"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."
To me that statement is saying that one should first establish power, then achieve prosperity, then one would have time for leisure. This is true on a national level as well as a family level.
I actually pay a lot for art every week. Most people do. It’s called music and movies. So the translation is, “everyone wants to make some random art but no one wants to pay for random unsolicited art.”
Which seems fine by me!
If you take away visual and experimental arts you also lose good music and movies. And good graphic design. And good architecture. And more.
If you think this is exaggeration, consider that not a few household name musicians - Eno and a long list of others - went to art school, not music school.
I understand that "if there's an act of buying, there's consumption" from your perspective, but I'd mostly disagree with that statement and actually, I think it's quite a narrow perspective.
For every act of buying, there's an act of selling. But in the reality I see, many artists sell to produce rather than they produce to sell. So the act of selling is quite flawed from, say, a company selling its products, and the same is true for the act of buying: many don't buy to own or consume, but to support or for a naively genuine sense of beauty.
You may very well boil it down to "money give, money take" but the symbolic here is far stronger than the capitalist perspective of art as a market.
Also, I'm not ignoring the attraction of the market for artists and buyers alike, it's just not the whole story.
How much of what you pay goes to the artists? If most of it goes to rentiers, then the artists themselves need other means of support so they can keep making art.
It sounds like research
Adding that into art studies could do a lot for that economy and passion.
-- or they live with much less $ and financial security than they otherwise might.
So mere mortals have to focus their time and energy into having a backup plan.
Or theyre prioritizing rent, bills, medical care and retirement.
Looking in history you can see a lot of rich kid artists doing great art. For instance Gustav Klimt was extremely wealthy. He literally painted with gold! His art is great but without his family's wealth nobody would discover his talent.
That's not entirely correct.
Many artists were dirty poor when they started and stayed poor their whole life or died poor after wasting all their earnings.
Notable examples: Amedeo Modigliani and Antonio Ligabue
I don't regret it but at the time it was fairly depressing. You don't have to love it enough to do it as a career, you have to love it enough to do it as a career while understanding you will very likely never be able to support yourself by doing it. That is a pretty tough reality.
I know folks from when I was performing a lot who are still doing it and doing it at a high level. Almost every single one of them didnt have other options. I mean they COULD have done something else but they would jump off a building before going into an office 5 days a week.
> "Consider that when the Mexican government passed a law in the early 2010s to require more information about buyers, and how much cash could be spent on a single piece of art, the market cratered, as sales dipped 70 percent in less than a year. Many believed that was because Mexican cartel rings had previously been the biggest buyers in the market."
https://www.artandobject.com/news/how-money-laundering-works...
NFTs have somewhat democratized this, by providing a new avenue for assholes with too much crypto to pay absurd prices for art, with the bonus wrinkle of "artist gets a cut if someone uses their piece to launder ill-gotten gains" though there's already marketplaces that ignore that part of the smart contracts designed to make that happen. And a different sort of deliberate ugliness.
But for real, yeah, my family wasn't a fallback plan. I very much intended to live more comfortably than that.
There is a reason that the economy treats art like a luxury to be reserved for the wealthy - for most of those artists, it is a luxury and we only put up with it because they are wealthy.
Second, the job market was never designed to encourage people to express their potential at best. The incentives are not aligned.
Additionally, throughout history almost all early *scientists* where wealthy people that did research out of passion. If it was for market forces we would be still in the middle ages.
There's plenty of people with good skills and advanced degrees in mathematics, physics, philosophy and whatnot that end up working in completely different fields only out of need.
If anything, this is a big argument for basic income.
You're right, but let's see this in a different way.
Let's not devalue Art too much. What you speak of is a more general problem, that the race is not to the swift... Humanity faces myriad problems, all solvable by smart, motivated young people. Yet we fail because we do not motivate, reward and support them to become all they can be. We turn their "solid technical contributions" around and make them the very thing that keeps us stuck in bureaucracy and systemised hopelessness. Without the spark of "art", the imagination that Einstein and Feynman spoke of, teche is no more valuable than wanky modern art [1].
