6 ms·

On William Deresiewicz’s “The Death of the Artist”

38 points by ilamont 6y ago

spodek 6y ago
Didn't mention what I consider the biggest blow to the arts: our educational system's teach-to-the-test ethos quashing children's innate tendency to create. Adults' tendencies are quashed too, probably more by lack of leisure time, spreading thin of in-person community, distracting environment, financial insecurity, and unhealthy diet.
cryptica 6y ago
The worst part of this is that the artists which tend to get promoted have zero talent. You cannot compare popular musicians today from those in the 70s and 80s. Actually there are very talented artists around today but it's impossible to find them... Takes a lot of searching on YouTube. I found some music on YouTube recently that blew me away but it didn't even hit 100k views... This extremely talented artist can't even feed themselves with that.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  What was the artist's channel?
- acdanger 6y ago
  The article touches on this, albeit briefly. Talent is no longer a requirement to be popular. Loud, novel - but also familiar -, and repetitive are all qualities that are favored over talent or skill.
  - cafard 6y ago
    I would remark that Johnny Cash's vocal range was something less than a whole octave. Yes, he wrote songs--some good--but I once walked into a bookstore playing an album on which he covered other people's songs. That was odd.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      He grew up 'covering' old songs. His family sang together every night - he was very accustomed to singing everything he could. Wasn't a songwriter until later in life. Isn't the purpose of old songs, to be sung? I guess today we regard some canonical rendition of a song to be the 'correct' one. Does that stem from the dying art of singing - folks don't hear songs except in their most viral form?
      - cafard 6y ago
        I don't think I consider songs to have a canonical rendition. However, I might consider a rendition of "Canzonetta Sull'Aria" by Britney Spears and Madonna to be 'incorrect', and this has less to do with their image than with their voices. By all means, one should sing old songs, and for many purposes remember Chesterton's dictum that 'anything worth doing is worth doing badly'. But if one is going to market an album of X sings Y, it is well if X actually can sing Y close to tune.
    - juniper_strong 6y ago
      To me, both Personal Jesus and Hurt are Johnny Cash songs now.
      - ilamont 6y ago
        I agree. "Hurt" was written by a young addict (Reznor) but Cash's cover coming from a much older ex-addict was really quite moving.
chrisjarvis 6y ago
Wow that was rather grim... I can't tell if the problem is more with algorithmic curation (and the big tech middleman squeezing margins) or with consumer behavior (expecting everything to be effectively free)? I will keep this in mind because this space, monetizing content creators online, is very interesting to me. Great read, thanks for sharing.
dumbfoundded 6y ago
Yeah, it's harder to be an artist because the internet has connected the whole world. The world used to be less connected and as a result, had lots of inefficient redundancy. If you wanted to see a play before, your options are pretty limited. Now, you can watch the best cast in the world from 10 years ago. It's only bad to be an artist now because art has become competitive. This is awful for the artists, but awesome for everyone who enjoys art. This is truly the peak of art. Think about what you could experience before and what you can experience now. And not only think of yourself, but all of the people in the world who now have access. It's mind-blowing. Like all industries, competition sucks for the entrenched. Artists can't just write a book anymore or can't just paint something beautiful. The landscape has completely changed. The choice has never been greater and artists must adapt by finding their niches.
- jjj123 6y ago
  I think it’s not just that there’s more art now, it’s also that the systems we use to consume it (spotify, Netflix, etc) shape that art, sometimes for the better but often for the worse. It’s like when the CEO of spotify said recently that “you can’t make an album every 3 years and be successful anymore.” He’s mostly right, but he skips over the part that he is probably the person most responsible for that fact. He also skips over the fact that cranking out 3x as much music is unlikely to result in higher quality art. So I guess all I’m saying is that I agree with you, but it’s not inevitable and it doesn’t have to be this way if we don’t like it.
  - lukevp 6y ago
    Surely the point the Spotify CEO was making is that music has become unbundled and shouldn’t be released as a collection in an album because consumption is at the track level now, and not that you should make more music as a rule.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    > cranking out 3x as much music is unlikely to result in higher quality art On the contrary, the more you produce, the more outstanding your hits. Yes there's more crap too, but nobody sees the crap. They only see the good stuff (thanks to recommendation algorithms, charts, and marketing). Here's the usual pottery class story that people use to talk about this phenomena: > The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". > Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. You can also look at statistics. Across all fields, the people who produce the largest volume of work also have the most outstanding successes. Beatles, for example, credit their success to being forced to play strip clubs for 8+ hours every day for months. Created lots of practice.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Reminds me of streaming platforms. Streaming platform originals have a certain lack of polish that I miss. And there's so much of it, it feels like it's a mile wide and an inch deep.
cyberdrunk 6y ago
Deresiewicz's story is inconsistent. First, he writes that early artists (Da Vinci, Bach etc.) basically saw themselves as artisans who worked jobs for their patrons, who essentially sheltered them from the cold realities of the market. Later, he laments that now artists are crushed by the market and can't have any stability that Bach et. al. enjoyed. He's missing a ton of contemporary working artists, who still have their patrons - visual artists working in game dev, musicians composing music for movies, commercials, video games etc. These people have steady income, just like Bach did. Of course, they're not really working on what they'd like to be working on, but neither really did Da Vinci (he was known to procrastinate a ton when asked to produce another boring portrait of somebody's daugther - a portrait which comically now could fetch tens of millions of dollars).
- lioeters 6y ago
  I remember seeing sketches of catapults and military inventions, which Leonardo da Vinci put together as marketing material and a sales pitch (I believe to the lord of Milan). Like, "I can create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege." It struck me how being an entrepreneur - learning to swim in the realities of the market - was (and is) an essential part of being an artist.

