

Carter Cleveland Says Art in the Future Will Be for Everyone - alexis
http://online.wsj.com/articles/carter-cleveland-says-art-in-the-future-will-be-for-everyone-1404762157#YES

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egypturnash
Has this person not actually been on the Internet?

There is a huge, sprawling market of art online. And I don't mean stuff with
the cultural approval of the gallery system. I mean, say, people making a
living by drawing mind-control commissions on Deviantart. Paying the bills by
cranking out custom art of folk's furry characters on Furaffinity. Selling
commissions of weird stuff via Tumblr. Folks doing web comics and selling
ads/books/t-shirts. Custom clothes/jewelry/chainmail/whatever on Etsy. Patreon
is helping too - lotsa people are starting to say "hey I just wanna draw some
COOL STUFF and if you like my themes then help support me doing it" in various
ways on that site.

This economy has been booming ever since Paypal made it easy to give someone
money online.

None of it is "Fine Art". No small amount of it is pornography. It is not
glamorous. It is not pretentious. A hell of a lot of it is amateurs still
learning. But there is a lot of it, and some of it is _amazing_.

Seriously: I have a friend who put his wife through nursing school, and is
still helping to support her and their child, by drawing outrageous furry
latex bondage commissions.

~~~
carterac
Carter, the author, here. Yes I've been on the Internet. In fact, I love and
grew up on the Internet, wrote my first lines of code in middle school, and
procrastinated my way through high school on sites like Deviant Art. I've been
reading Hacker News daily for over 5 years.

This essay was written with the WSJ audience (average age over 50) in mind.
That audience is more familiar with the established art world and its $66B
market. For an audience that grew up on the Internet like me, I would have
used more nuanced language and talked more about the importance of merging the
existing art market and the established art world with the more organic art
communities already online.

But here's the tl;dr version of what I would have written for HN:

The Internet will grow the art market and broaden it to include artists
outside of the existing establishment–the result is that more artists will be
able to make a living without having to appeal to the existing system. But
achieving this requires working with the established art world, e.g. major
galleries and museums, to publish more of their art online for easy and free
access–making art and art education accessible to everyone, not just those
with the time and money to go visit in person. By moving the existing art
world online, you're bringing its market of buyers and sellers with it, and
exposing them to a more vibrant, diverse, and organic ecosystem that many
readers on Hacker News are already familiar with. In summary, by increasing
awareness and education about art history, the Internet will drive greater
passion and market demand for art, which ultimately means more artists from
all over the world will get discovered organically and be able to pursue their
passions more sustainably.

Likewise, music has been around forever, but the chances of someone like
Lorde, a 16 year old from New Zealand, seeing such success was much less
likely before the Internet democratized music for listeners and creators
alike. Today, it's still very rare for a visual artist to experience that kind
of success if they are not part of the existing establishment. But the
Internet is going to change that, and this will be a great thing for all of
us.

~~~
schrijver
The art market is already using the internet to great effect. Like you write
in your article, many of the gallery sales are now online. Work can even be
sold in advance of the physical exposition opening.

However, if one might be tempted to correlate internet-based business with
openness and even educational inspirations: that’s not the commercial art
world I know of. Because in most of these cases collectors will have had a
password to the restricted part of the gallery website.

That entire $60B art market is in a continuous effort to make scarce and
unreachable what is at the basis an abundant resource. Hence the passwords
handed out to selected collectors. Or, for example, what’s the logic of taking
an image with a digital camera, and promising to print it only 5 times? It’s
an economic logic of promoting scarcity, and it works really well—contemporary
art auctions have gone through the roof this year.

At the same time, as art is moving to digital artefacts, the notion of
scarcity on which the art world is built is bound to blow up at some
point—like you, I’m confident that the internet will help us come up with new
ideas of what it is to be an artist, and what it is to produce art. Yet the
gallery circuit is the last place where I’d go looking for answers…

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qwerta
> Pre-20th century, the music world in the West resembled the art world today.
> If you listened to professional music, were informed about the genre and
> attended performances, you were part of an elite class.

Bullshit. There were massive outdoor concerts for public with no charge. Every
tiny village had church with some sort of musical instruments. My ancestors
(rural farmers) had (and still have) 300 years old music band...

> Pessimists would say that fundamentally there is a finite universe of people
> interested in art, or that you must experience art in person to acquire a
> passion for it.

Another bullshit. There is a huge number of street artists, from juggler to
spray painters. Every kid wants to go to circus to see acrobats. And finally
there is infinitive stream of movies, ads and others forms of art.

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josephschmoe
Art already is already as ubiquitous as music. I would even say art became
ubiquitous before music. The very first photographs and easily reproduced
paintings prove this. Kids these days cover their walls in prints and posters.
Your computer has a rolling background of various art or photography of your
choosing. The shirt you're wearing probably has a logo or a decal or maybe
even a full piece of artwork on it.

I have had days where I don't encounter music. Not encountering art? I pretty
much have to go out into the middle of the woods or spend all day at the
office off the internet.

Most people don't spend thousands of dollars on music per year. They won't
spend that kind of money on art either. But they're already consuming art -
tons of it.

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nobody_nowhere
So, sure, lots of flawed examples/reasoning here, but let's look at the
overall premise: can art become further democratized, accessible, expansive in
media and impactful?

First off, it's a nice idea. The world can use more pleasant, hopeful, upbeat
thinking in my mind.

Second, on the substantive points, that changes in technology will drive
changes in what is considered "art" and who can access it, particularly from a
market perspective: that's hard to dispute. This is a continuation of changes
that have been evolving for 100 years, from the dadaists, through the
invention of lithography, to warhol (or murakami today), and seem likely to
continue.

So an easy article to pick apart, but hard to dispute the point that (i think)
he's intending to make.

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Retric
This is factually wrong. Historically, a huge swath of the population
preformed music. And listening to professional musicians was about as 'elite'
as going to the movies is today.

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kazinator
If, today, you want to be a visual artist analog of a pop musician, you can
create comics, or perhaps grafiti. Or album covers, artwork on clothing,
sporting equipment, motorbikes, and cars, etc. (Just shooting off the top of
my head.)

This seems to strike at the fundamental premise of the article; pardon me if
I'm wrong.

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chrischen
I thought visual arts are already popular. They're called movies!

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jedunnigan
Tolstoy, we're almost halfway there.

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pestilence123
It's _already_ for everyone.. everyone who cares.

