Could a new composer replicate this? is too broad a question. Rather,
- could they support themselves with a blue collar job?
- could they support a family with said job, as the primary breadwinner?
- could they do it in X, where X is the geographic location of the cultural center of their art form?
Glass was lucky enough to hit all three. Today's young artists might be lucky to hit 1, and maybe the internet helps with 3 a bit, but if you work in an art form that really, really needs in person connection (eg theater, or you need to be where the gallerists and dealers are), I guess it doesnt solve the problem. 2 is very difficult.
The perfect trifecta is when you have a dense urban center that happens to be the center of your art form, but still has enough of a rough edge to it that you can live and work cheaply. New York, 1970s, classical music.
Berlin, visual arts, 2000s. Or you can create the scene yourself given enough mass and energy (see: Atlanta, 1990s, rap, or NYC, 1980s, hip hop).
The next Glass is therefore more likely working in an urban coffee shop than a suburban landscaping crew, living with roomies or parents rather than alone, has no children or spouse to support, and exists on the fringes of a city like London, NY, or Berlin.
What do you mean? It's still normal to have a "blue collar job", isn't it? Not to mention "retail"? Whether or not one is an artist. "Many" people do that and support their family that way. And it's still normal for artists to have a day job. Not just for young ones.
I don't think the Philip Glass story is all that different from today's artists'. More retail, less steel mill.
if anything, there is more awareness now that a day job is normal. And that the main concern is that this job needs to not be "toxic". That is, it needs to leave you enough energy to do your art. That's the main requirement.
I have no data to back it up, but my instinct is that “today’s artists” are increasingly supported by rich parents or spouses when compared with those of 50 years ago.
This is a consequence of wealth concentration and the destruction of the middle class.
Frameworks and examples now exist showing how to gain this freedom. Jacob Lund Fisker[0]'s ERE[1] in particular is an interesting system theory based approach .
I invite you to read the book or read one of the interviews with the author. It goes so much wider than FIRE. Rather than a guide, it's an invitation to build your strategy. That should workas an individual or a couple, with or without children.
I have a friend who lives near NYC and is a theatre director for a company in St Louis. Travels in person 1 week a month and remote with Zoom the other 3 weeks. It pays better than what he gets in his local market and allows him to support his family and spend more time with his children. Opportunities and life has changed significantly since COVID.
> “I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from Paris or India in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by working no more than three or four days a week.”
Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity? I think now there is such a great imbalance in cost of living and pay rates, it may no longer be possible to follow a similar path and get similar results.
Sure, you could move out to rural nowhere, where housing costs next to nothing. Find some part time job, and live your life.
I'm from a place like that, and a bunch of my old classmates from HS have lived like that their entire adult lives working part time. They work 2-3-4 days a week.
Of course, you'll be sacrificing lots of materialistic things, but that's a given.
If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. vatys isn't asking if you can make any living this way, because of course you can. The specific conditions that allowed Philip Glass to work part time jobs and still live in the same city as people like Steve Reich and institutions like The Kitchen don't exist anymore.
> If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass.
I'm not so sure. A lot of art comes out of "affordable areas" — sometimes small college-town ghettos like Athens, Georgia, for example. Why couldn't we get a Philip Glass from Manhattan, Kansas?
Why not indeed? If there is an orchestra's worth of musicians available and an audience there with the taste and curiosity necessary to support avant garde performing arts, anything can happen. It's easier now than ever to put a band together in your college town or even record and release music without ever leaving your bedroom, but beyond that scale you still need a critical mass of creative collaborators all in one place to pull it off.
There are orchestras everywhere. Because musicians want to play and directors want to direct and any random school has a performance hall. Whether they are all that good is another question, but that's true of big cities in the US also. And audience is still another question: I expect you don't get to have all that much of an audience until you have somewhat made it. No doubt Philip Glass didn't start with much of an audience.
Most artists that try to invent something new start with essentially no audience. They don't create that for the big bucks.
And they can all post videos of performances on YouTube. You don’t even need to have an orchestra perform a work for an extended time before you can find an audience. I would think that this would make it more likely for new composers to be able to find success than before. You don’t necessarily need to be in an NYC or Boston like before.
"Big bucks" is the last thing I'm talking about. I'm not talking about symphony subscribers and other blue hairs in a concert hall. I'm talking about an audience of creative peers.
Okay that's an interesting one. Any artists trying to create something new and different around here? How does it work with the "peers" around you? How does it work with other artists, art writers, gallerists, patrons, etc?
