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Well that's not really universal by any metric (you have to be an artist, there can't be too many applicants or you'll get subjected to lottery) but I'm still e

Well that's not really universal by any metric (you have to be an artist, there can't be too many applicants or you'll get subjected to lottery) but I'm still enthusiastic. It's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage. These feel more like government artist in residence grants.

emaro 5y ago
https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/080b9-minister-catherine-martin-launches-online-consultation-on-pilot-basic-income-for-the-arts/ https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/080b9-minister-catherine... The gov itself seem to speak about a basic income. :) Media...
lelanthran 5y ago
> It's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage. But, at the end of the day it's still worth close to nothing, right? I enjoy art and music as much as anyone else but the reason those professions are so poorly paid is because the supply outstrips the demand considerably[1]. What value is there in asking taxpayers to pay for an increase the supply when there's already too much supply? Sure, paying people for doing what they love even when you are going to, in effect, throw away whatever they produce is madness. [1] I play guitar and sketch/paint. Of the other people (who do these things) that I have regular contact with, no one can make money of the things they produce. My rough guess is that for every 1000 musician/art supply, only 1 is demanded.
- krageon 5y ago
  Framing everything as a reflection of short-term capitalistic gain is a travesty. Culture transcends your lifetime and probably the lifetime of the people that you are a part of. You ask what value there is in that, but I am curious what value your believe there could be in anything else without it.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    My point was not that there is no value in it, my point was that there is already a considerable oversupply of it, so why buy more of it? Those people who have already managed to turn it into a fulltime job are more than sufficient to ensure that arts and culture exist. What exactly do you expect to see when more f/time practitioners are added to the existing mix?
    - Cederfjard 5y ago
      Maybe an artist’s output might be tainted and diminished by having to worry about money, and someone in a secure financial situation may produce qualitatively different art? Pure speculation, obviously.
    - soneil 5y ago
      What's cultural and what's profitable don't always overlap, so the question is which you want to preserve. If I single out musicians - where I am on the west of Ireland, the cultural impact largely comes from street buskers and trad sessions in small pubs - not the profitable acts filling a stadium once every 5 years. Given that the local scene is a honeypot for tourists, where as stage tours breezing through town probably extract more than they bring, it might actually be an overall profitable investment - even if the individual artists aren't.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    We do so because money is artificially scarce. There are plenty of games (like minecraft or prosperous universe) where you have everything you could possibly want at the end which then marks the start of a sandbox mode within the survival mode. Humanity is kinda like that, but once we are in sandbox mode, we don't like it and destroy the sandbox. It's like starting a new game.
- paulannesley 5y ago
  Art and cultural heritage may have worth outside that represented by short-term supply and demand?
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Indeed, which is why, in my opinion, it is a reasonable thing for the government to fund. The government funding things which are of value but would not make economic sense in a free market economy is a good use of resources.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > Art and cultural heritage may have worth outside that represented by short-term supply and demand? Or it may not. We can't tell objectively, because there is no metric to measure. I suppose my point is, if you cannot tell that there is a benefit at all, why leap to the assumption that it's a large enough benefit to pay 25m euros for.
    - toyg 5y ago
      Because not of bread alone you shalt live. You can't get to the moon without moonshots. There is a queue of people willing to fund for-profit moonshots, but when it comes to art and other non-monetizable human endeavours, in practice there is only the State.
      - danivaz 5y ago
        art is monetizable
        neoromantique 5y ago
        Hardly. In its current form art market is looking more like tax break/deductibles market.
      - telxosser 5y ago
        What great works of art have ever come from the State? If anything, we need the ultra rich to fund this kind of thing based on their taste. That worked well in the past with the court musician/composer and patronage. There are so many problems with this UBI idea. The medium is one that comes to mind. We have largely moved on from paint on canvas to video the way we moved on from sculpture in stone to paint on canvas. Does the artist have the artistic freedom to start a youtube channel with the money? I would suspect not. Most likely this goes to propping up outdated mediums of expression and will lack the complete freedom needed for a true artist to really express themselves. Then of course you have to contend with those gaming the system to free roll by collecting old toilets from the trash to work on their homage to Duchamp masterpiece. I suspect there is reason for the starving artist archetype.
- SequoiaHope 5y ago
  Not very many people believe that a market of individual capitalists responding to supply and demand creates the best outcomes. For example many people believe that state mandated healthcare creates better outcomes. For anyone willing to look beyond a simple model of supply and demand, a deep analysis of the effects is needed.
  - telxosser 5y ago
    Yea this is just wrong. If we had a true healthcare free market starting from scratch right now the money would go into blood panel sampling and building massive data sets to use machine learning algorithms for classification. If I had a full quarterly blood panel sample that went into a database in 5-10 years the most trivial random forest would crush my doctor as far as classification. Pushing 50 my visits to the doctor are not going to look that much different than when I was a kid in 1980 for my entire life. Instead, with this bullshit system my doctor doesn't even want to do a full panel once a year. The government is not going to pay for that. Even better, imagine a $200 dollar home device to do a full blood sample once a month with a $20 subscription fee for analysis. 2-3 years from now would be incredible. Just impossible to have happen with this wonderful healthcare system the collectivist love so much.
    - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
      I only described what people believe, not what would be best.
- toyg 5y ago
