art.
Readit News
The art sector here is mostly publicly funded. This too has advantages for our gov: no artists will criticize the subsidizer of their lifestyle, so no real anti-authoritarian culture takes hold. Don't bite the hand that feeds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Has any Belgian artist in the past forty years been as impactful as Bill Watterson?
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?
Which is "fine" as long as a certain ideology controls the government (not always the same party, just the same "network"/ideology).
Now, the quality/quantity of the output is a mater of my subjective opinion, which would only muddy the water.
What isn't is what happened when the opposite ideology took over the government. Suddenly the much lauded ministry of arts became the enemy who chose different artists to subsidize. There were many Pikachu faces that day.
American society is pretty focused on success, and many of us blame our mediocrity on a lack of effort, bad parenting, the government, etc. The cold truth might be that even with a perfect work-ethic, upbringing and unlimited resources most of us would fail to do anything original or interesting. If you are doing an ok job of sleeping/eating/exercising and you are relatively disciplined you are probably already performing at like ~90% of your potential. Exercising insane discipline to try and squeeze those last few %s out probably isn't going to turn you into some gifted person.
Safety nets are for making otherwise dangerous things practical.
Of course. 90% of everything is crap, so you are going to pay for a lot of crap art if you want any good stuff. This is the same if you have a completely commercial model, because most people have no taste.
I've liked 100% of the art I've ever purchased (that's why I purchased it)
If you’re a painter or a sculptor, since you can’t provide proof of engagement length, you were out. That’s getting better but still not a UBI by any means. They’re poor.
Do we have good contemporary art ? Yes. They’re not subsidized by the government, have to pay heavy taxes as we are and got to have lot of red tape for their enjoyment. So they move out of Belgium. With a raised middle finger…
Meanwhile this same system is abused by Uber and other major.
From what I find in Google about CA's total optimized tax burden for a one-man freelance company it is about 28%. And a lot more buying power too probably, but that is hard to compare in.
Of course this is personal income from labour via one-man companies ("net take-home"). This does not take into account VAT, capital gains taxes, etc.
That's why I left Belgium. Getting squeezed to the bone to pay for endless leeches producing absolutely nothing that I enjoy or respect: it's not just the arts. Administrations are pathetically inefficient and arbitrary in how they treat people too.
So I already left and now I'm selling everything I have there: a little apartment, one garage, a few items worth a little something.
I'm fully planning on acquiring another nationality and then I'll just abandon my belgian one.
> Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.
Totally.
But the negative economic death spiral has set in here. More people work for the public sector directly and indirectly than the private sector, and the tax burden is ever increasing while services received are dwindling.
Surely that is also true of countries where it is not subsidized?
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
2,000 artists were selected with prior portfolios as well as control group for comparison. It will be revised in 2025.
And always has been: ninety percent of everything is crap.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
That's all I remember. It was horrible.
They do. Do they get attention on corporate media so you hear about them though?
> You'd think Belgium would have some impressive world-class artists
... It does. Are they given exposure in corporate media?
> so many can work unbothered by the oppressive forces of market trends
Being able to afford basic necessities does not, in fact, make artists immune to the "oppressive forces" of the market.
> mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.
Ie, Sturgeon's Law.
And we also have public media. Yet no credible evidence of the effectiveness of endless subsidies.
If we're going to namedrop economic laws like it means something: Parkinson's law: the art and media sector have become part of the self-perpetuating ineffective bureaucracy.
The powers that be decided, the ambitious middle class has to foot the bill for everything.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Culture Crash makes this interesting point: Did you know there used to be widely read, culturally relevant, AND Nobel Prize worthy (like actual contenders to win), poets? Unimaginable now but true in living memory. They didn't even have to be attached to a University, financially speaking. Like your male or female co-worker might hear that such an such a poet was coming out with a new book, and buy it, and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
The general point of these books (summarizing a lot here) is that the cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now, and there isn't much left. At this point literature has been "captured" by the University, but it's for a good reason: you can't survive as a fiction writer without it. People complain "but they're so insular" but the truth is: they don't have an alternative. You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.
