First, You’re arguing that rational labor input-output, the harder the better, and the resulting inputs it creates into a system, is the highest ideal or something. You’re missing that Art and various abstractions, to include the social sciences have played a major role in shaping history and our self identities for all of human existence (Homer, anyone?). When this missing started occurring is right around the ‘06 tech boom that put engineering and input output above all else, and by extension destroyed out the protected spaces artists could function in. Coincidently, that’s right around the time the world started to lose its mind by finding meaning making via their iPhones. This engineering-centric dismissal of everything that can’t be quantified is the cause of so many social issues. Your view was also directly present in the Soviet Union, fwiw.
I’m not sure what artist insulted you or wherever this take comes form, but you’re really missing some key points of why Art and the resulting high minded artists have existed since the cavemen.
To me, an average artist/band/... is at best, like an average roofer in the world where there are more roofers than houses - they are unnecessary and should do something else, or admit that roofing or art is just a side hobby. At worst, an average artist/band/... (the kind that the GP mentions, and I've certainly met) is like a roofer insisting that their personal roof that they are building on the ground level over a sand pit is inherently noble.
I think a better example is sports. On one hand, football players get paid a ton of money, by people who presumably consider it worthwhile, for "just playing a game once a week". On the other, imagine every relatively unimpressive rando on deviantart or whatever played football instead, on the same relatively unimpressive level. Do we need so many football players? Sure, they can do it as a hobby, but in terms of social value/making a living, we certainly don't.
Nobody asks roofers to work for "exposure."
Nobody's telling roofers that a penny per shingle / tile would be "entitled" of them (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv... ).
Nobody's arguing that roofers should agree to roof for a pittance and come up with some "hustle" like t-shirts or other roofing merchandise in order to enjoy the privilege of roofing.
People do ALL these things with artists.
Labor should be paid, that's true. Trade work is valuable, sure. Craft is a matter worthy of respect, certainly.
But the idea that most artists (outside of a small fraction) are somehow privileged is so far from the truth that it isn't even wrong.
Labor is undervalued all the time, especially if someone has no experience with it and does not understand the amount of time necessary for getting something done. And if you are young and starting your business, they try to exploit you even more. This is not limited to art. And Internet just intensified this, as now you have not only the cheapskates from your neighborhood, but of the whole world. Though, with art there is also the part that some people are not seeing it as a real job, but only as a hobby or something you do for our own enjoyment. So they are even more willing to undervalue it.
The same forces that mean those people "laying down cement in 100 degree weather" often can't actually "put a roof over their family's heads" are the forces that keep poor artists for existing in this society.
I believe it's mostly critics who look for "higher truth" in art?
Do roofers need support?
Lots of beginners in every field think that they're God's gift to whatever it is that they've just started. They're going to change the world, etc. That comes with the territory of being a beginner. Usually they mellow with age and experience.
>I have more admiration for someone who's laying down cement in 100 degree weather to put a roof over their family's heads, or someone who's putting in the hours massaging mindnumbingly boring spreadsheets to be able to support themselves, or someone putting in overtime at a hospital. The expectation that people must support you and give you preferential treatment because you're expressing yourself never made sense to me.
Just because you don't see the hours of training and production that goes into something, doesn't mean it isn't there. I might spend 10,000 hours practicing to spend 200 hours writing a novel that you read in 20 hours. I might spend four years in college and ten years writing a computer program that you'll use once. Lots of artwork is produced as work for hire. That doesn't make it that much different than any other job. A trained professional getting payment for services rendered is how things have worked since antiquity. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he was commissioned to, not just because he was expressing himself
> You always see signs exhorting you to "support your local artists", yet you never see encouragement to support your local roofers.
You see signs asking you to support local roofers all the time. What do you think all of those commercials on radio, television, print media, billboards, etc. are that advertising all of the roofing services?
Roofers produce roofs. Chefs produce food. Artists produce art. It takes labor to produce art, and if you want good art, it also takes years of training and practice. But somehow working to produce art is seen as 'lesser' than doing manual physical labor.