  > paying people for doing what they love even when you are going to, in effect, throw away whatever they produce is madness. No, it's hardcore keynesism. You're still sustaining demand in the market for all their necessities, from food and toilet paper to brushes and smart LEDs; and you are supporting the overall quality of life in the country, which passes also through people getting involved in art in various ways (as critics, consumers, etc). The fact that you may or may not get valuable output at the end is relatively irrelevant; in the end, a couple of resulting unicorns could probably repay the whole operation just by publicity and goodwill flowing to Ireland.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Keynes was dreaming of a world where we figured out how to solve the liquidity preference problem. I.e. tax land value and tax cash. If we did that, then we would have so much free time, that we would be spending all our time on social/cultural activities. The inflation targeting thing was an attempt to solve the problem in a less micromanaged way. In practice you still got the usual wealth concentration cycle that everyone knows from history.
- AndyMcConachie 5y ago
  Art is a public good. It's not something that gets produced and then consumed. It gets produced, and that production costs time and resources. But it is not comsumed like cheesecake or natural gas. Taxes should be spent in a manner that serves society and its people. The sharing of art benefits everyone. Even art you don't like benefits you, because there is a good chance an artist you like will be influenced by it. If you want a thriving art scene you need people making art. Much of it might get thrown away and never reach an audience, but gems will emerge from it. Even if one takes a completely selfish approach to art (ie, only art that I like is good art), there is benefit in having more artists making more art. As someone who does not live in Ireland I enjoy some art made in Ireland. So even I benefit from Ireland supporting its artists.
- chongli 5y ago
  Art produces huge positive externalities. This is the reason artists are the pioneers of gentrified neighbourhoods. They arrive when rent is low (all they can afford) and their product increases the desirability of the area. The artists themselves capture none of this value and often have to leave when rents go up.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    Is that sarcasm? This is a positive externality for landlords and a negative one for tenant. It's a zero-sum game between the two groups. And rent-seeking is a net negative for society.
    - NoboruWataya 5y ago
      It's also a positive externality for businesses (and by extension workers) in the area and for people who own their own homes (home ownership has historically been the predominant long-term living arrangement in Ireland). Even for tenants, it's not as simple as you suggest; most renters would rather live in a gentrified area than a run-down, crime-ridden one (which is exactly why rents are higher). Arguably the only category of people who definitely lose out are long-term, low-income renters with no protections, but they are relatively rare in Ireland. Gentrification has its problems for sure but I know several people who grew up in formerly run-down areas that are now gentrified, and they would never want to go back to the way things were.
- geocar 5y ago
  > What value is there in asking taxpayers to pay for an increase the supply when there's already too much supply? When "taxpayers" refuse to subsidize non-taxpayers, they run the risk of those non-taxpayers murdering them; the "value" is that it directly prevents death and revolt. Some people just simply don't agree that people should have to die simply because there are too many people, either because they're (directly or indirectly) worried about revolt or because they're "good people" who think people have a right to life, dignity, and happiness. But some people don't: either because they lie to themselves about what the ramifications of their decisions will be (or are simply ignorant to it), or because they believe in destiny -- that god, for example, wants some people to live and others to die.
  - barrucadu 5y ago
    Come on, the alternative to taxpayers subsidising artists isn't that artists face a choice between death or revolt. It's that artists get a different source of income (which may require stopping being an artist).
    - geocar 5y ago
      > It's that artists get a different source of income (which may require stopping being an artist). What a peculiar thought: Is an artist still an artist if they stop being an artist? > Come on, the alternative to taxpayers subsidising artists isn't that artists face a choice between death or revolt. No of course not, yet artists committing suicide for being unable to create their art isn't exactly unheard of. And what I said is exactly true if you maybe think about things a little differently.
- timeon 5y ago
  I think that art is also about ideas and experiences that can stimulate another ideas. Can takes you out of your usual context of thinking. There is no demand for it. How can be there be demand for something that do not exist yet. But it can influence generations. Not every value can be directly purchased.
burntoutfire 5y ago
Modern art world is completely overtaken by cliques and is basically about marketing and who-knows-who. If you create something that is against the current clique that runs things (i.e. are curators in major museums, officials in Ministry of Culture, art critics in major newspapers etc.) then you're basically screwed. The art world absolutely eclipses academia in terms of petty politics. The reason for that is of course the impossibility of objectively judging the value of a work of art. It's all subjective, and hence "emperor's new clothes" kinds of situation are commonplace. Also, subjectivity heavily supports no-skill fields like conceptual or performance art - why work 10+ years to learn how to paint properly, when you can do abstract paint splatters, and instead work on marketing it, building a clique (an "art movement") with like-minded allied "artists" instead? IMO it's all fair game until taxpayer's money are involved. I for one don't want my taxes to be paying a small fortune for an empty piece of canvas, the "artist"'s canned shit or a "performance" of an "artist" sitting on a stool and peeling potatoes.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> It's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage. we are all artists in that way. I don't play or paint, but in my country I take care of some vineyard a couple of centuries old, at my expenses. Of course I also enjoy the wine made from them and make no money out of it, I lose a little bit every year. Should I be included in those that "build the cultural heritage" of my country, given that my country is the world's largest producer of wine? Or am I simply adding a few thousand liters of wine to an already massive production, basically adding almost nothing to our "cultural heritage"?
- rsynnott 5y ago
  Many big wine producing nations actually do have a range of grants and tax exemptions for this sort of thing.

