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I'm always torn by this. If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache tur

I'm always torn by this. If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding? But should all art have commercial appeal? Do we force all artists to be marketers first and foremost? Are we going to get better art because of that? The age-old question: how do we decide what is "good"? If we train a bunch of experts on the entire history of art and let them decide, then we seem to get decisions that are based around those experts competing amongst themselves for intellectual snobbery points. But if we let the masses decide, then we get art that appeals to the lowest common denominator. Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide. Maybe we train an LLM to decide what deserves funding for us, and move one step closer to The Culture.

jltsiren 2y ago
This is not an either-or question. Let the public decide, and you get popular art. Let the rich people decide, and you get whatever art the elites value. And also have some public funding, and you get the kind of art experts and some politicians value.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  Let the rich decide by their own preferences. Let the public decide by their own preferences. Take money from the public and give it to politicians and bureaucrats so they can decide for the public. The first two make sense. The last does not.
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    But there is an argument that some people are truly experts in art, they have studied it and made it their life's work. That we should allow them to make the decision for us, because they will be able to make better decisions. We do this in a lot of other areas, after all.
    - HKH2 2y ago
      > We do this in a lot of other areas, after all. Other areas are not so subjective.
      - leocgcd 2y ago
        Amount of art knowledge isn't subjective, it's a testable and verifiable metric. And the idea that all subjective tastes should be equally valued is a relatively recent invention from within the last generation or so that isn't taken very seriously outside of entry level art appreciation groups. You can have whatever subjective response to art you'd like, but whether your response should be considered as serious insight and commentary into the structure, context, and significance of that art depends on how much time you've spent studying the field and honing your ability to read artworks. If the only music someone listens to is top 40, I don't think I care very much what they have to say about Bartok. If the only paintings someone is familiar with are the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh, they're not qualified to speak about an Imhof painting. Someone wearing Walmart doesn't have anything interesting to say about Demna. You get the idea. I think the common response to this is that it is elitist and exclusionary... But we are elitist and exclusionary in most other fields too. Nobody would listen to the engineering opinions of someone who can't name a programming language. Art is more experiential, sure, but not all experience or cognition that arise from experiences is of equal insight.
        fallingknife 2y ago
        And how is that enforced for engineering? The answer is it actually isn't. Anybody is free to build their own product and sell it. And the public chooses to buy only products built by professional engineers because they are better. Why can't we do the same with art? If these "experts" are as good as they say they are, they should be able to win in the free market. We don't need the government to take money from the public to support them.
        leocgcd 2y ago
        This is some kind of bizarre reflexive libertarian outburst to my comment that had little to do with the role of government. Firstly, lots and lots of people use government-engineer built apps. I pay for the products of government engineering contracts every time I tap my phone to enter the subway. Car commuters use it every time their plate is scanned to cross a government-built bridge. Often the same companies that carry out government, tax-payer funded contracts are also taking on contracts in the open market. Governments fund non-profits like art museums because these institutions, while existing within the free market, provide a public good that most agree ought to be as accessible as possible. To that end, the non-profit model allows for museums to guide themselves based on an ethical mission (usually having to do with providing accessible art and culture) rather than a profit-driven market strategy. They are still private, so the board has autonomy from government oversight, but they have tax structures and funding structures that position them as utilities rather than business ventures. Museums, like for-profit ventures, still