It's weird. It's expected that in most professions even beginners deserve to get paid. But the arts are somehow different. There's this expectation that artists should produce works for the benefit of society (and don't forget, 'art' is much more than just drawing pretty pictures, it's also the vast field of fine art, music, movies, television, writing, and a lot of other media) but that the work should be free. There's this unspoken feeling that since lots of art is easy to appreciate, it must have been easy to create, so paying for it is a waste of money. But have you ever tried to paint a picture? Compose a song? Write a novel? It's hard. It takes time. It can take thousands of hours of practice before you make anything good.
It's kind of like arguing that a programmer asking for money for the programming work that they do is somehow shaming people into supporting them for typing all day instead of doing real work that commands real pay like bricklaying or cattle ranching.
its kinda good that it is expected that way. art is placed at the level of love. u dont want love to be offered on the market. somehow that feels wrong even when its legal (eg., prostitution) and serving some purpose. artists need a society that appreciates that creativity is a gift and its source is mysterious. the society would then allocate a certain % of income to support the arts. but we now have a society that is each man for himself in a dog-eat-dog world.
I value art because it communicates something from an actual human being, like an exchanging between consciousnesses. When I can derive the choices of an author or photographer or any other class of artist, I find a mutual perspective that, at the root of it, makes me feel understanding and understood.
This article (posted here a few days ago) has a great argument on why AI art isn’t art:
There’s more to art than the mere appeal of an image to random people. Some great art is disturbing, but it is emotionally resonant. No doubt some of these AI images are quite neat to look at, but they’re basically assemblages, high tech collages. It’s a futurist parlor trick.
Philosophically art requires consciousness and a conscious will to express something. These AIs aren’t conscious and don’t make art.
Frankly humans and animals generated by these things look like blurry trash or are wrong on details in a way a human wouldn’t be, even intentionally. I’ve yet to see examples that don’t look kind of shitty.
There are plenty examples on the DALL-E subreddit that put the majority of Deviant Art artists to shame.
The best looking ones in general feel like banksy painting a character into a flea market painting, collage.
Again, this shit isn't art it's images with mashed together elements built by a system that has no sense of what it's doing. It's cool and all, but at best it's a pale imitation of a thing.
My point still holds that anything vaguely representational looks kind of bad and has an uncanny quality. It’s clear that the trick is a kind of collage in most of the images I’ve seen.
Until AI has a sense of good taste and can carefully blend multiple styles into a new genre, the human cannot be replaced. And at that point we're basically at the singularity.
Programmers are simply paid what they get paid because businesses they work for can make up that cost (of paying programmers the salary) with profit multiple times over, using the work produced by those programmers.
Yes, and no. There are entitled developers who think they deserve more than the average worker. And there are those developers who delve into their "Devine art" and are cranky because the world does not appreciate it. Usually those people are to be found around the more exotic languages it seems.
Art and IT have a big intersection from my experience. And majority of people in IT and also art are not entitled, nor are they on the Divine Train. It's just that as an outsider, you barely encounter those people, because of which it's harder to get a good picture of the art-scene.
But, to +1 the other poster, programmers can be just as deluded as anybody else about their own importance, we don't have to indulge that either.
Too bad I’m not a Roman Emperor, or else I’d host weekly public bouts where I’d pit them against one another in a fight to the death.
An economy is not a society. There is more to the human experience than "number goes up".
I have more admiration for someone who's laying down cement in 100 degree weather to put a roof over their family's heads, or someone who's putting in the hours massaging mindnumbingly boring spreadsheets to be able to support themselves, or someone putting in overtime at a hospital. The expectation that people must support you and give you preferential treatment because you're expressing yourself never made sense to me. There are lots of other ways in which people make sacrifices, many more commendable.
Being able to express yourself and having an audience is a privilege, not something people need to be shamed into giving you. You always see signs exhorting you to "support your local artists", yet you never see encouragement to support your local roofers.