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.
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 closest modern equivalent is a weekly comic book (or manga) that gets turned into a graphic novel after its run.
Other examples of serialized novels include The Count of Monte Cristo, Madame Bovary, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. A Farewell to Arms, for example, was completed entirely before it was serialized in Scribner's. In the heyday of the Atlantic and Scribner's magazines, many of the best American writers would first publish their novels in installments prior to releasing as a single volume. It was considered a mark of success to publish in installments in one of the vaunted literary magazines.
We’ve lost most of it, but there were tons of works connected to the Iliad. It’s just the last year of a ten year war. The instigation of the war, events in gathering the allies on both sides, the voyage of the Greeks to Ilium, and other battles and skirmishes are alluded to, but not directly covered in Homer’s story. Then there’s the return of the heroes other than Odysseus! We have some of this in surviving tragedies, but know only titles and maybe topics for a whole bunch more.
Then you’ve got all the national myths that connect to it. The Aeneid, the Round Table and broader “Matter of Britain”, et c.
This is of course true of mythology more generally, not just the Trojan War literary cycle. Mythology was the "fictional universe(s)" of its day, that most cultured people would've been familiar with.
Is this true? It was very popular with the people whose accounts mostly make up primary documents from that period. But they were a tiny minority of the population in absolute terms. The population was still primarily rural-agricultural, did that allow access to opera for most people?
There are several extant folk music traditions with continuity to 19th century italy, it seems much more likely to me that most people's music exposure would have been to locally produced folk styles than opera.
Speaking of Verdi, he postponed rehearsals of the famous "Donna e mobile" aria until the day before premiere, to keep it a secret, because he predicted (correctly) that it was going to be an instant hit. On release, it basically became a pop song, performed all over the place (recording did not exist, remember). This may give an idea what a hit could look / sound like at the time. BTW it has most features of a modern hit song: a clear rhythm, a simple but catchy and recognizable melody, somehow playful words about the nature of romantic relationships.
Of course live music was how people accessed music, and generally for this time in most parts of europe we have a strongly attested art music tradition enjoyed by the aristocratic minority and a separate, vastly more popular yet barely attested folk music tradition associated with the lower class rural majority.
The elite wrote about the things that interested them, and their writings make up the vast majority of primary documents from the era. We have to be careful not to accidentally consume their biases along with their information.
Notably though, there was sheet music as a mass-market form of music, so we can tell what was popular - and "opera tunes" definitely made the list, together with theme-and-variations sets based on opera tunes, medleys of opera tunes, parodies based on the tunes, arrangements for countless instruments etc.
Isn't that mostly just a change in technology? Taylor Swift and Whitney Houston have to sing into microphones that amplify their voice electrically, whereas opera singers obviously don't; they just sing the way public singing was done for much of recorded history. To some extent, the point of opera and classical music (which also features unamplified instruments) is a kind of historical reenactment; of keeping performance practices alive that have a very long history of their own.
It's still a niche product compared to recordings of, say, Taylor Swift (who is also an excellent performer).
[1]: https://thespaces.com/sydney-opera-house-emerges-with-a-whol...
An example : Darren Aronofsky's now-famous cribbing of Satoshi Kon's work, back when anime was mostly thought of as, "Sex and violence, Pokemon, and Miyazaki (if you even knew of Miyazaki)." And even that's kind of the tip of the iceberg. Decades-old expressionist films, little-known performance and video art, paintings, music, fashion; unless you really know the landscape, how can you tell what is and isn't influencing culture down the line? How much of your experience in the world of 2024 was shaped by the proclivities of teenagers on IRC and 4chan in 2004, just trying to make each other laugh?
[Insert that monologue from The Devil Wears Prada]
As J.L.Borges aptly noted, a serious artist produces not only successors but also predecessors. (Regarding Miyazaki, I could not miss an animator who was praised so highly by Kurosawa. I learned about the rest of anime later.)
But my point was more narrow: however beautiful The Magic Flute or Barber of Ceville or even Carmen may be, they are sort of stuck in a particular point of cultural space, you can't materially change them without leaving the genre that defines them. This is not specific to genres that became high-brow "refined art"; you can't play a rock-n-roll like it's 1957 either, it will only resonate among the fans of the genre / period, not very numerous now. With that, both opera and rock-n-roll were once the epitomes of wide, overwhelming popularity, each at their time.
I agree about lineage. This is basically how culture grows and develops. The past is absolutely not worthless, but no cultural epoch is a final destination. Rainbow in 1970s, Jethro Tull in 1990s, and Master Boot Record in 2020s all directly quoted baroque music, but each of them did that differently, and not exactly the way an authentist ensemble would play it.
Edit: the downs mean its true ^_^
Commissions and Patreon subscribers welcome.
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.