What I have noticed of this, and my readings seem to point to the reaction of people around someone in an uncharted direction like PG being a mix of "bemused but admirative and encouraging", and "ignored". And what proportion of the "peers" is now online? IG and such? (For an artist in my life, IG seemed to be an essential lifeline. A main connection.)
He roamed as a hobo for years during the Great Depression. The text for Barstow is graffiti that he saw scrawled on highway railings during that time. It's featured in most music history books that cover the 20th century. (Also, many of the instruments he invented are visual works of art, in addition to being musically beautiful.) And if you liked the recent HN article on just intonation, well... let's just say you're gonna love Harry Partch!
There's also Conlon Nancarrow, who got pissed at the U.S. harrassing him when he got back from fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He moved to Mexico City and hand-punched player piano rolls in seclusion, for decades.
Other composers and musicians made pilgrimages to his studio, just to hear what it sounds like when, say, a 12-voice canon has each voice moving at different tempo.[1]
Nancarrow received the MacArthur fellowship back in 1982. At one point there was a piano duo who taught themselves to play a selection of his pieces as a four-hands duet for one piano.
People who care about music will find interesting musicians, no matter where they live. This goes back at least to J.S. Bach, who reportedly walking hundreds of miles to listen to Buxtehude improvise at the organ.
1: and what are the proportions for the voices of that canon? You guessed it-- they're the ratios from a just intonation chromatic scale, which Nancarrow probably got from a book by Henry Cowell (New Musical Resources, IIRC).
Em... Harry Parch was living off Guggenheim and Carnegie grants at the start of the great depression. He was also celebrated and known in New York early in his career (while working menial jobs). He absolutely didn't rise from obscurity while living in a rural area. He was still receiving grants while travelling as a 'hobo' at the height of the great depression. He wasn't exactly cosplaying poverty, but it's a total mischaracterisation to craft a narrative where he was discovered while living that life.
> People who care about music will find interesting musicians, no matter where they live
This is the 'just world hypothesis' and survivorship bias combined. Some very talented people will be discovered despite their circumstances. An enormously larger number will not. You won't know you don't know them.
Congratulations, you missed the point of the comment while also being unnecessarily condescending! Another internet point!
The commenter remarked "we would never have heard of Philip Glass." Who among the laity would have heard of Philip Glass and the people you listed? I expect that Venn diagram is really two circles.
100% - but people don’t want to make those sacrifices. They want to live and do what they’ve always done. It has and likely always will be possible to pick up stumps and move somewhere very cheap and get on with a personal creative endeavour - not many have the courage though.
Orchestral music composition and performance is quite different from painting and writing. When you are dependent on a large amounts of other highly skilled people to create and perform it makes it really hard to live out in nowhere.
These days internet and digital production can ease a lot of the rural isolation. But for many (most?) people it is essential to be in and around the art scene to be able to create and maintain focus and motivation to work on their art. Especially when starting a career it is important to meet and see other artists and art.
I'm sorry, but I don't hold them in high regard as artists. They're part of the "western/southern frontier" crowd that encapsulated the zeitgeists of their environments, rather than create something that transcended it. The "frontier" is a notable and interesting subject in itself, but it has only peripheral cultural value to... civilization.
Much of O’Keeffe’s work relates to gender in a way that was counter to the zeitgeist of the contemporaneous southwest. Johnson more or less embodied a nascent Delta blues, defining it on wax, then died. It was too early in the codification for there be something to transcend. His career was like 9 months long. McCarthy I don’t know, can’t read because I don’t like the violence.
Nonetheless your final point is far more vapid because the frontier is where civilization is created and destroyed. It is where norms, values and modes of production of some civilization are placed with decreasing amounts of their domestic support, and usually in increasing conflict with a different civilization, so that it becomes clear what aspects have some more fundamental truth or at least robustness, and what is simply town and gown, responding to the ever shifting attentions of easily bored patrons.
In New York particularly this could maybe work. They have strong blue collar unions so benefits and pay would be actually livable. Plumbing anywhere is pretty viable. Faulkner worked in construction and did a similar thing. I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue collar
Not at all. Do you know what it actually takes to get in to those blue collar unions in NYC? It's not at all a "I can just show up, with no experience, and convince a business owner to give me a job" like Glass did.
IME, my impression, is that far more people today are in 'survival' mode - the fight/fligh/freeze response: not trying to create, build, and self-actualize but to survive, and ridiculing - as people in that mode do - art, humanities (and humanitarianism), knowledge, etc. Advocating the value in those things is now transgressive, IME. 'That's all pointless!' they say - and yes it's pointless if your only goal is to survive a week or maybe a year, and make nothing better of the world.