This is true of other industries too. Music: you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician. You might also be the guy who was the resident expert on classical music for the neighborhood at the store, who would recommend operas conducted by Karajan and the best recordings from Deutsche Grammophone (I remember those guys). Art: you could paint signs or design posters, back when there was a real demand. Writing: you could write for the alternative weeklies (I'd read those) or be a regular journalist, writing as little as one story a day. Movies: you could be a video clerk (I also remember this). And those 'subcultures' were incubators. Quentin Tarantino graduated from the video store in a sense. Who can follow him, if there are no video stores anymore?
So this crisis in nonprofit funding really is coming at the end of a much longer crisis in the arts in general. It should be seen in that context.
The idea that nonprofits should prop up art has always been wrong, in a way. Artists since the Italian Renaissance have produced most of their greatest / most famous works for wealthy patrons, not because governments paid them to do it. (Unless you count the Vatican as a government).
What I'm trying to say is that all art arises from pop culture, and pop culture can engender the height of artistic excellence, if the culture itself has good taste and demands quality. Or, pop culture can be a pit of garbage if the culture has degraded. This is what is meant about the transition from "Ideal" Hellenistic art to art which embodied "Pathos" around the 4th Century BC.
We have transitioned in the past 50 years from a culture which strives for the ideal, to one which worships pathos. That may be the mark of a civilization in decline (based on a relatively limited number of historical examples). But the "fix" isn't more public funding for art that no one looks at or listens to. All great art arose from popular desire for it; you can't force it on a population, or keep it alive if there's no audience.
But the part about nonprofits is possibly orthogonal to the issue and may even be wrong in the opposing direction. Why would pathos overtake everything? Honestly it's what I'd expect to happen in the wake of two simple developments:
1) most media engagement moves from text, which requires the engagement of the mind, to video/audio, which can run on a much higher volume of feels/vibes alone. I don't think it's a coincidence that we had a print culture up through a half century ago when there were popular poets (Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski, maybe even WH Auden) and now we get to your comment which, representative of the times, will subtly shift to popular performing songwriters as if they're the same thing.
Like one of Patrick Rothfuss' characters said: “Remember this, son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.”
2) And that means when the market becomes the dominant social mediator, what finds its way through culture? What sells. What sells most broadly? What touches people's hearts. What touches people's hearts? Vibes/feels, or pathos, as you say. And then we do stupid things with our markets like Spotify that magnify the problem by eroding marginal success, bifurcating into go-pathos-big or go home as the option.
Your own comment is a great illustrator of just how much market-as-mediator is readily thought of as the way to understand the issue. Do we want other ideals? Then we need other cultural institutions that explore, circulate, and foster values/ideals beyond the market. And at least some of them would necessarily be non-profits. And while they'd need to go beyond subsidizing pre-popular work (including perhaps some never popular) and into various forms of popular education, subsidy would be part of what they'd do. There can't be an audience for something that is never produced.
50 years ago the top selling single was "The Way We Were" by Barbra Streisand and the top selling album was a Carpenters singles collection.
What's happened over the last century or so is a huge shift towards the middle of the bell curve. Culture used to be gate-kept and handed down, which meant a much smaller number of talents could be become household names, with an income to match. Generally there was a concept of quality based on exceptional creative imagination and craft. That rubbed off onto genre work, so it was still an influence there.
Now it's become corporatised, so the only metric is income, which pushes everything away from risk and novelty towards lowest common denominator satisfaction for middle-of-the-bell-curve readers. Currently that means trope-heavy checkbox romance with plenty of explicit sex for women, and militaristic scifi for the relatively few men who still read, with a bit of overlap for formulaic thrillers and police procedurals.
This is possible in fiction, where the market for sexy romance seems insatiable.
But there are similar things happening in music and visual art. The audience for those is much smaller, and the barriers to entry much lower, so there's a perfect storm of mediocre people trying to sell their work on social media to a shrinking audience in a global free-for-all, while the scene is being eaten alive by generative AI. And a tiny, tiny number of global mega-artists get most of the attention, income, and marketing budgets.
The only subcultures are online, so they're much more diffuse and lack the lynchpin gatekeepers and networkers who curated and promoted the most interesting work.
Throwing funding at the arts is a band aid for this. It's a structural issue caused by a forced shift in values away from shared community towards compulsive individual hustle as a value in itself.