Uhhh, yes? Can you imagine a global pandemic of 2020s magnitude happening in, say '94? Would the world at large have fared as well as we did without the "dinky little apps" like click-to-get-food and click-to-stock-warehouses and click-to-develop-rna-vaccines and click-to-work-remotely and click-to-talk-to-family and click-to-watch-anything and click-to-stay-sane? Are you seriously arguing that art is doing more for the world at large than the IT industry? Come on...
Yes? Art has been made for at least 17,000 years, it is a fundamental expression of human consciousness. This is like asking if symbolic thinking or language is more important than IT. Yes. Obviously. The sum of all IT work is a blip compared to the sum total of human expression across our species's existence.
You're right, if IT hadn't been present during the last pandemic, we would have been much worse off. But even if we had apocalyptic human collapse and reverted to a pre-historic hunter-gatherer existence with primitive technologies... people would still be making art.
But that is not an argument for art doing more for the world, right now, than the IT industry. In fact, it is the latter that takes art and makes it accessible on a scale that was impossible decades ago. Accessible to the masses, understandable to anyone, and so on. Literature is art. And we now have every piece of human literature at our fingertips. And not just us, I mean almost any human being, including the poorest of the poor. You should look at the impact technology is having in the less fortunate parts of the world - from health care, to supplies delivery, clean water, education, access to information, and so on.
It's one thing to consider art important. It's another to put it ahead in "world impact" than technology.
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.
Many artists have a small audience in mind and that is quite reasonable.
Mid-career, Duke Ellington chafed under the racist and unadventurous expectations of his audiences, and charted a new musical path, making music that was primarily aimed at pleasing other musicians. Many of these compositions are now jazz standards.
In modern classical music, 20th Century figures like Boulez, and even earlier composers like Wagner thought their audiences were hopelessly sentimental and complacent, and worked intentionally to disturb them. A great many of the household names in modern classical music meet this description, and they certainly set the direction of classical music to follow.
Now to my point: I think some of these artists made good, enduring art. But if we look at the media in which they worked — Jazz and Classical music — these forms are, I regret to say, completely culturally irrelevant. They’re dead media; the only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games, and jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point. It’s hard not to see some truth in the above post’s sense that the net result of these artists’ influence was a kind of wish granted by the monkey’s paw. They set out to destroy the idols of their day and succeeded, and the long run outcome was essentially suicidal.
I wonder if we need to re-examine the trope of the iconoclast, in hopes of finding new artistic pathways that are capable of expressing new ideas and asking new questions without destroying the traditions that give rise to them.
Fan service is a thing for the exact same reason.
Stravinsky should probably be the start of your argument, and someone like Cage/Reich as your midpoint and Glass as your populist revisionism endgame/full circle. Gould on Igor Stravinsky, followed by Bernstein/Gershwin/Copeland, if you want to get deeper into the new world bastardisation of the genre.
"only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games"
You mean the two dominant forms of funded and marketed media in the contemporary age? What argument are you tryin to make exactly?
"jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point"
I mean there's so much to unpack and address there it's hard to even know where to start - so I'll talk about my own direct experience in the European Domestic market. Jazz accounts for about 1% of streamed music (about the same for Classical) but accounts for closer to 5% of ticketed live music in Ireland and the UK.
There's also a huge cross-pollination in the UK Jazz/Hip-Hop scene - with particular emphasis on Grammy award winner Venna and his collaborations with the likes of Knucks etc... The South London jazz scene is also similarly dominated by the likes of drummer Yussef Dayes and keyboardist Kamaal Williams, who do a huge amount of collaborations and released the seminal 'Black Focus' album, as well as featuring on cultural touchpoints like Boiler Room etc...
London Jazz Festival pulls in 100,000 people alone annually. 2023 Guinness Cork Jazz Festival attracted over 100,000 visitors in a Metro area of 300,000.
As for jazz, I love and play jazz music. I don’t disagree that there are excellent and innovative jazz musicians, and I think the acceptance by jazz musicians of rap music is a positive, if overdue development. That said, I read your words, and I see described exactly what I meant: a genre with a peripheral cultural presence, that means nothing in the lives of anyone outside of a small, dedicated fan base. Certainly nothing approaching it’s time as a cultural protagonist, which remains indisputably in the past (but may it rise again).
When they say "don't buy it" I take them at their word. I just wish my stolen tax money didn't also fund them.
Thanks to many artists being incapable of abstaining from Xitter loggorhea, we definitively know this to be false.
Poverty seasoned Foie Gras art.
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.
It is my experience that everyone lives in bubbles. They form the lens that filter our perception of other people's existence.
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.
Apparently comedy is thriving as well too.
Maybe not US subsidies, but I'd bet that there are some Canadian film and tax credit logos at the end of most credit reels. When you film/edit/design/create on an international scale, you pick up lots of local tax credits. Also probably UK/Scotland credits too. Heck, the 2005 reboot of DrWho was backed by Canadian government money. (Just check the final credits.)
