Is it not? How much time or will do people currently have to consume art? The internet has dropped the barrier to getting an audience to near zero. Yet the vast, vast majority of people still want to consume mainstream, curated art. Even though it’s completely free, people don’t sit and browse websites for niche artists. Or, if they do, they certainly aren’t going to pay for it and would prefer the format of TikTok/Instagram.
I'm not being flippant. This is a serious question that needs to be addressed in any would-be public art program. Sooner or later you run into limits.
I'm pretty sure even most socialists would agree with this - even those who want to abolish money. If your art isn't valuable to society, you'll get treated like someone who digs holes and then fills them all day.
Now, art which is widely appreciated but still has trouble getting funded might be another matter (because they're e.g. directed at a demographic that doesn't have much money), but most of the people who can't live off their art definitely don't fall into this category - they simply aren't popular.
Publically funded broadcasting for example has been phenomenally successful.
The created art is simply how the vast, vast majority of people in a city will interact with a local community of artists and thus how their quality of life is increased by their existence. A group of e.g. untalented musicians will simply have a terrible quality of live/cost ratio. We don't fund parks simply because they're a quality of life investment - but because they're a _good_ investment.
This can be exploited. Imagine if I wrote a program that simply outputs a string of 1000 random notes and durations and published this as a song every day, with a random UUID for the title. This is technically art, but is it the same as your favorite musician?
Now if someone is buying each of those songs for a million dollars each, that's between the artist and person making the purchase.
Should society subsidize that though? How do you draw the line?
I'm not suggesting that artists should be paid unconditionally per piece, obviously that'd be ridiculous. I'm not suggesting _anything_. I'm just saying that maybe (maybe not) society as a whole finds enough value in art that it wants to make sure that artists can survive. Maybe "the market" is the whole answer, maybe we want the market to have no part in artists' income, maybe it's just one part of the answer (lots of countries like Italy and France heavily subsidize culture & art).
> How do you draw the line?
By drawing a line? We manage to draw lines on unemployment pensions, retirement pensions, research subsidies, children benefits, universal healthcare... It's nothing magical, we draw lines by writing laws that seem to account for different cases, and we know it's not perfect and that there's loopholes in laws, that some people get too much and some others too little, but we iterate and adapt.
But in summary, I don't know! I'm not a politician, an economist, an artist or even a particularly keen art consumer. I just don't believe "the market" is the One True Answer.
Thought you were going somewhere completely different based off of the first sentence. Yes artists have been exploited for decades, but they aren't being exploited by their audiences aka their market. Fans of music, video, performance, etc. are willing to pay quite fair prices (even exorbitant ones) to consume or own the media that they love. The lion's share of that money never reaches the artist that produced it. Vast empires of wealth have been built on the backs of superstar artists and the problem as always is rent seeking which is the enemy of socialists and capitalists alike. We absolutely should not subsidize art production, I can guarantee you that money would also be siphoned off under the current status quo. We're already very close to a solution to this problem with the massive drop in cost of producing any kind of art that is amenable to digital production and distribution. It just needs to continue to tip in the direction of artists being their own producers or being able to hire the people who do the actual work directly rather than going through an established company built on exploitative practices. The next piece of the puzzle is going to be a better system for paying to consume the produced art without relying on the toxic ad ecosystem. We need to starve the greedy giants of the last century out of existence, their only benefit was in connecting people to art when that used to be difficult. Connecting is easy now, paying someone for their work should be too.
Well, it's not that simple is it. For decades actors, musicians and artists have been complaining that they have to live in misery to pursue their art and fighting for better conditions, it's not like they've always been OK with the status quo.
It's a more general question: should art be subject to the market laws, or should society subsidize art production? In the first case (the liberal POV I suppose) it's up to the artist to find ways to make money out of their art, or keep it as a hobby, or give up on it. On the second case (a more socialist POV), we need to challenge how artists are getting a revenue in our society because it's clearly not working.