compete for funding, they still compete for relevance and cultural capital, and they are still beholden to providing a service that people care about. Fantasizing about slashing government budgets doesn't really make sense here. The government is taking money from people to fund museums because if we all pay $100 a year to arts funding in our taxes, we get to go see sculptures from 2500 years ago in a palatial building attached to a giant park for free... Without group buy in, that same experience might be stratified to only the very wealthy. You seem to think it is politicians deciding what art people see. In reality, it is arts experts pitching the relevance of their expertise to secure funding and outputting culturally significant material to justify their existence in the same way software engineers make themselves appealing for government contracts.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    What do you think about the tax deductibility of charitable donations then? To me, it seems to be the worst of both worlds. You are still using tax money to fund some activity, but instead of having public control with checks and balances, you let rich people decide how the tax money is used. It can be argued that tax deductions for donations make sense, if the government is already using money for similar purposes. You then get a greater effect from the tax money, at the expense of losing control over it. But if it's not the government's job to support the arts, then all donations to the arts should be made with after-tax money.
bmitc 2y ago
For some reason, it feels like artists always need to somehow justify their existence. Meanwhile, tech gets billions of dollars of private and public funding. As long as what you're doing in tech fits within the current hype cycle and milieu, then no one blinks an eye. I'd much rather "throw money away" at the arts rather than waste more money on self-driving cars, fintech, going to Mars, or whatever else the Bay Area thinks will make the world a better place.
- at_a_remove 2y ago
  Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money. By all means, donate to your local artist. Tech gets all of this funding because it produces tangible results, tech provides what people ask for. Piss Christ, however ... well, give money to the artist if it pleases you. There's a sculpture park not too far away from me. It has very large metal polygons, gently rusting. It certainly fits my modern art criteria: is it ugly? Is it incomprehensible? And then comes the question of "What do you get out of this particular bit of art?" The standard defense is "anything you like." Which sounds great until you realize that only one piece of art is ever required, the rest being superfluous. That one piece is "anything you like," which is congruent with any other piece's identical "anything you like." No need for anything else. With these sorts of things, modern art is backing itself into a corner. It isn't surprising that people aren't eager to open their wallets.
  - bmitc 2y ago
    > Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money. I reiterate my comment. Scientists and engineers get billions of dollars of other peoples' money, both private and public. Regarding the rest of your comment, art is not the arts. The arts include theater, music, dance, etc.
    - chung8123 2y ago
      Scientist and engineers also need to justify their desire for other people's money.
throwup238 2y ago
> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding? Paper mache turds are gauche. Real artists produce works that are extensions of themselves, capturing the very essence of their being. The texture should be genuine and the scent unmistakably original, challenging conventional aesthetics. True art requires a visceral connection formed through a process of personal evacuation. It's about creating something so authentic viewers can practically taste the artist's commitment.
- defrost 2y ago
  If it's not visceral, it ain't art: Kiss My Art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWTcAAtMj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWTcAAtMj4
- gruez 2y ago
  I can't tell whether this is serious or satire.
  - orwin 2y ago
    It's a joke about 'mierda de artista' I think.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  I see what you did there.
- slillibri 2y ago
  ceci n'est pas une turd
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
HKH2 2y ago
> Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide. A lot of the best art in history has been done because of rich people's money and influence. No doubt the 'urinals are art' crowd would disagree with that though.
- defrost 2y ago