I'm too young to remember this for poetry, but it certainly was true for music, TV shows, and movies for long after it was true for poetry. People are still talking about The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, various highly-successful movies from the 60s-00s (Lord of the Rings for instance), TV shows like Game of Thrones, etc. However, I'd say it's less true today, but TV for instance seems to have lot of this still going on with people talking about various high-caliber shows like The Expense, Silo, etc. I think poetry simply went the way of theater: other art forms surpassed it in popularity, though it still has its niche audience: New York's Broadway is still quite popular. And people spend lots of money on music concerts.
Was music in the '60s and '70s better than music today? Probably not.
If you were able to time travel back to then and listen at some random time to a radio tuned to a pop station you'd hear a lot of OK songs, a smaller number of good songs and bad songs, and a few great songs. Just like if you listened to some stream of a wide selection of recent music.
Is music from the '60s and '70s that you are likely to hear today better than most recent music? Probably.
Listen to an oldies stream and it likely is to just include those songs from then that were great or good, and it will be drawing from several years.
Same thing happens with TV. Old sitcoms like "Frasier" are as good as the best being produced today. Same with even older shows like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "I Love Lucy". But there were a heck of a lot of other sitcoms from the same times that are almost forgotten.
With sitcoms the old sitcoms we might still see are probably more likely to be great than the old music we still hear today, because old sitcoms have an additional filter to get past. You'll probably only see them today if they had enough episodes to be worth syndication.
They typically show one episode a day and they want to be able to go several months before wrapping around. Even with having more episodes per year back then than we typically have now (~32 then, ~24 now) the show would have to last at least 3 years to get enough episodes for syndication. Many a show that was great or near great and would have become great in season 2 or 3 has been killed by its network for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the show.
(I no longer watch anything on Fox other than sports and reality shows because of that. After "Firefly", "Futurama", "Terra Nova", and "Lucifer" I learned my lesson. I don't care how great people say a Fox show is now, I will either wait until Fox cancels it and watch it on streaming if people tell me that it got a proper series finale, or I might consider watching entire seasons before that but only if those seasons ended at points that would be good stopping points. "Terra Nova" and "Lucifer" ended on huge cliff hangers).
For example, the video rental store has been replaced by a multitude of sources: Netflix et al, torrent sites, YouTube, Twitch. It’s never been easier to make a film and distribute it to a lot of people, yet I can’t deny a sense of loss from the demise of the video store. What is the difference here?
We've merged more and more into a megasociety. In a geographically distributed society, the power law for quality is more forgiving. You can be the best local band and make a living.
Now that we have ultra-efficient communications, there's less room for "mid-tier" art. Local art gets outcompeted by whatever the top stuff is among a much greater national or international population.
Because of this, there's also less of a breeding ground for maturing artists, or for experimental styles in isolated areas (think California surf rock, or NYC Salsa, etc). There's no place to go if you're not the best.
I remember the same thing happening in music stores. You'd go to buy a tape/CD and it wouldn't be in stock, but you'd be primed to buy one, so you just start browsing until you found something that looked interesting enough to buy.
The "academies" are mostly incubator for future bureaucrats, professors and bullshitters. I've seen so much talented artists get their spirits broken when they entered the world of Academics, where your art is less important than "He was a student of Mr. Z who was an apprentice of Mr. X which was a semi-relevant local artist".
I've worked with "digital art" teachers (famous academies) who didn't understand video formats, image formats, compression or had any taste in discerning what's good and what's bad.
I've been to art fairs where the most discussed thing is "price per square meter of a painting" instead of the actual emotional value itself. Fairs where most sought after items were "abstract spray of paint #3" style things by Academics who have lost all inspiration and are hard to differentiate between strip-mall furniture store 4.99$ paintings.
Complaining to these people gets you - "oh but you don't understand art". Complaining to actually talented artists gets you the same visceral disgust I feel when seeing that shit.
Burn the academies, free the art.
In many areas of the arts, the infrastructure you speak of was controlled by oligopolies: local broadcasters with allotted bandwidth, record distributors who only worked with certain labels, an insular book industry that favored certain types of literature and nonfiction and poetry, magazines which promoted a "cultural conversation" but overwhelmingly favored artists who happened to live in or near New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo.
Some great art came out of that environment, but there was a lot of garbage that made its way past the gatekeepers because of broken incentives, bias, and outright bribery.