In my experience, that attitude for me was due to the devaluing of spirituality and the resulting overemphasis on rationality.
Funny thing is in hindsight, I didn’t realise how much my “rational” attitude was informed by the Protestant work ethic pervading secular society. It’s like we threw away the god part but kept the part where we’re all “sinners” until we prove ourselves worthy through work.
Instead of appreciating the natural beauty in the world as it is, I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world. From that latter, small view, art was difficult to appreciate.
> I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world
I was there too, and I see others doing it. I think that when we look externally for our value, we end up sacrificing a lot of ourselves for someone else's approval.
Is 'rationality' the right word here (I see you put it in quotes)? It doesn't seem rational or based on reason, more a social custom.
Many of my cultural heroes were ignored by academia
Ignored, or the jobs just weren't there?
A department head once told me that she couldn't hire any new tenure-track faculty. Turnover at the school is so rare, and when a position does open up, there are literally hundreds of highly qualified applicants. It's been that way for decades, particularly in the humanities and arts.
She noted that among the existing faculty were several tenured professors who had been hired in the previous century when their respective areas of study were hot. Even though their expertise was outdated and students weren't signing up for their classes, they were still on the books until they voluntarily retired ... or died.
Fresh Air had a great interview with Glass in which he talked about his career and the various jobs he had to take as he developed his music. He was driving a cab in NYC in the 70s and he said it was very dangerous. It's the top interview in this list:
Hunting and fishing, the most important employments of mankind in the
rude state of society, become in its advanced state their most
agreeable amusements, and they pursue for pleasure what they once
followed from necessity. In the advanced state of society, therefore,
they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people
pursue as a pastime. Fishermen have been so since the time of
Theocritus. A poacher is every-where a very poor man in Great Britain.
In countries where the rigour of the law suffers no poachers, the
licensed hunter is not in a much better condition. The natural taste
for those employments makes more people follow them than can live
comfortably by them, and the produce of their labour, in proportion to
its quantity, comes always too cheap to market to afford any thing but
the most scanty subsistence to the labourers.
There are a lot of jobs in teaching and most are not tenured. And that's probably true of many disciplines, not just art. Many are not even full time. So... depending what you are looking for, it may not be a comfortable situation - but it might be good enough as a day job. At least if teaching art is within your tolerance for a "not toxic" job... From an economics perspective, the fact that plenty of people teach art without tenure may have something to do with why so little tenure is available.
The rise of social media and 'smart culture' has led to huge, sudden interest over the past decade in all sorts of niche or esoteric subjects. Talented people are making a good living at math videos, TikTok tutoring, playing instruments on TikTok, reaction videos, food videos, etc. In the '90s, if you were a 'philosophy buff' your options were limited to academia. Now there is a devoted, captive audience for practically anything you can think of.
In the art world, I'm convinced ignored is correct. Academics often have very different goals and produce very different art than those outside academia.
Yeah, I think a lot of people miss that these jobs opened up when the population was growing much faster due to the baby boom, plus people are living longer. Things have changed since the 1950s-80s.
Changing quickly now as the prior generation sat still collecting rent as long as possible, refusing to evolve themselves, and kept the next generation away from opportunities to evolve.
Teachers who just take public school jobs rather than start local learning programs and nurses who idle in hospitals rather than start some in-home nursing service for their community, academics whose careers stalled due to progress sit there reliving the same old routine blocking newcomers from moving through the pipeline
Whole lot of ossified minds in industry who need to get over coddling some sacrosanct story and identity and move along
Absolutely not. Cost of living increases and the like. Consider, back then single income households were the norm because you could absolutely afford a house, car in the driveway, and raise a couple kids on a single blue collar income. Hell, in the late 90s you could make rent on a studio apartment in a single weekend delivering pizza if tips were decent.
I couldn't agree more. One is a number on your pay stub the other is a measure of what that actually means. In 1998 I could do more on the $8hr I was earning at the time than you could earning 3 times as much today.
> Just imagine reading Siddhartha or The Glass Bead Game at a steel mill—but that’s Philip Glass for you.
I don't know what this means. I worked a lot of "blue collar jobs" in my time, and I'd often see people reading "serious books" on break. It's not uncommon. I read a lot of Hemingway because of recommendations I got from a dude I used to work with cleaning concrete truck drums with jackhammers.