emaro 5y ago

https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/080b9-minister-catherine-martin-launches-online-consultation-on-pilot-basic-income-for-the-arts/ https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/080b9-minister-catherine... The gov itself seem to speak about a basic income. :) Media...

lelanthran 5y ago

> It's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage. But, at the end of the day it's still worth close to nothing, right? I enjoy art and music as much as anyone else but the reason those professions are so poorly paid is because the supply outstrips the demand considerably[1]. What value is there in asking taxpayers to pay for an increase the supply when there's already too much supply? Sure, paying people for doing what they love even when you are going to, in effect, throw away whatever they produce is madness. [1] I play guitar and sketch/paint. Of the other people (who do these things) that I have regular contact with, no one can make money of the things they produce. My rough guess is that for every 1000 musician/art supply, only 1 is demanded.

krageon 5y ago
Framing everything as a reflection of short-term capitalistic gain is a travesty. Culture transcends your lifetime and probably the lifetime of the people that you are a part of. You ask what value there is in that, but I am curious what value your believe there could be in anything else without it.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  My point was not that there is no value in it, my point was that there is already a considerable oversupply of it, so why buy more of it? Those people who have already managed to turn it into a fulltime job are more than sufficient to ensure that arts and culture exist. What exactly do you expect to see when more f/time practitioners are added to the existing mix?
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    Maybe an artist’s output might be tainted and diminished by having to worry about money, and someone in a secure financial situation may produce qualitatively different art? Pure speculation, obviously.
  - soneil 5y ago
    What's cultural and what's profitable don't always overlap, so the question is which you want to preserve. If I single out musicians - where I am on the west of Ireland, the cultural impact largely comes from street buskers and trad sessions in small pubs - not the profitable acts filling a stadium once every 5 years. Given that the local scene is a honeypot for tourists, where as stage tours breezing through town probably extract more than they bring, it might actually be an overall profitable investment - even if the individual artists aren't.
- imtringued 5y ago
  We do so because money is artificially scarce. There are plenty of games (like minecraft or prosperous universe) where you have everything you could possibly want at the end which then marks the start of a sandbox mode within the survival mode. Humanity is kinda like that, but once we are in sandbox mode, we don't like it and destroy the sandbox. It's like starting a new game.
paulannesley 5y ago
Art and cultural heritage may have worth outside that represented by short-term supply and demand?
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Indeed, which is why, in my opinion, it is a reasonable thing for the government to fund. The government funding things which are of value but would not make economic sense in a free market economy is a good use of resources.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > Art and cultural heritage may have worth outside that represented by short-term supply and demand? Or it may not. We can't tell objectively, because there is no metric to measure. I suppose my point is, if you cannot tell that there is a benefit at all, why leap to the assumption that it's a large enough benefit to pay 25m euros for.
  - toyg 5y ago
    Because not of bread alone you shalt live. You can't get to the moon without moonshots. There is a queue of people willing to fund for-profit moonshots, but when it comes to art and other non-monetizable human endeavours, in practice there is only the State.
    - danivaz 5y ago
      art is monetizable
      - neoromantique 5y ago
        Hardly. In its current form art market is looking more like tax break/deductibles market.
    - telxosser 5y ago
      What great works of art have ever come from the State? If anything, we need the ultra rich to fund this kind of thing based on their taste. That worked well in the past with the court musician/composer and patronage. There are so many problems with this UBI idea. The medium is one that comes to mind. We have largely moved on from paint on canvas to video the way we moved on from sculpture in stone to paint on canvas. Does the artist have the artistic freedom to start a youtube channel with the money? I would suspect not. Most likely this goes to propping up outdated mediums of expression and will lack the complete freedom needed for a true artist to really express themselves. Then of course you have to contend with those gaming the system to free roll by collecting old toilets from the trash to work on their homage to Duchamp masterpiece. I suspect there is reason for the starving artist archetype.
SequoiaHope 5y ago
Not very many people believe that a market of individual capitalists responding to supply and demand creates the best outcomes. For example many people believe that state mandated healthcare creates better outcomes. For anyone willing to look beyond a simple model of supply and demand, a deep analysis of the effects is needed.
- telxosser 5y ago