Few artists made a living solely from their art. Almost everyone had a day job - Phillip Glass driving a taxi, Cormac McCarthy doing odd jobs, Gene Wolfe editing Plant Engineering magazine. And those are the ones who eventually hit escape velocity.
The interesting stuff was happening at the margins - the alternative weeklies you mentioned, the independent presses, the music scenes in second and third tier cities, the artists in remote locales driven to do what they needed to do and hopefully could connect with audiences, albeit small ones.
> you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician.
That is still true and I am not sure if it's any less true, than it ever was.
For one, a lot of musicians are playing more instruments (I suspect because instrument prices have fallen) so there's less need for a dedicated musician.
Also experimentation has gotten a lot cheaper: You can do a lot of recording at home. When you don't need to rent a studio at high rates, you don't need someone who can deliver in an hour.
Then, of course, there's the digitalization of music: You have virtual instruments and you have sample libraries at your disposal. Somebody makes and uses those – but usually not the studio musician.
What it comes down to is that more musicians can support themselves off of making music than ever before. This part is not a crises in the arts, not in general, or at all, but a shift in how the arts are created, where and who exactly a "studio musician" is today.
If you work at a University are you really a full-time writer though, you do have classes to teach.
At any rate there is one other choice, which would be crime. If you're a good enough criminal you can spend little effort in your trade and still have plenty of time for reading and writing. And if you're caught and do time you can devote that time to literature. Crime also gives you a more interesting subject to write about than University life - it was good enough for Verlaine and Rimbaud.
This is of course half facetious, as you have to be somewhat determined to take that course, and probably also have some other problems.
Or there could be an UBI.
I have a day job as a programmer, it's pretty chill, lets me make music. And write code for more "artsy" stuff in my spare time, which I mentally liken to Renaissance painters painting portraits for money.
I'm considering going back to school for a maths PhD at some point, that would also be a pretty nice day job.
relevant Derek Sivers post: https://sive.rs/balance
I do still occasionally read books based on word of mouth, they're just not "high" culture.
E.g., Dungeon Crawler Carl, or the Murderbot series.
I guess that puts me in the same camp as the commoners who were supposedly one of Shakespeare's target audiences.
Yes there was, but it got killed by outsourcing [1].
[1] http://www.watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html
but that's a lot of mental energy. Intellectual laziness would prefer things be black and white, correct or incorrect, good or bad, and then once things are sorted into one of those binaries, lean back and stop thinking about it because it's now sorted. Once everyone's decided that the Rothko paintings are just big blocks of a single colour, they're easy to make and boring to look at, then there's no further thought needed.
I feel like generative AI art is kindof a culmination of this: the idea of artists and creative people deserving to live and be supported simply by the things they contribute to society in the form of art and humanities, because it isn't hard labour or a trade, is laughable to the point of genuine hostile animosity. It's hard to even describe it until you've experienced it. Seeing people get angry at artists or writers or creators and thinking them being paid for the art they create is unfair: they produce it like a cow makes milk, so why the hell should they be paid for what they'd be making anyway? And if an artist labours to create their art it's more valuable and "better" than someone who piles candy in a corner and writes a story about it resembling how their gay partner was slowly diminished by AIDS. Anyone can do that!
I wish I knew how better to instill appreciation of art and artists in people. Seeing AI generated picture enthusiasts laugh and jeer openly at the artists whose pieces comprised its dataset in the first place as useless and that they're going to starve now has left a bitter taste in my mouth.
I realize that's all subjective taste, but I'm hardly the only person who reacts to him that way. You're right that lots of people assumed the secret was "hey, it's just large blocks of color", but none of his imitators produce anything like his effect on me. There's something else going on with his work.
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.
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.
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.
And many of those laws are forcibly denying people from access to something when it is declared "private property".
Do you have an alternative idea we could easily disabuse you of?
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.
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 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".
Just because rich people used to be the only source of arts funding doesn't make them the best source of arts funding.
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.
wouldn't have happened without rich people's money and influence.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Otherwise we’d get Walmarts all over the place
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.
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.
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.
Compare that to today, where many of the newly rich are from tech or finance. They don’t seem to care at all about supporting culture or the arts, instead focusing on politics, medicine, or their own pet causes.
