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The problem with the arts is that nobody really gives a shit. The vast majority of the population doesn't visit the opera or is interested in modern art. Despit

• Gigachad 2y ago
  Just make art people actually want to pay for like furry art.
  • edm0nd 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • Rinzler89 2y ago
    A company already has a world leadership on that. Look into Nutaku.
  • egypturnash 2y ago
    I do this. http://egypt.urnash.com http://egypt.urnash.com Commissions and Patreon subscribers welcome.
• sandworm101 2y ago
  >> vast majority of the population doesn't visit the opera or is interested in modern art. Never in history has this been any different. "High" art has always been the domain of a narrow few and, frankly, those few want it to remain that way. But that isnt all art. Movies are art. Modern music is art. The vast majority of the population consumes an immense amount of art, i'd argue more than any time in history. It just isnt the high art of galleries and opera houses.
  • posterman 2y ago
    the person you are replying to claims an artist wont "change the world". you couldn't ask for a more "hacker-brained" take on culture. what, sitting around on our computers building dinky little apps does more than movies, film and music?
    • lubujackson 2y ago
      To this day I maintain Obama wouldn't have been electable if not for the black president on "24" getting middle America used to the idea.
      • DontchaKnowit 2y ago
        Middle American checking in here. Never even heard of 24 and I find your prejudiced view of middle America to be ignorant.
      • sandworm101 2y ago
        Also Morgan Freeman.
    • NitpickLawyer 2y ago
      > you couldn't ask for a more "hacker-brained" take on culture. what, sitting around on our computers building dinky little apps does more than movies, film and music? Uhhh, yes? Can you imagine a global pandemic of 2020s magnitude happening in, say '94? Would the world at large have fared as well as we did without the "dinky little apps" like click-to-get-food and click-to-stock-warehouses and click-to-develop-rna-vaccines and click-to-work-remotely and click-to-talk-to-family and click-to-watch-anything and click-to-stay-sane? Are you seriously arguing that art is doing more for the world at large than the IT industry? Come on...
      • leocgcd 2y ago
        >Are you seriously arguing that art is doing more for the world at large than the IT industry? Come on... Yes? Art has been made for at least 17,000 years, it is a fundamental expression of human consciousness. This is like asking if symbolic thinking or language is more important than IT. Yes. Obviously. The sum of all IT work is a blip compared to the sum total of human expression across our species's existence. You're right, if IT hadn't been present during the last pandemic, we would have been much worse off. But even if we had apocalyptic human collapse and reverted to a pre-historic hunter-gatherer existence with primitive technologies... people would still be making art.
• nine_k 2y ago
  In 19-century Italy, opera was about as popular as pop music today. As an artist, you certainly can change (some of) the world if you do art which people care about. If you do refined academic portraits, or [adjectives expunged] postmodern art, only a bubble is going to care. If you do art like, say, Banksy, a lot more is going to care. If you sing in classical opera, only a narrow (but usually wealthy) circle of opera goers will care. If you sing like Taylor Swift or like Whitney Houston (who had a powerful, opera-worthy voice), you may have a much wider effect.
  • karmonhardan 2y ago
    This isn't even necessarily true. High art is the basic research of culture. You'd be amazed at how many elements from your fave this-or-that are copped (often wholesale) from some obscure piece of media. Often, that reference lifts the latter out of obscurity, and everyone pretends that they knew it was groundbreaking and brilliant all along. "The favorite artist of your favorite artist," is a real concept. An example : Darren Aronofsky's now-famous cribbing of Satoshi Kon's work, back when anime was mostly thought of as, "Sex and violence, Pokemon, and Miyazaki (if you even knew of Miyazaki)." And even that's kind of the tip of the iceberg. Decades-old expressionist films, little-known performance and video art, paintings, music, fashion; unless you really know the landscape, how can you tell what is and isn't influencing culture down the line? How much of your experience in the world of 2024 was shaped by the proclivities of teenagers on IRC and 4chan in 2004, just trying to make each other laugh? [Insert that monologue from The Devil Wears Prada]
    • nine_k 2y ago
      Thank you, that's a nice take! As J.L.Borges aptly noted, a serious artist produces not only successors but also predecessors. (Regarding Miyazaki, I could not miss an animator who was praised so highly by Kurosawa. I learned about the rest of anime later.) But my point was more narrow: however beautiful The Magic Flute or Barber of Ceville or even Carmen may be, they are sort of stuck in a particular point of cultural space, you can't materially change them without leaving the genre that defines them. This is not specific to genres that became high-brow "refined art"; you can't play a rock-n-roll like it's 1957 either, it will only resonate among the fans of the genre / period, not very numerous now. With that, both opera and rock-n-roll were once the epitomes of wide, overwhelming popularity, each at their time. I agree about lineage. This is basically how culture grows and develops. The past is absolutely not worthless, but no cultural epoch is a final destination. Rainbow in 1970s, Jethro Tull in 1990s, and Master Boot Record in 2020s all directly quoted baroque music, but each of them did that differently, and not exactly the way an authentist ensemble would play it.
• welferkj 2y ago
  >The problem with the arts is that nobody really gives a shit. It'a almost as if divorcing the artist class from having to care about public opinion was a bad idea. If you want this to change, the solution is painfully obvious. End the subsidies, force them back on the open market. Remove open disdain for the audience as an option.
