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With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does n

With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something. Is this any different, or even less desirable, than the patronage style of old, where only a relative few obtained artist-in-residence-style support from from the limited market of nobles and moneyed interests (who may have been maintaining stables of artisans as a conspicuous display of wealth rather than a specific interest in the artist or their works)? Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history?

clock_tower 10y ago
> Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history? They normally couldn't in pre-revolutionary France; The Great Cat Massacre has the details.
taway_1212 10y ago
> Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history? It was probably true for top fine artists, but at a price of working on commission (i.e. clients dictating the content). For writers, philosophers and composers, I think it was much tougher. For example Chopin, even when he was a celebrity, was living largely off piano lessons. Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets.
- paganel 10y ago
  > Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets. As far as I remember Jean-Jacques wanted to make a living by being a musician and "copying piano sheets" and didn't want to depend on how well his books were selling. The reason being that had he started living off his books he would have felt compelled to write what his readers wanted to read, not what he really thought. At least that's what I remember from reading his Confessions.
  - taway_1212 10y ago
    It was the same with Czeslaw Miłosz (poet Nobel laureate) - he wrote that, if he tried to live off his writing, he'd had to resort to writing commercial novels, which for him was dreadful. He chose to be a Slavic literature professor at Berkeley instead, and wrote poetry in spare time.

clock_tower 10y ago

> Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history? They normally couldn't in pre-revolutionary France; The Great Cat Massacre has the details.

taway_1212 10y ago

> Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history? It was probably true for top fine artists, but at a price of working on commission (i.e. clients dictating the content). For writers, philosophers and composers, I think it was much tougher. For example Chopin, even when he was a celebrity, was living largely off piano lessons. Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets.

paganel 10y ago
> Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets. As far as I remember Jean-Jacques wanted to make a living by being a musician and "copying piano sheets" and didn't want to depend on how well his books were selling. The reason being that had he started living off his books he would have felt compelled to write what his readers wanted to read, not what he really thought. At least that's what I remember from reading his Confessions.
- taway_1212 10y ago
  It was the same with Czeslaw Miłosz (poet Nobel laureate) - he wrote that, if he tried to live off his writing, he'd had to resort to writing commercial novels, which for him was dreadful. He chose to be a Slavic literature professor at Berkeley instead, and wrote poetry in spare time.