Our interregnum then becomes one of disappointment and frustration for most, who cannot exercise their power as creative, rational and compassionate beings. Ironically, the thing that often signals a new direction and seeds revolutionary progress is Art. It's proper place is in the hands of the poor and disenfranchised. In the hands of the trustafarians it's just more stuckness for the status quo.
Creativity is not a product. It's an attitude, as applicable to computer science as to sculpture, oil painting, or music.
[1] see C.P Snow's "Two Cultures" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Very little. 200 years ago people who had to work for living didn't have time or resources to pursue their art. Today there is 2 free days a week and more free time.
There is oversupply of art and literature. The real challenge is to find anything good from the sea of mediocrity.
As lamentable as it may be, if a larger proportion of the population was able to be artists there would still be a struggle to be recognized. In fact, it might even be harder for them.
if your parents are loaded you don't need to worry about finding a job that will earn you a living. simple.
* Time to practice their craft for years+ without worry about daily necessities. This includes getting the best training and personal tutoring to reach their full potential (whatever it may be).
* Knowledge through connections of how to properly write a grant that is going to be accepted
* Possibly knowing the people making grant decisions personally (or through family). Nepotism exists everywhere.
* If grant comes from a non-goverment institution. Family ability to donate to institutions increases their chances of picking kids for jobs or grants. If you rely on donations would you pick a poor kid who will cost you money overall or a rich kid who will actually make you money in the long run?
Of course, creative work does pay well. It just has to be creative in serving a commercial goal.
The stereotypical HN reader is a creative worker.
It'd be interesting to know how much of this happens in childhood vs. when they're choosing a career as young adults.
None have nest eggs or rich parentes that support them.
They usually have a hard time getting art into galleries. Some run galleries as a collective, but few of those make it into "high society"
A while ago I left my corporate developer / manager to pursue life as an artist. Things to several circumstances not important here, I do not have a nest egg, I make my living off of small stipends when I can get them, and a few other programs that the government provides. (Nice thing in Norway). It is difficult, it is an enormous change in circumstances. Some hurt. I am happier than before.
Perhaps I am hung up on that type of artist. "Corporate" artists might folio the story exactly.
You do have some artists who started late after already having a successful career. They have money and sometimes they have a network of important people to get them into galleries.
Like Howard Schatz who is a great photographer now. After having a long and distinguished career as an ophthalmologist.
Then you have artists like Hunter Biden who can sell paintings for $75K mostly due to fame. (One curator estimates that some pieces might fetch as much as 500K.
Edit: the scope of what is considered art is also quite narrowly defined in most studies.
However, both groups had nothing to lose by pursuing their dream.
Design seems to be about getting users/ consumers to behave in a certain way, or utilize what you made for a specific end.
Art seems to be about the artist expressing something aesthetically via whatever medium, in order to get an audience (could even be 1 person, but usually hoping to appeal to a certain crowd) to consider said audiences internal responses to whatever the artwork may evoke or provoke.
There can be overlap, but the intended goals seem to be about "outward" behavior for design, versus inward responses and reactions in genuine and earnest attempts at art (be it high or low).
The money factor can sully all of it, of course, but removing money also doesn't guarantee a "purity" to either, per se. But the more incentive to monetize in massive ways, the more the art will feel less genuine in its core, even if it is able to garner attention and evoke reactions.
Again, very oversimplified. But as such, I think product design is far more about getting its users to behave and find use of the product in specific outward ways.
Let’s make it happen, the world is waiting for us to do it
It’s not just better AI, let’s also digitize production processes in preparation
I was talking to a Romanian who said to me “When we were communist, we had plenty of money but nothing to buy. Now we have to buy everything but have no money.” Apparently, there is nothing in the middle.
I don’t hold out much hope that AI, basic income, or anything as all can save us from ourselves.
