6 comments

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  gregory

  5 months ago

  music, from the time of the troubadors, was free. it will be again, as the recording/distribution medium trends to transparency. artists are fine, it is the non artists who need them, not the other way around. money is not the motivator for doing art, it is something in the spirit. distribution companies were allowed to ride on artists as long as they controlled the medium, that time is over. enjoy the music, it will actually be better, the more individualized it becomes,
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  Chris

  5 months ago

  Art created by artists who can spend more of their time creating and practising than needing to do other things is always going to be, on average, better. There's no way to get around that. If a society exists where artists can't make a living from their art (leaving aside questions of what being wealthy means for one moment) and have to use up their time on hackwork or unrelated guff to make a living then either that society doesn't value art as highly as one that helps artists live off their art, or it has a remarkably high number of gifted trustafarians and other aristocrats.
  
  Off the top of my head, great artists motivated by making money - and not just a small sinecure of a living either - include Pope, Dickens and Scott. And for Pope especially financial independence meant intellectual independence.
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  mathewi

  5 months ago

  Those are good points, Chris -- and I would agree that Dickens and
  Pope are good examples. But we got a fair bit of good art out of them
  anyway, despite their focus on making a living, right? Not sure what
  that proves. I would respond in more depth, but I have to go and do
  some hackwork :-)
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  Chris

  5 months ago

  I don't think they're proof of anything, but I think they're evidence that financial incentive isn't necessarily a bad motivation for artists and that it can have side benefits as well as produce good art,. So (not that I'm accusing anyone specifically of this, this started with Kaplan asking very general questions after all) dismissing its existence and taking a Romantic view of the artist as beholden only to his muse - now *there's* a modern notion - might mean throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If society wants diverse artists that means society should provide as diverse incentives as possible.
  
  It's all moot anyway since it turns out what Kaplan was really complaining about was NEA funding which is boring old kulturkampf stuff and certainly not as philosophical as it first appeared to be :-(
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  mathewi

  5 months ago

  I'm not so sure -- that might be what Mike Arrington thinks, but I
  think Ethan's concerns are much broader than just getting some
  government funding.
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  Chris

  5 months ago

  Oh I don't think it's anything to do with music tax propaganda like Arrington assumed, but Kaplan's update posts of 'My point is: how can we really debate the value of music or movies or photography, how compensation works, etc when we can’t, since 1989 when the NEA fell apart, figure out how to make art viable as a commercial practice and how to value and support it as a part of the fabric of a functioning society?' and 'How do we value cultural artifacts when there is little to no value of culture itself in the educational systems, public sector and society at large?' seems pretty grounded in older battles as well as parochial (speaking as a Brit, what's this 'we' shit, kemo sabe?). While it's an arguable point, he's not really asking a forward-looking tech/culture intersection question, is he?
  
  That said I'm still sympathetic to his changed/clarified point - I get the same way when, i.e., people talk about education tech without considering underlying educational principles.
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