  • scandox 2y ago
    Open disdain for audience is rarely in the mind of the artist and often in the mind of someone that doesn't like what they created and for some reason interprets this as an attack. Many artists have a small audience in mind and that is quite reasonable.
    • Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
      > Open disdain for audience is rarely in the mind of the artist When they say "don't buy it" I take them at their word. I just wish my stolen tax money didn't also fund them.
    • welferkj 2y ago
      >Open disdain for audience is rarely in the mind of the artist Thanks to many artists being incapable of abstaining from Xitter loggorhea, we definitively know this to be false.
    • EarthBlues 2y ago
      I’m no expert, but iconoclasm is a pretty common trope in western music, and it tends to come with some amount of disdain for audiences. Mid-career, Duke Ellington chafed under the racist and unadventurous expectations of his audiences, and charted a new musical path, making music that was primarily aimed at pleasing other musicians. Many of these compositions are now jazz standards. In modern classical music, 20th Century figures like Boulez, and even earlier composers like Wagner thought their audiences were hopelessly sentimental and complacent, and worked intentionally to disturb them. A great many of the household names in modern classical music meet this description, and they certainly set the direction of classical music to follow. Now to my point: I think some of these artists made good, enduring art. But if we look at the media in which they worked — Jazz and Classical music — these forms are, I regret to say, completely culturally irrelevant. They’re dead media; the only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games, and jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point. It’s hard not to see some truth in the above post’s sense that the net result of these artists’ influence was a kind of wish granted by the monkey’s paw. They set out to destroy the idols of their day and succeeded, and the long run outcome was essentially suicidal. I wonder if we need to re-examine the trope of the iconoclast, in hopes of finding new artistic pathways that are capable of expressing new ideas and asking new questions without destroying the traditions that give rise to them.
• mikojan 2y ago
  What you are referring to is not intended for mass consumption. If it were you would be watching a popular music video instead. That does not mean however that it has no effect on popular culture. Popular music scenes transition seamlessly into avant-garde music circles where I live and I would assume in most metropolitan areas. And youth culture has always been experimenting of course. If you only looked at the most prestigious outlets of modern art you may well be missing the connection just like you might miss it if you looked only at the dirtiest punk venues. But that does not mean that it is not there. More boldly: Lana Del Ray would have probably not happened without Musique Concrete, Ambient, Field recordings happening first.
• WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > The first thing any artist should realize is that they live in a bubble. It is my experience that everyone lives in bubbles. They form the lens that filter our perception of other people's existence.
  • goostavos 2y ago
    Unfortunately, my bubble isnt subsidized.
    • BobaFloutist 2y ago
      You'd be surprised.
• mapt 2y ago
  That is if you define "The Arts" as specifically "Archaic forms of art too unpopular to survive without subsidies from government or the aristocracy". That's a tautology. Hip hop music isn't getting government subsidies. DeviantArt isn't getting government subsidies. Etsy isn't getting government subsidies. Youtubers aren't getting government subsidies. The Marvel Cinematic Universe isn't getting (many) government subsidies.
  • jasondigitized 2y ago
    This. Modern music. Woodworking. Digital illustration. Pottery. All very much thriving.
  • BoiledCabbage 2y ago
    > Marvel Cinematic Universe Apparently comedy is thriving as well too.
  • pdonis 2y ago
    The article under discussion, though, isn't about arts that are surviving as for profit businesses--which includes all of the ones you mention. IT's about arts that aren't doing that. Those are the forms of art that the GP comment was about.
  • sandworm101 2y ago
    >>The Marvel Cinematic Universe isn't getting (many) government subsidies. Maybe not US subsidies, but I'd bet that there are some Canadian film and tax credit logos at the end of most credit reels. When you film/edit/design/create on an international scale, you pick up lots of local tax credits. Also probably UK/Scotland credits too. Heck, the 2005 reboot of DrWho was backed by Canadian government money. (Just check the final credits.)
    • SideQuark 2y ago
      Those are usually granted by local governments to increase local revenue, not lower it. It's how one jurisdiction can attract more investment relative to another.
• kjkjadksj 2y ago
  If no one gave a shit these venues would close. Instead some of them have been lovingly maintained for a century. What does that say about your reductionist assessment of the world? Are things only valid if they are upheld by the overwhelming majority of the population? Is that a realistic expectation given the things that do in fact influence a heck of a lot more people often have to resort to psychological manipulation over standing on its own merits to do so? Take your head out of the sand and see what the arguments you are making are actually pencilling out to be.
• kredd 2y ago
  I generally understand this sentiment as a couple of my best friends work in theatre industry, although I have no inclination towards anything related to arts. That being said, you don’t need mass market to get second order effects. Especially for tourism industry. Not everyone who visits NYC goes to a Broadway show, but they know of the industry and how it attracts the talent. Not everyone who goes to Berlin dances their night out till 6am, but they know of it. These subsidies help to create the image of the city, and in some sense help the residents to identify with their surroundings. I understand it’s a bit lame, but I don’t mind some of my tax dollars going into an industry that I never directly benefit from.