This has to be a major factor, and also explains why Bezos Hall or Gates University of the Arts seem like completely implausible things to exist today.
Suppose the reason that rich people bought art in the old days was mostly to gain respect and status from other people (and personal pleasure secondly).
Art like a Vermeer painting is good at that: everybody can see it is a good painting and many people would want such a painting in their home.
But modern art (including architecture) is often only understandable in narrow artist circles and not by people at large. Most people look at modern art and wonders if this is a piece of art or some junk that needs to be thrown out.
So modern art fails at making the population give the rich person higher social status.
Example: A rich guy in Denmark built a new opera house (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Copenhag...) to replace the old one (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Royal_Da...). I think the attempt at improving status failed with the new building.
This interpretation is the style of Clayton Christensen: The Theory of Jobs To Be Done https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/clay-christensen-the-theory-of-jo...
So it might be that the rich people has concluded that currently is is not possible to create "public works of art" that would increase the rich peoples social standing.
1. The term here should be contemporary art, not modern art. Modern art refers to art from roughly 1890-1960. Typically people that don’t know much about contemporary art and claim it’s all stupid make this basic mistake, which highlights their ignorance of the subject.
2. The contemporary art market is absolutely driven and perhaps even survives because of rich people. So much so that artworks have become financial instruments.
The difference, which is what my comment was trying to get at, is that the ultra rich, society-defining wealth tends to come from the tech world and generally has little interest in arts or culture. For example the entire contemporary art market is only about 65 billion, which is orders of magnitude lower than tech. https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/art/collecting/art-ma...
3. Even then, this is only “art” and not “the arts” as a whole. So I don’t think it’s very comprehensive of an answer.
One related conclusion I came to awhile ago, and wrote a short post on, is that it’s very difficult to invest in “public art” vs. “private art.” I wrote more about it here:
https://onthearts.com/p/modern-culture-is-too-escapist-part
But the most relevant part for this discussion is this:
Today, if a wealthy benefactor wanted to emulate a Renaissance patron and fund an architect or artist to create a new town square or city park, it’s unclear how he or she would even go about doing so. There don’t appear to be any financial instruments specifically designed for rewarding investors that fund integrated artworks. The design of the public space would almost certainly be watered down and subject to various governmental councils and community groups. Hostile attitudes toward the wealthy would probably result in the park being vandalized, if it were actually built.
Consequently, it is much easier and more creatively rewarding to instead spend a few million on a rare painting or backing a film project. Put simply, there are very little incentives for the wealthy to fund integrated arts.
Even then, though, this is already a subset of the potential wealthy founders of art, a subset that largely excludes most of the tech billionaires that don’t care about art culture at all.
Also Stanford literally has a building named after Bill Gates: https://www.cs.stanford.edu/about/gates-computer-science-bui...
However, from my limited understanding of the YT algorithm, it rewards consistency.
If you make at least one new video every week, and each video is "well recieved", i.e. most of the people who click on it finish it, and ideally like it/subscribe to your channel as well, the algorithm will start pushing your stuff on the "recommended" list.
Here are some local NYC artists/groups i follow in order of followers:
https://www.instagram.com/secret_riso_club/https://www.instagram.com/sahanabanana/?hl=enhttps://www.instagram.com/naomi.basu/?hl=en
Also, a lot of the traditional arts are very hard to monetize. Just ask any animation youtube channel. The biggest fundings are for personalities, not necessarily the art they make nor consume. But I suppose being an influencer is an art in and of itself.
>IMO the people who refuse to use the new tools, or do so unseriously find it hard to fund themselves.
if you're being paid to react to art in an ungenuine way rather than provide your own art, are you still an artist?
Youtube and co. are also big rich people who influence trends. I'm not surprised some people don't want to cease their craft simply to please an algorithm.
The things young people like rarely fit into that category.
For a lot of people this is a better alternative than the old gatekeepers of yore, small or local magazine editors and tastemakers who may for whatever reason hold you back
Besides the Oscar crowd is filled with actors and the maximum prestige an actor can give to another actor is limited greatly. Compare it to an Oscar crowd filled with heads of state, industry etc like a royal court of the past and that would be an insanely strong incentive to produce great art.