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.
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.
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.
You'd meet some interesting people if nothing else.
Abusive relationship? Not at all!
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.
This is what I'd expect from a country where the EU bureaucracy is HQ'd
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.
> CA's total optimized tax burden for a one-man freelance company it is about 28%
CA’s tax burden varies wildly based on a host of factors. However the simple calculation for a freelancer filing as a single person making 50k = 24.6%, 100k = 32%, 150k = 36.5%, 300k = 40% which some people actually pay. https://www.upwork.com/tools/freelance-tax-calculator
Healthcare costs, VAT vs sales tax, and various deductions definitely matter in practice but further muddle the comparison.
It’s an inherent advantage of corporate taxes over income taxes, you simply get more resources from the same burden on your citizens.
For the viewers at home that is 6% on food, and now electricity (how kind daddy govt), and 21% on everything else. So this tax burden is in fact higher.
Safety nets are for making otherwise dangerous things practical.
It's arbitrary and unfair.
> This is essentially the same mechanism used in the provision of universal primary education;
I don't know if giving free money to adults who consider themselves artists is the same as ensuring children have access to vital education services. Educating children also ensures there's more a chance they'll contribute rather than be a client/dependent of the state.
Why doesn't the state fund everyone's hobby? I play golf - they should subsidize some of my greens fees. I might end up writing an amazing book that uses my golf experience to push a narrative about the different types of people you meet on a golf course, but we're all "just people" or some nonsense. You never know, it might become a cherished cultural artifact.
Yes, why not?
Golf is heavily subsidized. It's the poster child of a sport that wouldn't exist if it had to pay fair taxes or abide by free market pressures.
There are a handful of activities that cater to the elite like an 'artist subsidy'. Golf makes the list.
As for issuing the tokens, there are a variety of UBI systems that handle that without a centralized authority. CirclesUBI and Idena come to mind. Admittedly some work is needed here, but the technical barriers are not the hard part.
The hard part is establishing the collective political will to build a culture around accepting them, otherwise it's just meaningless numbers.
And you'd want it as an alternative for cases where the other money is questionably legitimate. Like if the people who control its supply have stopped acting in the best interest of the people who use it.
So I agree, universal solves the problem, but you're not going to get universal from a bureaucracy. You've got to bake it into the design, similar to how backed-by-gold is baked into the design of the money we're currently using. It needs to be legitimate because it's universal, rather than being legitimate because you got it from somebody who has a lot of guns and has promised to behave themselves.
I'm very pro-UBI, I just don't think that saying pretty please to the government is the way to get it.
Where do you get that idea from? The Federal reserve flatly denies it: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12770.htm
The US came off the gold standard in 1933. I'm pretty sure no country uses it now.
It's a system that works, more or less, I just think it would work better if it had some alternatives to compete against. Alternatives would give the powerful a reason to care about non-monetary outcomes.
The whole thing has aggregate behavior, and we're going to be better off if we develop a way to shape that behavior independently of how we deal with individual bureaucrats.
If somebody offers you money that was issued by an organization that has been bombing your neighborhood or poisoning your water you should be able to reject it and still have other options, because to accept it is to contribute to the continued economic power of your enemy such that they can keep harming you. That's independent of whether you're in a position to have the relevant politicians fired.
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.
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.
What is the harm in letting people live their lives producing art without a freaking OKR tracking their output?
I always find it fascinating how people assume that if you're not slaving away making someone else richer, it's a problem.
The argument is always something in the lines of "I'm paying for it". Well, we all know that if the only people actually making money out of our society paid their fair share, we'd be able to subsidize programs like these and much more without a problem.
People contribute to society in ways other than working. We simply choose to not value any of it in today's society.
It's not like these people are buying yachts, right? It feels so petty to me when we complain about helping out people with the bare minimum.
There are too many subsidy receivers for anyone to ever visit in their life, even if they spend 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year visiting them.
Reminds me of education. Being from the most educated jurisdiction in the most educated country, everyone is sure we need to fund it, but nobody seems to know what we get from it. The usual suspects (stronger economy, more engaged society, more progressive socially, etc.) that everyone loves to attribute to education lag behind much of the rest of the much-less-educated world...
> The burden of proof should be on the policy maker and subsidizer to ensure the purported goals of spending tax many are met.
The burden on policy markers is simply to keep the bosses (i.e. the general public) happy. The burden of proof rests on the public at large to justify their goals to the policy makers, perhaps, but is that really necessary? If the people want something arbitrary because it makes them feel good, why not? The universe doesn't care.
Its not for the policy makers to descide what is good art or not.
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?
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.
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)
And always has been: ninety percent of everything is crap.
The powers that be decided, the ambitious middle class has to foot the bill for everything.
Surely that is also true of countries where it is not subsidized?
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.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
That's all I remember. It was horrible.
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.