  Yea this is just wrong. If we had a true healthcare free market starting from scratch right now the money would go into blood panel sampling and building massive data sets to use machine learning algorithms for classification. If I had a full quarterly blood panel sample that went into a database in 5-10 years the most trivial random forest would crush my doctor as far as classification. Pushing 50 my visits to the doctor are not going to look that much different than when I was a kid in 1980 for my entire life. Instead, with this bullshit system my doctor doesn't even want to do a full panel once a year. The government is not going to pay for that. Even better, imagine a $200 dollar home device to do a full blood sample once a month with a $20 subscription fee for analysis. 2-3 years from now would be incredible. Just impossible to have happen with this wonderful healthcare system the collectivist love so much.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    I only described what people believe, not what would be best.
toyg 5y ago
> paying people for doing what they love even when you are going to, in effect, throw away whatever they produce is madness. No, it's hardcore keynesism. You're still sustaining demand in the market for all their necessities, from food and toilet paper to brushes and smart LEDs; and you are supporting the overall quality of life in the country, which passes also through people getting involved in art in various ways (as critics, consumers, etc). The fact that you may or may not get valuable output at the end is relatively irrelevant; in the end, a couple of resulting unicorns could probably repay the whole operation just by publicity and goodwill flowing to Ireland.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Keynes was dreaming of a world where we figured out how to solve the liquidity preference problem. I.e. tax land value and tax cash. If we did that, then we would have so much free time, that we would be spending all our time on social/cultural activities. The inflation targeting thing was an attempt to solve the problem in a less micromanaged way. In practice you still got the usual wealth concentration cycle that everyone knows from history.
AndyMcConachie 5y ago
Art is a public good. It's not something that gets produced and then consumed. It gets produced, and that production costs time and resources. But it is not comsumed like cheesecake or natural gas. Taxes should be spent in a manner that serves society and its people. The sharing of art benefits everyone. Even art you don't like benefits you, because there is a good chance an artist you like will be influenced by it. If you want a thriving art scene you need people making art. Much of it might get thrown away and never reach an audience, but gems will emerge from it. Even if one takes a completely selfish approach to art (ie, only art that I like is good art), there is benefit in having more artists making more art. As someone who does not live in Ireland I enjoy some art made in Ireland. So even I benefit from Ireland supporting its artists.
chongli 5y ago
Art produces huge positive externalities. This is the reason artists are the pioneers of gentrified neighbourhoods. They arrive when rent is low (all they can afford) and their product increases the desirability of the area. The artists themselves capture none of this value and often have to leave when rents go up.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Is that sarcasm? This is a positive externality for landlords and a negative one for tenant. It's a zero-sum game between the two groups. And rent-seeking is a net negative for society.
  - NoboruWataya 5y ago
    It's also a positive externality for businesses (and by extension workers) in the area and for people who own their own homes (home ownership has historically been the predominant long-term living arrangement in Ireland). Even for tenants, it's not as simple as you suggest; most renters would rather live in a gentrified area than a run-down, crime-ridden one (which is exactly why rents are higher). Arguably the only category of people who definitely lose out are long-term, low-income renters with no protections, but they are relatively rare in Ireland. Gentrification has its problems for sure but I know several people who grew up in formerly run-down areas that are now gentrified, and they would never want to go back to the way things were.
geocar 5y ago
> What value is there in asking taxpayers to pay for an increase the supply when there's already too much supply? When "taxpayers" refuse to subsidize non-taxpayers, they run the risk of those non-taxpayers murdering them; the "value" is that it directly prevents death and revolt. Some people just simply don't agree that people should have to die simply because there are too many people, either because they're (directly or indirectly) worried about revolt or because they're "good people" who think people have a right to life, dignity, and happiness. But some people don't: either because they lie to themselves about what the ramifications of their decisions will be (or are simply ignorant to it), or because they believe in destiny -- that god, for example, wants some people to live and others to die.
- barrucadu 5y ago
  Come on, the alternative to taxpayers subsidising artists isn't that artists face a choice between death or revolt. It's that artists get a different source of income (which may require stopping being an artist).
  - geocar 5y ago
    > It's that artists get a different source of income (which may require stopping being an artist). What a peculiar thought: Is an artist still an artist if they stop being an artist? > Come on, the alternative to taxpayers subsidising artists isn't that artists face a choice between death or revolt. No of course not, yet artists committing suicide for being unable to create their art isn't exactly unheard of. And what I said is exactly true if you maybe think about things a little differently.
timeon 5y ago
I think that art is also about ideas and experiences that can stimulate another ideas. Can takes you out of your usual context of thinking. There is no demand for it. How can be there be demand for something that do not exist yet. But it can influence generations. Not every value can be directly purchased.

