I'm reading a book called Culture Crash, which is relevant here. I also read Sinykin's Big Fiction a while back, so you could say I've been reading abou the culture industry.
Culture Crash makes this interesting point: Did you know there used to be widely read, culturally relevant, AND Nobel Prize worthy (like actual contenders to win), poets? Unimaginable now but true in living memory. They didn't even have to be attached to a University, financially speaking. Like your male or female co-worker might hear that such an such a poet was coming out with a new book, and buy it, and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
The general point of these books (summarizing a lot here) is that the cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now, and there isn't much left. At this point literature has been "captured" by the University, but it's for a good reason: you can't survive as a fiction writer without it. People complain "but they're so insular" but the truth is: they don't have an alternative. You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.
This is true of other industries too. Music: you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician. You might also be the guy who was the resident expert on classical music for the neighborhood at the store, who would recommend operas conducted by Karajan and the best recordings from Deutsche Grammophone (I remember those guys). Art: you could paint signs or design posters, back when there was a real demand. Writing: you could write for the alternative weeklies (I'd read those) or be a regular journalist, writing as little as one story a day. Movies: you could be a video clerk (I also remember this). And those 'subcultures' were incubators. Quentin Tarantino graduated from the video store in a sense. Who can follow him, if there are no video stores anymore?
So this crisis in nonprofit funding really is coming at the end of a much longer crisis in the arts in general. It should be seen in that context.
I don't think the bohemians you alluded to were so much funded by nonprofits, as by the public at large. 50 years ago we had Bob Dylan as the poet laureate, more or less, of his generation. Today we've got Taylor Swift. Both got big record contracts. No knock against her, but if you want to talk about cultural decay, I think it's more of a demand-side problem. The market will elevate artists who the public are willing to pay for. Yes, a publisher or a producer can "make a market" for something, but Francis Ford Coppola can put $100M of his own money into an art piece and, evidently, no one currently will pay to see it.
The idea that nonprofits should prop up art has always been wrong, in a way. Artists since the Italian Renaissance have produced most of their greatest / most famous works for wealthy patrons, not because governments paid them to do it. (Unless you count the Vatican as a government).
What I'm trying to say is that all art arises from pop culture, and pop culture can engender the height of artistic excellence, if the culture itself has good taste and demands quality. Or, pop culture can be a pit of garbage if the culture has degraded. This is what is meant about the transition from "Ideal" Hellenistic art to art which embodied "Pathos" around the 4th Century BC.
We have transitioned in the past 50 years from a culture which strives for the ideal, to one which worships pathos. That may be the mark of a civilization in decline (based on a relatively limited number of historical examples). But the "fix" isn't more public funding for art that no one looks at or listens to. All great art arose from popular desire for it; you can't force it on a population, or keep it alive if there's no audience.
Is this really a "degradation" in popular taste, or is it a change in the demographics that dominate the demand side? While there's apparently been some studies on the demographics of Swifties, it's much more difficult to produce the same for Bob Dylan 50 years ago. My impression though is that the initial core demographics (driving the fame) of Bob Dylan's music were young adults of both sexes, while the initial demographics of Taylor Swift's music were teenagers, overwhelmingly female. The demographics have different interests, with the interests preferred by Dylan's demographics being considered deeper and more intellectual by the cultural zeitgeist. It makes sense that target demographics of popular music would have been older back in the day, since buying records required some sort of record player, which was a significant investment. Today, there's practically no investment to listen to music via a streaming service.
Mostly agreed, but imo Taylor Swift’s music trajectory is kinda similar to Beatles.
Swift’s fanbase has been mostly teenage girls, who now grew up, and now her concerts are filled with women in their 20s and 30s, as well as plenty of guys (though still a minority).
Beatle’s fanbase at the time of their rise to fame? Also predominantly teenage girls. Take a look at the photos from any of their concerts in the prime age. And then there are those infamous photos with crowds (that were almost entirely teenage girls) pretty much hysterically crying in the audience upon seeing their idols.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It is probably a controversial take, but if anything, I would consider Taylor Swift’s core audience these days being way less “culty” and less homogeneous than that of the early Beatles (despite, indeed, being one of the most “culty” fanbases of the present times). And I am saying this as someone who is as far from a Swift fan as one can be. I only know a few of her top songs, and they are pretty catchy/fun, but I simply don’t have much interest in it overall. Can’t deny that she is doing a great job all around though.
Calling it now: a few decades down the road, Taylor Swift will exist in the cultural zeitgeist in a similar way to how Beatles are revered many decades after their breakup in the present times (assuming she stays on her current trajectory).
> Calling it now: a few decades down the road, Taylor Swift will exist in the cultural zeitgeist in a similar way to how Beatles are revered many decades after their breakup in the present times (assuming she stays on her current trajectory).
The Beatles, after getting early popularity with teenage girls via stuff like "She Loves you", "I wanna hold your hand" etc., moved on to more ambitious music for adults. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Taylor Swift's equivalent of the White Album...
I think you're right. I'd add that it's sound to invest in a younger demographic when there are more young people, more customers, who are more impressionable, for a longer term return. With companies trying to get the most from their investment, I'd expect this strategy to drive the market towards less complex, and less interesting media.