38 points by ilamont 6y ago

Didn't mention what I consider the biggest blow to the arts: our educational system's teach-to-the-test ethos quashing children's innate tendency to create. Adults' tendencies are quashed too, probably more by lack of leisure time, spreading thin of in-person community, distracting environment, financial insecurity, and unhealthy diet.

cryptica 6y ago

The worst part of this is that the artists which tend to get promoted have zero talent. You cannot compare popular musicians today from those in the 70s and 80s. Actually there are very talented artists around today but it's impossible to find them... Takes a lot of searching on YouTube. I found some music on YouTube recently that blew me away but it didn't even hit 100k views... This extremely talented artist can't even feed themselves with that.

selimthegrim 6y ago
What was the artist's channel?
acdanger 6y ago
The article touches on this, albeit briefly. Talent is no longer a requirement to be popular. Loud, novel - but also familiar -, and repetitive are all qualities that are favored over talent or skill.
- cafard 6y ago
  I would remark that Johnny Cash's vocal range was something less than a whole octave. Yes, he wrote songs--some good--but I once walked into a bookstore playing an album on which he covered other people's songs. That was odd.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    He grew up 'covering' old songs. His family sang together every night - he was very accustomed to singing everything he could. Wasn't a songwriter until later in life. Isn't the purpose of old songs, to be sung? I guess today we regard some canonical rendition of a song to be the 'correct' one. Does that stem from the dying art of singing - folks don't hear songs except in their most viral form?
    - cafard 6y ago
      I don't think I consider songs to have a canonical rendition. However, I might consider a rendition of "Canzonetta Sull'Aria" by Britney Spears and Madonna to be 'incorrect', and this has less to do with their image than with their voices. By all means, one should sing old songs, and for many purposes remember Chesterton's dictum that 'anything worth doing is worth doing badly'. But if one is going to market an album of X sings Y, it is well if X actually can sing Y close to tune.
  - juniper_strong 6y ago
    To me, both Personal Jesus and Hurt are Johnny Cash songs now.
    - ilamont 6y ago
      I agree. "Hurt" was written by a young addict (Reznor) but Cash's cover coming from a much older ex-addict was really quite moving.

chrisjarvis 6y ago

Wow that was rather grim... I can't tell if the problem is more with algorithmic curation (and the big tech middleman squeezing margins) or with consumer behavior (expecting everything to be effectively free)? I will keep this in mind because this space, monetizing content creators online, is very interesting to me. Great read, thanks for sharing.

dumbfoundded 6y ago

Yeah, it's harder to be an artist because the internet has connected the whole world. The world used to be less connected and as a result, had lots of inefficient redundancy. If you wanted to see a play before, your options are pretty limited. Now, you can watch the best cast in the world from 10 years ago. It's only bad to be an artist now because art has become competitive. This is awful for the artists, but awesome for everyone who enjoys art. This is truly the peak of art. Think about what you could experience before and what you can experience now. And not only think of yourself, but all of the people in the world who now have access. It's mind-blowing. Like all industries, competition sucks for the entrenched. Artists can't just write a book anymore or can't just paint something beautiful. The landscape has completely changed. The choice has never been greater and artists must adapt by finding their niches.

jjj123 6y ago
I think it’s not just that there’s more art now, it’s also that the systems we use to consume it (spotify, Netflix, etc) shape that art, sometimes for the better but often for the worse. It’s like when the CEO of spotify said recently that “you can’t make an album every 3 years and be successful anymore.” He’s mostly right, but he skips over the part that he is probably the person most responsible for that fact. He also skips over the fact that cranking out 3x as much music is unlikely to result in higher quality art. So I guess all I’m saying is that I agree with you, but it’s not inevitable and it doesn’t have to be this way if we don’t like it.
- lukevp 6y ago
  Surely the point the Spotify CEO was making is that music has become unbundled and shouldn’t be released as a collection in an album because consumption is at the track level now, and not that you should make more music as a rule.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > cranking out 3x as much music is unlikely to result in higher quality art On the contrary, the more you produce, the more outstanding your hits. Yes there's more crap too, but nobody sees the crap. They only see the good stuff (thanks to recommendation algorithms, charts, and marketing). Here's the usual pottery class story that people use to talk about this phenomena: > The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". > Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. You can also look at statistics. Across all fields, the people who produce the largest volume of work also have the most outstanding successes. Beatles, for example, credit their success to being forced to play strip clubs for 8+ hours every day for months. Created lots of practice.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Reminds me of streaming platforms. Streaming platform originals have a certain lack of polish that I miss. And there's so much of it, it feels like it's a mile wide and an inch deep.

cyberdrunk 6y ago

Deresiewicz's story is inconsistent. First, he writes that early artists (Da Vinci, Bach etc.) basically saw themselves as artisans who worked jobs for their patrons, who essentially sheltered them from the cold realities of the market. Later, he laments that now artists are crushed by the market and can't have any stability that Bach et. al. enjoyed. He's missing a ton of contemporary working artists, who still have their patrons - visual artists working in game dev, musicians composing music for movies, commercials, video games etc. These people have steady income, just like Bach did. Of course, they're not really working on what they'd like to be working on, but neither really did Da Vinci (he was known to procrastinate a ton when asked to produce another boring portrait of somebody's daugther - a portrait which comically now could fetch tens of millions of dollars).

lioeters 6y ago
I remember seeing sketches of catapults and military inventions, which Leonardo da Vinci put together as marketing material and a sales pitch (I believe to the lord of Milan). Like, "I can create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege." It struck me how being an entrepreneur - learning to swim in the realities of the market - was (and is) an essential part of being an artist.