burntoutfire 5y ago

Modern art world is completely overtaken by cliques and is basically about marketing and who-knows-who. If you create something that is against the current clique that runs things (i.e. are curators in major museums, officials in Ministry of Culture, art critics in major newspapers etc.) then you're basically screwed. The art world absolutely eclipses academia in terms of petty politics. The reason for that is of course the impossibility of objectively judging the value of a work of art. It's all subjective, and hence "emperor's new clothes" kinds of situation are commonplace. Also, subjectivity heavily supports no-skill fields like conceptual or performance art - why work 10+ years to learn how to paint properly, when you can do abstract paint splatters, and instead work on marketing it, building a clique (an "art movement") with like-minded allied "artists" instead? IMO it's all fair game until taxpayer's money are involved. I for one don't want my taxes to be paying a small fortune for an empty piece of canvas, the "artist"'s canned shit or a "performance" of an "artist" sitting on a stool and peeling potatoes.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

> It's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage. we are all artists in that way. I don't play or paint, but in my country I take care of some vineyard a couple of centuries old, at my expenses. Of course I also enjoy the wine made from them and make no money out of it, I lose a little bit every year. Should I be included in those that "build the cultural heritage" of my country, given that my country is the world's largest producer of wine? Or am I simply adding a few thousand liters of wine to an already massive production, basically adding almost nothing to our "cultural heritage"?

rsynnott 5y ago
Many big wine producing nations actually do have a range of grants and tax exemptions for this sort of thing.