  They're largely in 100% agreement, eg: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/mar/03/donald-trump-where-is-political-art-satire https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2... wouldn't have happened without rich people's money and influence.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  If you’re referring to Fountain, it was more of a statement about the art world than something with intrinsic value that requires funding to preserve imo. Those kinds of things can be done with duct tape and a banana.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  The same argument holds for lots of things: e.g. most pre-enlightenment scientific progress was made by priests (because they had an education and were able to spend time thinking about stuff). This is no longer true because we live in more enlightened times. Just because rich people used to be the only source of arts funding doesn't make them the best source of arts funding.
- a-french-anon 2y ago
  That's true, but I posit that today's richs aren't the same as before. I'll even go further and claim that culturally speaking, the middle class doesn't exist anymore; at least in Western Europe. They may have more money, but they're statistically the same Spotify/YouTube/TV slop addicted zombies as the class under them, perhaps with just a little less sportsball and more vapid traveling to "discover ze world and culture and stuff <3".
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  In much of the history of the world "rich people" have been in fact controllers in one form or another of the public's purse strings; nobility, royalty, religious leaders have been most of the world's rich people, merchants and industrialists are rather new entries into that class. In other words most of the grand artistic works people point to as being funded by "rich people" were funded by public wealth controlled by those "rich people".
sbuttgereit 2y ago
"Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide." Except that civil servants are making those choices with money they took forcibly from people that don't have a real/significant say in the matter of the taking or what the takings are spent on. In kind it makes it much worse than any decision made by "rich folks". Sure some may agree with those bureaucratic choices, but others are simply giving their cash for no return in value.
- analog31 2y ago
  Sounds like what you're describing is a government funded by taxes, except using scary sounding verbiage.
- chowells 2y ago
  It's only taken by force from misanthropes. The average person understands that collective action is a positive, and participates without the threat of force.
  - WrongAssumption 2y ago
    You can’t really believe this. If taxes were optional, people would not pay. How much do you really believe people gift the government? https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.h...
    - jampekka 2y ago
      At least for now people haven't at large elected politicians who would eliminate taxes.
      - schnitzelstoat 2y ago
        If you rob Peter to pay Paul. You get Paul's vote.
salomonk_mur 2y ago
Thankfully there are 8 billion people on the planet, each with different art tastes, and hence a different definition of what is good art. So all of your versions are ok and coexist. There is a market for your turd, for people-art and for you elite-driven art and for many others. In other words... No, if you can't attract and audience, there is no funding. But there is an audience for many things.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  Yeah, I agree. But that does mean that the primary skill of a good artist is finding that audience... y'know, marketing. Is that what we want?
  - nicbou 2y ago
    It is what we got. You will have a hard time as an artist if you don’t curate your personal brand. Even authors need a TikTok and your social media clout is something publishers will ask about before they sign you.
  - achenet 2y ago
    this may be an overly optimistic take, but I'd argue that much like with software (indeed, we can consider software to be art, especially if we look at video games), the really good stuff tends to need very little marketing because it resonates with very many people in a powerful way, and those people it resonates with tend to share it with others. For example - Doom. I don't think during those days the primary skill of id software was "marketing". They made a really good game, and it kinda sold itself.
    - aspenmayer 2y ago
      Doom and the shareware model are interesting examples in this context, especially given that Doom is now open source.
    - marcus_holmes 2y ago
      The average video game studio makes two games and goes broke. Most video game makers are living on their savings hoping for that one hit. Meanwhile the AAA studios are busy being complete arseholes, ripping their customers off, mistreating their staff, and generally being examples of the worst kind of capitalist. I don't disagree with you. But I do think that this is a really bad model for funding video games creation, and gives us the worst of both worlds: indie developers are struggling and don't create their best games because they can't afford to, while AAA developers rip us off with mtx and loot crates because they're not in it to make money not great games. So I'd argue that we should try to avoid this for the art world ;) And if we can, find a better way of funding video game creation while we're at it.