Upvoted for being one of the best comments in the discussion I've read so far -- I'm sure there's something relevant going on that's similar enough to a transition from some sort of ideal to pathos.
But the part about nonprofits is possibly orthogonal to the issue and may even be wrong in the opposing direction. Why would pathos overtake everything? Honestly it's what I'd expect to happen in the wake of two simple developments:
1) most media engagement moves from text, which requires the engagement of the mind, to video/audio, which can run on a much higher volume of feels/vibes alone. I don't think it's a coincidence that we had a print culture up through a half century ago when there were popular poets (Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski, maybe even WH Auden) and now we get to your comment which, representative of the times, will subtly shift to popular performing songwriters as if they're the same thing.
Like one of Patrick Rothfuss' characters said: “Remember this, son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.”
2) And that means when the market becomes the dominant social mediator, what finds its way through culture? What sells. What sells most broadly? What touches people's hearts. What touches people's hearts? Vibes/feels, or pathos, as you say. And then we do stupid things with our markets like Spotify that magnify the problem by eroding marginal success, bifurcating into go-pathos-big or go home as the option.
Your own comment is a great illustrator of just how much market-as-mediator is readily thought of as the way to understand the issue. Do we want other ideals? Then we need other cultural institutions that explore, circulate, and foster values/ideals beyond the market. And at least some of them would necessarily be non-profits. And while they'd need to go beyond subsidizing pre-popular work (including perhaps some never popular) and into various forms of popular education, subsidy would be part of what they'd do. There can't be an audience for something that is never produced.
Based on the comment’s reference to Bob Dylan, I imagine they were more discussing the 60s, so it would be helpful to see what were the top selling things 60 years ago in 1964.
The best selling album of 1964 was the soundtrack to the musical "Hello, Dolly!". The best selling single was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles. Dylan at least made it to the top album charts (as he did in 1974 and in every decade since) but not the top 100 singles chart. Barbara Streisand beat him out in 1964 too with "People" at #11.
There's a ton of great music on the top 100 singles chart from '64 ("I Get Around by the Beach Boys, "Where Did Our Love Go" and "Baby Love" by the Supremes, "Twist and Shout" by the Beatles, "The Girl from Ipanema" by Getz and Gilberto, "Little Honda" by the Hondells, "Leader of the Pack" by the Shangri-Las, "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks, "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen, most importantly and influentially "Surfin' Bird" by the Trashmen), but not much poet laureate material. I guess the closest would be "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals, there was a book written on the history of that song.
Most of the best popular music is repetitive, loud, stupid and obnoxious (see, for example, "Surfin' Bird"). Poet laureate type popular music is hard to pull off. Tom Waits did it, he would have gotten my nomination for United States Poet Laureate in the '80s and '90s. Taylor Swift sold more records with "1989" than Tom Waits has done in his entire career (14,000,000 for Swift's "1989", 4,000,000 for Tom Waits career to date).
Yes but at the same time the music industry exists as a capitalistic machine that forms public taste and interest through sheer force of marketing - it’s easier to have one mega artist like Taylor performing one huge show in every city to capture all of the disposable income for music in one go, rather than have lots of competing artists and dilution and effort to create a range of cultural product. Competition is a sin remember? The music industry understands this nowadays. “The public wants what the public gets” in the words of Paul Weller / The Jam. There isn’t a free market of music and ideas. The market is closed and offers only a small number of products, and everyone else has to stand outside of the market giving out their art for free.
For a while I had a website where I put my music, with a Stripe button for donations.
Now, I didn't make as much money as T.Swift, but I chalk that up my music being not quite as polished (still working on getting access to a multi-million dollar recording studio with a $10,000 microphone and $500,000 mixing console staffed by a team of world-class music producers, sound engineers and hit makers like her), not because some capitalist mega-machine is keeping me down.
I guess I'm more of a believer in the 1,000 true fans [0] mindset.
Yeah, that's the problem if we're talking about cultural relavance. We all have accedd to 24/7 on demand media, and that inevitably means we will form our on cultural bubbles based on taste, community, etc. There really isn't any single TV show these days that everybody watched compared to Breaking back in the '10's, or The Wire in the 00's, or Friends in the 90's.
We're a culture more specialzied than ever and lonlier than ever. Especially if you don't like Sports (pretty much the last remaining "cultural media"). That also makes it much harder to get the 1000 true fans you linked to (interesting read, thanks!).
Kind of tangential, and I know this is taking the number too seriously but: it doesn't help that 1000 true fans can no longer sustain an artist either. I want to work on my own game, and even if I could somehow get away with 1000 copies sold at $30 (basically pricing myself at the top of indies)... I wouldn't even make minimum wage in California. With no benefits!. and of course that's before the platform cuts and potentially paying for any tools I use. And assuming I work alone on all this. Making more monetization in games these days is still a controversial topic evolving in real time.
1000 true fans more became 10000 true fans these days. Thanks, inflation.