I'd almost say high concept books pair better with blue collar work. I'm mentally exhausted after a day of meetings or programming, but if I'm doing manual labor I end up physically exhausted, not mentally exhausted
An age old wisdom - if you work manually, rest via mental efforts, and vice versa. For most HNers it means do tons of sweat inducing efforts, often, so mind can rest a bit and do some defragmentation, not leaving everything only for sleep.
His experiences are completely alien now and not reproducible today.
How is it possible to get any blue collar job at all without extensive training and certifications on your own time and with your own money in that very specific field?
How is it possible to not only be able to support your family on 3 working days per week, but to find a boss willing to hire you as a part time worker for what seems like a high wage?
How was he able to seemingly be unaffected by frequent job hopping and employment gaps that today seem to be as disadvantageous as having face tattoos?
My own grandfather told me stories of lying about knowing how to drive a tractor-trailer, and learning on the job. Now we have licensing, background checks, reference checks, and all manner of ladder-pulling that is leaving the younger generation without the same opportunities.
Another factor that is overlooked is the tradeoff between interest rates and employment. The Federal Reserve, by law, must target maximum employment first, and then 3% inflation second. It flagrantly disobeys this law with zero consequences. For the first time since the 70s or 90s, we had a job market that favored employees, and all levels of government treated it like a policy emergency to stop immediately. https://x.com/mucha_carlos/status/1791621965343560152
Many stories tell that one secret is "showing up". For many jobs, the boss has a long list of ideal requirements. Even a retail manager would loooooove to find someone with solid experience and recommendations (and is a buddy, jk, or am I?). Anyway. And then also keeps around people who simply reliably show up.
We're talking past each other. You're talking about retaining people already hired or simply rehiring people.
I'm talking about the ability to get a job in the first place. Employers are spoiled for choice since 2008, and their requirements genuinely are hard unless you happen to know someone. Your experience in tech is an outlier. Your experience outside of tech in your state and your city is vastly different from my state and my city.
> How is it possible to get any blue collar job at all without extensive training and certifications on your own time and with your own money in that very specific field?
People do. And sure you can find lots of fields as counter examples. I guess people do because they do not insist on these fields.
I was not talking of re-hiring. In the case of retail, you have store managers with lots of candidates who end up having to "hire" one after the other because they still can't fill their schedule with people who actually show up. They hire enough at random so that eventually they do have people who stick.
Parts of Los Angeles, specifically, now, specifically, are filled with entertainmnent industry hopeful for small part time industry jobs. Meanwhile they make do with day jobs that require no particular training or certification. Besides actually showing up, which is not to be taken for granted when many people will outright say it aloud "why should I care?"
The Ghost Ship in Oakland, SF Bay Area, an artist coop kind of thing until it burned to the ground was "charging about 25 resident artists rent ranging between $300 and $600 per month. The monthly rate for a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland at the time typically exceeded $2,000." They are not the only place like that in the Bay Area - they were cheap though.
I'm not talking tech jobs. But actually I do have examples as tech jobs also! Some startups are fairly desperate in their hiring - and may not pay all that much but certainly enough to survive. In one crazy example, they paid room and board, and not much more. And they worked out perfectly fine on that person's resume for their next job.
this is sadly true. as much as i "want" the old stories like OP to be true now (they may still be in rural areas i suspect), those times are basically over. i suppose one could do jobs like fruitpicking (totally unskilled) or other things like that but those employers dont want someone fluffing around for 3 days a week they want your life
Philip Glass and Steve Reich worked together as removals men. For some reason I find it fascinating that the two greats of minimalist composing did this. It shouldn’t be that strange, I have plenty of struggling musician friends who work day jobs together. Perhaps it’s the fact that they both became greats, or just my reverence for them that makes it seem fascinating (or perhaps it's just the mental image of Philip Glass and Steve Reich moving a sofa up some stairs!)
The reason is simple, Western classical music was extremely, extremely (and it's impossible to stress this enough: extremely) conservative in late 20th century. Anything that's not part of the canon Schoenbergian atonalism, or Mahlerian Romanticism was considered "wrong", "illogical" etc. Believe it or not WCM had a just as rich of a history and stream of movements as any other tradition of art, but by mid-to-late 20th century academia -- one by one -- killed every single vehicle of creativity for simply being "incorrect". Here is a theory from 1880s and 1920s from a German musicologist that "proves" mathematically that this music is incorrect and should be rewritten.
No artist can make rent money in that atmosphere.