Swizec 2y ago
> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding? Slovenia has I think a pretty good solution to this: If you are registered as an independent artist, don't have a full-time job, and fulfill some reasonable criteria for being active (art exhibitions per year, poems published, etc), then the government pays you minimum wage. You are welcome and encouraged to freelance (or make royalties) for more. It's basically UBI for the arts.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  That's a great answer. Is it working? Is Slovenia producing more/better art as a result?
- jl6 2y ago
  Is it? If you are referring to the Slovenian status of “self employed in culture”, it appears to be a way of getting social security contributions paid by the government - not a wage. It requires “exceptional cultural contribution”.
ajkjk 2y ago
ideally the economy is nice and efficient and is optimized so that everybody can afford to live a decent life while having plenty of money to spare, which they can spend however they want, and which they will in practice spend on lots of arts and culture. Instead we have an economy that is ruthless about costing as much as everybody can afford, and a culture that when there's more resources wants more and bigger stuff, leaving little surplus for culture, which often has to be funded with ads and grift because it is counterintuitive to fund it directly. at least we've still got government-backed culture like arts councils and grants ... without that we'd be even more desperate. but if you want a lot more art, make food, rent, education, and healthcare affordable, so that people have time and resources left over and don't feel the financial anxiety of capitalism breathing down their neck.
- jl6 2y ago
  A great of deal of history’s greatest works of art have been produced by artists in dire personal circumstances.
  - ajkjk 2y ago
    is that so? I have no idea what the % is. Maybe it's very small.
janalsncm 2y ago
I guess a corollary to your question would be at what point should we let old forms of art die? New forms of art are being constantly created, and if we gave each form equal funding, art funding would increase forever. Since it must remain constant (or decrease) some forms must lose funding. Perhaps they will even go extinct as a result.
ohthehugemanate 2y ago
Living in a country where the civil servants decide the vast majority of art support (Germany), it's not great. It's just an incentive to please grant readers, rather than an audience. It's just as banal. The difference is that an audience is more likely to know and care about the art form, content, and context. A grant reader rewards what sounds like a good idea on paper. This is how we get productions like the planet-of-the-apes-meets-star-wars Rigoletto, which played to empty seats at one of the biggest theaters in Germany for years because it was so effective at getting grant money. Ideally you need both. Attracting and holding an audience is an artistic value, and should be a driver for support. Convincing a neutral outsider with no context is also a useful measure, for art that may not be commercially appealing. Even Nepotism and elitism select for certain dimensions of artistic quality. Going all in on one system or another is a recipe for cultural death. It's been clear since the ancient Greeks that there is no single definition of "quality", least of all in the arts. A plurality of support mechanisms is needed.
alphazard 2y ago
> how do we decide what is "good"? We don't. Individuals do. Attempts to arrive at an objective notion of good are always motivated by a desire to extract rents from the group. Got 'em with the ole "greater good" trick.
sktrdie 2y ago
I’d trust way more that group of experts to make a decision for me. Otherwise we’d get Walmarts all over the place
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Things get easier to grasp when you drop the idea that all human action must be profitable. In fact we can and should subsidize things that are not profitable but are beneficial either on the individual or collective level. No one is getting rich off of these subsidies for art, but the subsidy might mean they can now devote some of their day to organic thought rather than the capitalist rat race we find ourselves in. Maybe on aggregate this will lower population stress levels and lead to improved population health outcomes.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  I agree, but it doesn't answer the question.

