>Free Art just says that art has no economic value and therefore the time spent on it doesn't either. It says some 3 year-old's finger paintings are no better o

>Free Art just says that art has no economic value and therefore the time spent on it doesn't either. It says some 3 year-old's finger paintings are no better or worse than the expression of someone's craft that took years to develop. So if someone gives a 3 year-old a nickel for their fingerpainting, does that make it as significant as The Last Supper? Or is the significance of art directly proportional to its dollar valuation? When one person thinks it's worthless and another thinks it's priceless, what dollar valuation does it have? >You could just throw a $10 bill in the air on a windy day every so often and the money would likely wind up helping someone, but that wouldn't be very rewarding for you, would it? That actually describes quite well what shopping for CDs used to be like (except it was a $20 bill). Since you couldn't hear the music first, you were taking a random chance that there would be at least 1 or 2 songs that you might like on it. It was like an expensive lottery scratch ticket (complete with the joy when you found a rare winner and went to buy more of that band). Artists absolutely should be able to make a living as well as anyone else (and make better money as they improve their skills/knowledge/experience). But I don't think the 'old' system was any better at that, except for the few who were both smart and lucky. It's a difficult problem because the value of art is not always easily measured in dollars. Aside from some commercial or pop art, it's one of those cases where supply & demand and capitalist economics is insufficient for both the suppliers and the consumers. Traditional ownership also breaks down a bit when the thing becomes a part of you and also because the thing is not a physical object. We do need a better solution that provides decent money to artists while not arbitrarily restricting access, censoring, or controlling what people have access to, or punishing/shaming them for accessing it. Crowdfunding and things like Patreon have made some progress toward providing alternatives, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. A lot of people make a decent living now working with (and to some degree contributing to) open source software which is made freely available. I hope that more artists will soon be able to make a decent living while people can also have free access to (at least some of) their art.