Artists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass were gigantic innovators, they were iconoclasts, they wanted WCM to go way beyond what it was stuck at in 1970s. Of course they spent decades being considered a charlatan by their colleagues. Philip Glass in an interview explains how, when he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble and started producing his early (brutally minimalist) music people tried "helping" him by teaching basic musical composition, and told him that he needs to learn basics first before writing music like that. It's a farce really, from 2020s having listened to 21st century post-minimalism, if you go back and listen to early minimalism in 1970s and 1980s (think, Music for 18 musicians, Music in 12 parts, Einstein on the beach, in C, Glass Violin Concerto, De Stijl etc) it's just haunting how creative their music is. They had to invent everything from scratch! You have to go all the way back to 1640s Froberger to find anything that remotely sounds idiomatic within the tradition, while aggressively responding to their contemporaries like the extreme-complexity of Boulez etc. It's really unfortunate, my sense is, modern music education creates very conservative, robotic craftsmen who play technically perfectly but are unable to see innovation and artistic response.
I would like to say 21st century WCM is in a much better situation and there is more creativity, but I would say it's likely a marginal improvement over late 20th century, rather than a significant transformation.
He is such a humble guy. When I was dating my wife about 12 years ago, he gave a piano concert for free in Battery Park. You could walk right up to him: no barriers, no bodyguards. How many musicians of his caliber would do that?
It's inspiring for sure, and I think this post will have some impact on my life. Giving me a stronger/better attitude basically.
But I'd like to take a moment for people who live lives like Philip Glass but don't have that famous composer label attached to them. There are so many anonymous people going through such a crazy amount of work that they do and we never hear of them.
Lest you feel any guilt for how you may have felt before reading this piece, I have to say that artists are going to art — whether they are successful or not. It's what they do and it's something that they cannot stop doing.
I once had Wolfgang Pauli's cousin use my checkstand at the grocery store. I noticed his last name because he wrote a check. When I asked if was "Pauli like the exclusion principle?" he got very excited and hung around for an hour just to chat.
For anyone who's interested there's a BBC radio programme in which Glass speaks about his life in New York in the early 70s, driving a cab and finding his way to recognition as a composer. Lots of interesting colour about life in a city which was on the verge of bankruptcy and yet, partly because of that, had opportunities for the impecunious artist.
My favourite bit is his, years later, encounter with Martin Scorsese who, on learning he used to drive a cab, was surprised to discover that Glass had never seen Scorsese's film "Taxi Driver". Glass replies that when "Taxi Driver" was released he drove a cab four nights a week and so, when he had time off, he hardly felt the need to go and watch a film about cab driving ;-)
John Adams wrote in his memoir about trying something similar around the same time, but with less success. When he moved out to the Bay Area he ended up taking a job as a longshoreman at the port. He wrote that he had this Marxist fantasy of laboring with the proletariat during the day and composing avant-garde music during the night.
But the job left him so exhausted when he got home that he could barely read a few pages of a book let alone compose any new music.
He didn't really pick up composing again until he happened to get a job teaching music in SF.
And Laurie Anderson got a job at McDonalds. But somehow I think with her it was kind of part of her art, ha ha.
> Standing behind a cash register in her uniform, Anderson became practically invisible, even to her friends. "They would come in and I would be like 3 feet away from them," she says. "And I wasn’t trying to disguise anything. But I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I wasn’t."
In Philip Glass's autobiography he says when people accuse him of selling out by having his music in movies and ads, he tells he got into music to make money.
I've got an insane amount of respect for that honesty.
I always find those criticism hilarious. Glass with his "sold out" style made more innovation in WCM tradition than pretty much anyone else in 20th century who lived before him, except perhaps Schoenberg who came close to his levels of iconoclasm. Once you're that good and creative, "you sold out" stops being a valid criticism. Bach would poop out a cantata weekly for the church he was a Kapellmeister at, because his job was to write music for the church for people to listen to during various ceremonies. That's not selling out, that's just working for money.
I live in Baltimore, home of Philip Glass (as far as I know, he still lives in Baltimore) and a lot of my friends went to a famous Peabody conservatory. Even after graduation, a lot of them either entirely left music or struggling musicians, who have blue collar jobs.
I remember going to one the local bars and saw a girl working as bartender(she quite attractive), years before that, I saw her playing cello in one of the concerts.
I don’t get this piece. I don’t know who honest broker is but I’ll take it he’s a Philip glass (PG) fan. So I’ll start there.
What is the difference between PG doing blue collar work and anyone else? Why is PG having to drive a taxi or work at a plant any different?