jltsiren 2y ago

This is not an either-or question. Let the public decide, and you get popular art. Let the rich people decide, and you get whatever art the elites value. And also have some public funding, and you get the kind of art experts and some politicians value.

fallingknife 2y ago
Let the rich decide by their own preferences. Let the public decide by their own preferences. Take money from the public and give it to politicians and bureaucrats so they can decide for the public. The first two make sense. The last does not.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  But there is an argument that some people are truly experts in art, they have studied it and made it their life's work. That we should allow them to make the decision for us, because they will be able to make better decisions. We do this in a lot of other areas, after all.
  - HKH2 2y ago
    > We do this in a lot of other areas, after all. Other areas are not so subjective.
    - leocgcd 2y ago
      Amount of art knowledge isn't subjective, it's a testable and verifiable metric. And the idea that all subjective tastes should be equally valued is a relatively recent invention from within the last generation or so that isn't taken very seriously outside of entry level art appreciation groups. You can have whatever subjective response to art you'd like, but whether your response should be considered as serious insight and commentary into the structure, context, and significance of that art depends on how much time you've spent studying the field and honing your ability to read artworks. If the only music someone listens to is top 40, I don't think I care very much what they have to say about Bartok. If the only paintings someone is familiar with are the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh, they're not qualified to speak about an Imhof painting. Someone wearing Walmart doesn't have anything interesting to say about Demna. You get the idea. I think the common response to this is that it is elitist and exclusionary... But we are elitist and exclusionary in most other fields too. Nobody would listen to the engineering opinions of someone who can't name a programming language. Art is more experiential, sure, but not all experience or cognition that arise from experiences is of equal insight.
      - fallingknife 2y ago
        And how is that enforced for engineering? The answer is it actually isn't. Anybody is free to build their own product and sell it. And the public chooses to buy only products built by professional engineers because they are better. Why can't we do the same with art? If these "experts" are as good as they say they are, they should be able to win in the free market. We don't need the government to take money from the public to support them.
        leocgcd 2y ago
        This is some kind of bizarre reflexive libertarian outburst to my comment that had little to do with the role of government. Firstly, lots and lots of people use government-engineer built apps. I pay for the products of government engineering contracts every time I tap my phone to enter the subway. Car commuters use it every time their plate is scanned to cross a government-built bridge. Often the same companies that carry out government, tax-payer funded contracts are also taking on contracts in the open market. Governments fund non-profits like art museums because these institutions, while existing within the free market, provide a public good that most agree ought to be as accessible as possible. To that end, the non-profit model allows for museums to guide themselves based on an ethical mission (usually having to do with providing accessible art and culture) rather than a profit-driven market strategy. They are still private, so the board has autonomy from government oversight, but they have tax structures and funding structures that position them as utilities rather than business ventures. Museums, like for-profit ventures, still compete for funding, they still compete for relevance and cultural capital, and they are still beholden to providing a service that people care about. Fantasizing about slashing government budgets doesn't really make sense here. The government is taking money from people to fund museums because if we all pay $100 a year to arts funding in our taxes, we get to go see sculptures from 2500 years ago in a palatial building attached to a giant park for free... Without group buy in, that same experience might be stratified to only the very wealthy. You seem to think it is politicians deciding what art people see. In reality, it is arts experts pitching the relevance of their expertise to secure funding and outputting culturally significant material to justify their existence in the same way software engineers make themselves appealing for government contracts.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  What do you think about the tax deductibility of charitable donations then? To me, it seems to be the worst of both worlds. You are still using tax money to fund some activity, but instead of having public control with checks and balances, you let rich people decide how the tax money is used. It can be argued that tax deductions for donations make sense, if the government is already using money for similar purposes. You then get a greater effect from the tax money, at the expense of losing control over it. But if it's not the government's job to support the arts, then all donations to the arts should be made with after-tax money.

bmitc 2y ago

For some reason, it feels like artists always need to somehow justify their existence. Meanwhile, tech gets billions of dollars of private and public funding. As long as what you're doing in tech fits within the current hype cycle and milieu, then no one blinks an eye. I'd much rather "throw money away" at the arts rather than waste more money on self-driving cars, fintech, going to Mars, or whatever else the Bay Area thinks will make the world a better place.

at_a_remove 2y ago
Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money. By all means, donate to your local artist. Tech gets all of this funding because it produces tangible results, tech provides what people ask for. Piss Christ, however ... well, give money to the artist if it pleases you. There's a sculpture park not too far away from me. It has very large metal polygons, gently rusting. It certainly fits my modern art criteria: is it ugly? Is it incomprehensible? And then comes the question of "What do you get out of this particular bit of art?" The standard defense is "anything you like." Which sounds great until you realize that only one piece of art is ever required, the rest being superfluous. That one piece is "anything you like," which is congruent with any other piece's identical "anything you like." No need for anything else. With these sorts of things, modern art is backing itself into a corner. It isn't surprising that people aren't eager to open their wallets.
- bmitc 2y ago
  > Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money. I reiterate my comment. Scientists and engineers get billions of dollars of other peoples' money, both private and public. Regarding the rest of your comment, art is not the arts. The arts include theater, music, dance, etc.
  - chung8123 2y ago
    Scientist and engineers also need to justify their desire for other people's money.

throwup238 2y ago

> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding? Paper mache turds are gauche. Real artists produce works that are extensions of themselves, capturing the very essence of their being. The texture should be genuine and the scent unmistakably original, challenging conventional aesthetics. True art requires a visceral connection formed through a process of personal evacuation. It's about creating something so authentic viewers can practically taste the artist's commitment.

