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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

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.

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.