The article seems to want to praise PG by, what I’m reading anyway, almost patronizing him. But there is an undertone that insults people who have to work for a living and there’s no glamour there. I doubt I will read a “the blue collar jobs of joe nobody” expounding joe’s salt of the earth character for having to make ends meet.
I’m not posting this with sour grapes, I just genuinely don’t get what is different between PG working and anyone else working that same job that warrants writing about it.
To be fair it’s not the first time. Reading people waxing poetic about Charles Bukowski’s life like he relished in the down-trodden shit of it all is just makes them sound pretentious.
I agree. The tone of this article was grating to me. Most of my family is blue collar and is very well read. My uncle -- who worked at a grocery store his whole life -- made a habit of buying me books 10 years ahead of my reading level all through my childhood.
I think HN readers are missing the point. It's not about the money, or opportunity to (or lack of) make living off a blue collar job today.
Here's what I got from reading this article.
No job is beneath me. I once scoffed at an opportunity to work at a supermarket when I was between employment. But looking back, maybe I should have.
I believe strongly that everyone should work at least once in their lifetime to work at menial/low-level job. I think working at menial jobs like in retail when I was young helped me a lot, even though I didn't realize it at that moment.
By working at minimum wage jobs at restaurant, retail, etc..., I've learned to respect others, no matter what they do for living, like a janitor or truck driver or a fastfood worker.
Also there is something about physical labor and working with your bare hands that makes me feel so alive and fulfilled.Perhaps, I am wired and built to work on physical things. Even as an old guy, since I started fixing physical things like broken toilet, or making physical things, even if it's just assembling Ikea furnitures, or tinkering with hardware, I feel more well and alive compared to when I'd been working as a dev.
Maybe that is why some of high-level tech workers leave their high-paying career to work at a farm or become a truck driver.
I don't know why people look down on trust-fund kids. Being born smart ,as this author clearly was- is just another innate advantage, like being born rich. It's that the latter is denigrated. High IQ, or music talent, or sports talent is just as unearned as having rich parents. Yet we're supposed to downplay or feel ashamed of the latter.
Because wealth, unlike those other things, is readily transferable by taxation to level the playing field. I don't necessarily agree it should be, but if we could sap intelligence or other skills from the gifted and spread them around to shore up deficient people, I bet there would be a faction of people supporting this as the moral thing to do: "why should talented musicians meet and mate and produce offspring who keep disproportionately high inherited talent they didn't earn?", they might say.
This is 100% what Generative AI is doing and I am one of those people who "support this as a moral thing to do".
I would go as far as to claim that it's a moral bad as a creative to put a payway behind any of your work and those who subvert it (i.e. fine-tuning your likeness into a model) are doing ethically good work.
Hmmm, kiiiiiinda. But if we declare equivalences without providing any justification, there's little substance:
We should look (up|down) to people who (do|don't) have X.
It's meaningless. In order to make this seem meaningful, you could dictate some premises, for example:
We should look up to people who have inherited wealth.
We should look down upon people who don't have high IQ.
What issue does this illuminate? By declaring unearned wealth and unearned IQ (or unearned musical talent) to be comparable, what can we learn? Are they, in fact, comparable in any meaningful way?
It seems an odd approach. The initial premises seem to illuminate the person who selects them, rather than illuminating any societal issue. What can we learn from your selection, other than that you seem to feel an affinity towards those with inherited wealth?
There is of course one apparent distinction between inherited wealth and inherited ability, be it musical or sporting or intelligence or what have you. Wealth tends to be accrued, while talent can only be recognised when it is shared.
- could they support themselves with a blue collar job?
- could they support a family with said job, as the primary breadwinner?
- could they do it in X, where X is the geographic location of the cultural center of their art form?
Glass was lucky enough to hit all three. Today's young artists might be lucky to hit 1, and maybe the internet helps with 3 a bit, but if you work in an art form that really, really needs in person connection (eg theater, or you need to be where the gallerists and dealers are), I guess it doesnt solve the problem. 2 is very difficult.
The perfect trifecta is when you have a dense urban center that happens to be the center of your art form, but still has enough of a rough edge to it that you can live and work cheaply. New York, 1970s, classical music. Berlin, visual arts, 2000s. Or you can create the scene yourself given enough mass and energy (see: Atlanta, 1990s, rap, or NYC, 1980s, hip hop).
The next Glass is therefore more likely working in an urban coffee shop than a suburban landscaping crew, living with roomies or parents rather than alone, has no children or spouse to support, and exists on the fringes of a city like London, NY, or Berlin.