defrost 2y ago
If it's not visceral, it ain't art: Kiss My Art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWTcAAtMj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWTcAAtMj4
gruez 2y ago
I can't tell whether this is serious or satire.
- orwin 2y ago
  It's a joke about 'mierda de artista' I think.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
AlbertCory 2y ago
I see what you did there.
slillibri 2y ago
ceci n'est pas une turd
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

HKH2 2y ago

> Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide. A lot of the best art in history has been done because of rich people's money and influence. No doubt the 'urinals are art' crowd would disagree with that though.

defrost 2y ago
They're largely in 100% agreement, eg: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/mar/03/donald-trump-where-is-political-art-satire https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2... wouldn't have happened without rich people's money and influence.
janalsncm 2y ago
If you’re referring to Fountain, it was more of a statement about the art world than something with intrinsic value that requires funding to preserve imo. Those kinds of things can be done with duct tape and a banana.
marcus_holmes 2y ago
The same argument holds for lots of things: e.g. most pre-enlightenment scientific progress was made by priests (because they had an education and were able to spend time thinking about stuff). This is no longer true because we live in more enlightened times. Just because rich people used to be the only source of arts funding doesn't make them the best source of arts funding.
a-french-anon 2y ago
That's true, but I posit that today's richs aren't the same as before. I'll even go further and claim that culturally speaking, the middle class doesn't exist anymore; at least in Western Europe. They may have more money, but they're statistically the same Spotify/YouTube/TV slop addicted zombies as the class under them, perhaps with just a little less sportsball and more vapid traveling to "discover ze world and culture and stuff <3".
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
In much of the history of the world "rich people" have been in fact controllers in one form or another of the public's purse strings; nobility, royalty, religious leaders have been most of the world's rich people, merchants and industrialists are rather new entries into that class. In other words most of the grand artistic works people point to as being funded by "rich people" were funded by public wealth controlled by those "rich people".

sbuttgereit 2y ago

"Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide." Except that civil servants are making those choices with money they took forcibly from people that don't have a real/significant say in the matter of the taking or what the takings are spent on. In kind it makes it much worse than any decision made by "rich folks". Sure some may agree with those bureaucratic choices, but others are simply giving their cash for no return in value.

analog31 2y ago
Sounds like what you're describing is a government funded by taxes, except using scary sounding verbiage.
chowells 2y ago
It's only taken by force from misanthropes. The average person understands that collective action is a positive, and participates without the threat of force.
- WrongAssumption 2y ago
  You can’t really believe this. If taxes were optional, people would not pay. How much do you really believe people gift the government? https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.h...
  - jampekka 2y ago
    At least for now people haven't at large elected politicians who would eliminate taxes.
    - schnitzelstoat 2y ago
      If you rob Peter to pay Paul. You get Paul's vote.

salomonk_mur 2y ago

Thankfully there are 8 billion people on the planet, each with different art tastes, and hence a different definition of what is good art. So all of your versions are ok and coexist. There is a market for your turd, for people-art and for you elite-driven art and for many others. In other words... No, if you can't attract and audience, there is no funding. But there is an audience for many things.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
Yeah, I agree. But that does mean that the primary skill of a good artist is finding that audience... y'know, marketing. Is that what we want?
- nicbou 2y ago
  It is what we got. You will have a hard time as an artist if you don’t curate your personal brand. Even authors need a TikTok and your social media clout is something publishers will ask about before they sign you.
- achenet 2y ago
  this may be an overly optimistic take, but I'd argue that much like with software (indeed, we can consider software to be art, especially if we look at video games), the really good stuff tends to need very little marketing because it resonates with very many people in a powerful way, and those people it resonates with tend to share it with others. For example - Doom. I don't think during those days the primary skill of id software was "marketing". They made a really good game, and it kinda sold itself.
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    Doom and the shareware model are interesting examples in this context, especially given that Doom is now open source.
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    The average video game studio makes two games and goes broke. Most video game makers are living on their savings hoping for that one hit. Meanwhile the AAA studios are busy being complete arseholes, ripping their customers off, mistreating their staff, and generally being examples of the worst kind of capitalist. I don't disagree with you. But I do think that this is a really bad model for funding video games creation, and gives us the worst of both worlds: indie developers are struggling and don't create their best games because they can't afford to, while AAA developers rip us off with mtx and loot crates because they're not in it to make money not great games. So I'd argue that we should try to avoid this for the art world ;) And if we can, find a better way of funding video game creation while we're at it.

