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> you can't really justify the arts You absolutely can. Is this actually an issue that EAs have to grapple with? It seems so obvious to me. You just have to st

> you can't really justify the arts You absolutely can. Is this actually an issue that EAs have to grapple with? It seems so obvious to me. You just have to stop thinking about art in the fuzzy, "good because other people say it's good" sense of the word. You have to actually come to grips with the function that art serves, which I gather is difficult for a lot of people because the answer doesn't gel with the cultural pacifism that they believe they believe in. Marx of all people got this right. Art is cultural warfare. >I suspect no society, ever, has been healthy that didn't invest significant time and resources in the arts. Obviously. A culture that does not invest in its art is going to be overtaken by a culture that does. Just as a nation that lacks a military is not going to be its own nation for long. The purpose of art is to define, defend, and spread the cultural values of the people that create it. Doing so ensures that those values survive to the next generation, ensuring the long-term success of the culture and movement. Thus, justifying investment and engagement with art, or raising children, is easy. Quantifying the benefits of that investment is much harder because, in contrast to mosquito nets and vaccinations, culture spread is going to be opposed by other cultures. It's PvP, rather than PvE. For those that don't believe that art affects cultural values, please consider this thought experiment; imagine you have a young child that wants to watch a new movie. You take a look at it, and the movie's story is of a bully and cheater winning at some competition, the entire community siding with that antagonist, and the main character eventually accepting that this is fine and normal and must simply be tolerated. The moral is clearly that liars and cheaters win, violence is a valid way of getting what you want, and everyone who disagrees will be unhappy and defeated in the end anyway. Would you want your child to watch that movie? If not, why? Of course, this view means that most forms of "high" art - the kind that exists so that people in the know can look down their nose at people who just lack taste and class[0], or so that they can commit tax evasion[1] - are not actually good art. They do not effectively communicate cultural values, or defend them. The attitude of the art world in defending this excreta widens the rift between them and the general public that they should be trying to communicate to. It lowers people's interest in engaging with art on an intellectual and philosophical level, allowing more and more pandering nonsense to be shovelled into them. The modern world has no more interest in "artists" making "art"; it wants "content creators" creating "content".The ongoing destruction of people's ability to understand or appreciate art - where it actually exists - at a high level serves only to lower natural defenses against competing cultures. "All poets are soldiers. We fight our wars across centuries." [0]: https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2021/08/the-weird-story-of-the-artist-pierre-brassau/ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2021/08/the-weird-story-of-th... [1]: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/90-of-modern-art-is-just-tax-evasion/ https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/90-of-modern-art-is-just...

deleted 4y ago
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michaelt 4y ago
> You absolutely can. Is this actually an issue that EAs have to grapple with? No, not particularly. If you've committed to donating 10% of your income to the most effective charities, you can still spend the remaining 90% at your own discretion. Buy a house, have children, donate to a ballet company, buy yourself a Ferrari, whatever.
Zababa 4y ago
I see how that justifies art in general, but that doesn't justify new art. If you have values that have already been expressed by other people, what's the use of producing something new? Do we need this much people working in art?
- endominus 4y ago
  This is where my point about culture being PvP rather than PvE is important to understand. Cultures are in active conflict with other cultures. It's like marketing; do you need $X dollars to inform people about your brand? No, but if you don't spend it, your competitor will, and take you to the cleaners. You can't rely on fixed targets like "supplying a mosquito net for every family" or "delivering 100,000 doses of the MMR vaccine to this region." You are playing an iterative game, and new strategies will be discovered, exploited, countered, and become obsolete. The language of art and how it must engage with people is in constant flux; no one views Shakespeare's plays as low-brow entertainment any more. Further, art builds on art. Less so now that copyright has strangled the ability of artists to expand on each others' work, but a community of artists working and improving alongside one another does produce better art. Sturgeon's Law is in full effect; 99% of art produced is crap, but it needs to be supported so that the 1% that actually matters ever gets made. And artists often improve best when they have bad examples to analyze; of cinema, it is said that it is easier to understand the rules of film-making from a bad film than a good, because the mistakes are in full view.
sky-kedge0749 4y ago
This is a pretty restricted idea of what art is and can be. Creating art has been a human impulse probably since the beginning of our species, painting on cave walls, adding flourishes to pottery, tattooing and other body modification. Today you have people writing poetry no one else will read, singing songs no one else will hear, and that's art too. Obviously art can be propaganda. Batman and Iron Man are capitalist billionaires with hearts of gold. Of course there's a message there. That's only a small sliver of what art is. I suppose you can crunch some numbers and decide that higher arts funding at the high school level will result in an X% increase in romantic poems exchanged between lovers with a concomitant increase in worker productivity and the general birth rate. Maybe the animal paintings in the Lascaux caves reinforced cultural or religious bonds that improved the local group's success. Looking at things this way is definitely a choice though, and I don't think it's a healthy one generally, though I'm not sure how I could justify that to someone who doesn't already agree. What is the point of being alive other than to care for others and be happy? Making art makes people feel good.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

michaelt 4y ago

> You absolutely can. Is this actually an issue that EAs have to grapple with? No, not particularly. If you've committed to donating 10% of your income to the most effective charities, you can still spend the remaining 90% at your own discretion. Buy a house, have children, donate to a ballet company, buy yourself a Ferrari, whatever.

Zababa 4y ago

I see how that justifies art in general, but that doesn't justify new art. If you have values that have already been expressed by other people, what's the use of producing something new? Do we need this much people working in art?

endominus 4y ago
This is where my point about culture being PvP rather than PvE is important to understand. Cultures are in active conflict with other cultures. It's like marketing; do you need $X dollars to inform people about your brand? No, but if you don't spend it, your competitor will, and take you to the cleaners. You can't rely on fixed targets like "supplying a mosquito net for every family" or "delivering 100,000 doses of the MMR vaccine to this region." You are playing an iterative game, and new strategies will be discovered, exploited, countered, and become obsolete. The language of art and how it must engage with people is in constant flux; no one views Shakespeare's plays as low-brow entertainment any more. Further, art builds on art. Less so now that copyright has strangled the ability of artists to expand on each others' work, but a community of artists working and improving alongside one another does produce better art. Sturgeon's Law is in full effect; 99% of art produced is crap, but it needs to be supported so that the 1% that actually matters ever gets made. And artists often improve best when they have bad examples to analyze; of cinema, it is said that it is easier to understand the rules of film-making from a bad film than a good, because the mistakes are in full view.

sky-kedge0749 4y ago

This is a pretty restricted idea of what art is and can be. Creating art has been a human impulse probably since the beginning of our species, painting on cave walls, adding flourishes to pottery, tattooing and other body modification. Today you have people writing poetry no one else will read, singing songs no one else will hear, and that's art too. Obviously art can be propaganda. Batman and Iron Man are capitalist billionaires with hearts of gold. Of course there's a message there. That's only a small sliver of what art is. I suppose you can crunch some numbers and decide that higher arts funding at the high school level will result in an X% increase in romantic poems exchanged between lovers with a concomitant increase in worker productivity and the general birth rate. Maybe the animal paintings in the Lascaux caves reinforced cultural or religious bonds that improved the local group's success. Looking at things this way is definitely a choice though, and I don't think it's a healthy one generally, though I'm not sure how I could justify that to someone who doesn't already agree. What is the point of being alive other than to care for others and be happy? Making art makes people feel good.