Swizec 2y ago

> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding? Slovenia has I think a pretty good solution to this: If you are registered as an independent artist, don't have a full-time job, and fulfill some reasonable criteria for being active (art exhibitions per year, poems published, etc), then the government pays you minimum wage. You are welcome and encouraged to freelance (or make royalties) for more. It's basically UBI for the arts.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
That's a great answer. Is it working? Is Slovenia producing more/better art as a result?
jl6 2y ago
Is it? If you are referring to the Slovenian status of “self employed in culture”, it appears to be a way of getting social security contributions paid by the government - not a wage. It requires “exceptional cultural contribution”.

ajkjk 2y ago

ideally the economy is nice and efficient and is optimized so that everybody can afford to live a decent life while having plenty of money to spare, which they can spend however they want, and which they will in practice spend on lots of arts and culture. Instead we have an economy that is ruthless about costing as much as everybody can afford, and a culture that when there's more resources wants more and bigger stuff, leaving little surplus for culture, which often has to be funded with ads and grift because it is counterintuitive to fund it directly. at least we've still got government-backed culture like arts councils and grants ... without that we'd be even more desperate. but if you want a lot more art, make food, rent, education, and healthcare affordable, so that people have time and resources left over and don't feel the financial anxiety of capitalism breathing down their neck.

jl6 2y ago
A great of deal of history’s greatest works of art have been produced by artists in dire personal circumstances.
- ajkjk 2y ago
  is that so? I have no idea what the % is. Maybe it's very small.

janalsncm 2y ago

I guess a corollary to your question would be at what point should we let old forms of art die? New forms of art are being constantly created, and if we gave each form equal funding, art funding would increase forever. Since it must remain constant (or decrease) some forms must lose funding. Perhaps they will even go extinct as a result.

ohthehugemanate 2y ago

Living in a country where the civil servants decide the vast majority of art support (Germany), it's not great. It's just an incentive to please grant readers, rather than an audience. It's just as banal. The difference is that an audience is more likely to know and care about the art form, content, and context. A grant reader rewards what sounds like a good idea on paper. This is how we get productions like the planet-of-the-apes-meets-star-wars Rigoletto, which played to empty seats at one of the biggest theaters in Germany for years because it was so effective at getting grant money. Ideally you need both. Attracting and holding an audience is an artistic value, and should be a driver for support. Convincing a neutral outsider with no context is also a useful measure, for art that may not be commercially appealing. Even Nepotism and elitism select for certain dimensions of artistic quality. Going all in on one system or another is a recipe for cultural death. It's been clear since the ancient Greeks that there is no single definition of "quality", least of all in the arts. A plurality of support mechanisms is needed.

alphazard 2y ago

> how do we decide what is "good"? We don't. Individuals do. Attempts to arrive at an objective notion of good are always motivated by a desire to extract rents from the group. Got 'em with the ole "greater good" trick.

sktrdie 2y ago

I’d trust way more that group of experts to make a decision for me. Otherwise we’d get Walmarts all over the place

kjkjadksj 2y ago

Things get easier to grasp when you drop the idea that all human action must be profitable. In fact we can and should subsidize things that are not profitable but are beneficial either on the individual or collective level. No one is getting rich off of these subsidies for art, but the subsidy might mean they can now devote some of their day to organic thought rather than the capitalist rat race we find ourselves in. Maybe on aggregate this will lower population stress levels and lead to improved population health outcomes.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
I agree, but it doesn't answer the question.