If you think a $10,000 microphone and a $500,000 mixing console and a team of people to.man them is what's standing between you and Taylor Swift level polish, I'd argue that is is the capitalist mega-machine keeping you down. If it weren't for capitalism, you'd have access to those things and be able to give your music that kind of polish.
Of course, in this day and age, access to quality gear and talent doesn't that quite that much money. Garage band isn't just the name of the recording software, but also a statement on how accessible technology has made being a musical artist.
There are plenty of full-time writers outside of universities. Most of them are self-published genre writers. There's a solid core of six figure writers, and a smaller but non-trivial number of seven figure writers. They don't get awards, they don't teach (usually), but they earn a decent living.
What's happened over the last century or so is a huge shift towards the middle of the bell curve. Culture used to be gate-kept and handed down, which meant a much smaller number of talents could be become household names, with an income to match. Generally there was a concept of quality based on exceptional creative imagination and craft. That rubbed off onto genre work, so it was still an influence there.
Now it's become corporatised, so the only metric is income, which pushes everything away from risk and novelty towards lowest common denominator satisfaction for middle-of-the-bell-curve readers. Currently that means trope-heavy checkbox romance with plenty of explicit sex for women, and militaristic scifi for the relatively few men who still read, with a bit of overlap for formulaic thrillers and police procedurals.
This is possible in fiction, where the market for sexy romance seems insatiable.
But there are similar things happening in music and visual art. The audience for those is much smaller, and the barriers to entry much lower, so there's a perfect storm of mediocre people trying to sell their work on social media to a shrinking audience in a global free-for-all, while the scene is being eaten alive by generative AI. And a tiny, tiny number of global mega-artists get most of the attention, income, and marketing budgets.
The only subcultures are online, so they're much more diffuse and lack the lynchpin gatekeepers and networkers who curated and promoted the most interesting work.
Throwing funding at the arts is a band aid for this. It's a structural issue caused by a forced shift in values away from shared community towards compulsive individual hustle as a value in itself.
>and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
I'm too young to remember this for poetry, but it certainly was true for music, TV shows, and movies for long after it was true for poetry. People are still talking about The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, various highly-successful movies from the 60s-00s (Lord of the Rings for instance), TV shows like Game of Thrones, etc. However, I'd say it's less true today, but TV for instance seems to have lot of this still going on with people talking about various high-caliber shows like The Expense, Silo, etc. I think poetry simply went the way of theater: other art forms surpassed it in popularity, though it still has its niche audience: New York's Broadway is still quite popular. And people spend lots of money on music concerts.
Was music in the '60s and '70s better than music today? Probably not.
If you were able to time travel back to then and listen at some random time to a radio tuned to a pop station you'd hear a lot of OK songs, a smaller number of good songs and bad songs, and a few great songs. Just like if you listened to some stream of a wide selection of recent music.
Is music from the '60s and '70s that you are likely to hear today better than most recent music? Probably.
Listen to an oldies stream and it likely is to just include those songs from then that were great or good, and it will be drawing from several years.
Same thing happens with TV. Old sitcoms like "Frasier" are as good as the best being produced today. Same with even older shows like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "I Love Lucy". But there were a heck of a lot of other sitcoms from the same times that are almost forgotten.
With sitcoms the old sitcoms we might still see are probably more likely to be great than the old music we still hear today, because old sitcoms have an additional filter to get past. You'll probably only see them today if they had enough episodes to be worth syndication.
They typically show one episode a day and they want to be able to go several months before wrapping around. Even with having more episodes per year back then than we typically have now (~32 then, ~24 now) the show would have to last at least 3 years to get enough episodes for syndication. Many a show that was great or near great and would have become great in season 2 or 3 has been killed by its network for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the show.
(I no longer watch anything on Fox other than sports and reality shows because of that. After "Firefly", "Futurama", "Terra Nova", and "Lucifer" I learned my lesson. I don't care how great people say a Fox show is now, I will either wait until Fox cancels it and watch it on streaming if people tell me that it got a proper series finale, or I might consider watching entire seasons before that but only if those seasons ended at points that would be good stopping points. "Terra Nova" and "Lucifer" ended on huge cliff hangers).
>Was music in the '60s and '70s better than music today? Probably not.
Yes, it was absolutely better. This "it's just your age" thing is BS. The entire music industry back then was different; bands were discovered by record company agents, not manufactured by them. And Auto-tune didn't exist either, so if someone was a great singer, you knew it was real and not just computer-generated fakery like now.
Similarly, you can't say that music of the, say, 1890s, was just as good as music from the 1970s. They were fundamentally different: recorded music basically didn't exist in the 1890s.
What do you mean by cultural infrastructure? I think I agree with the general thrust of the argument but I’m fuzzy on the particulars.
For example, the video rental store has been replaced by a multitude of sources: Netflix et al, torrent sites, YouTube, Twitch. It’s never been easier to make a film and distribute it to a lot of people, yet I can’t deny a sense of loss from the demise of the video store. What is the difference here?
My hypothesis:
Lack of geographically local experts.
We've merged more and more into a megasociety. In a geographically distributed society, the power law for quality is more forgiving. You can be the best local band and make a living.
Now that we have ultra-efficient communications, there's less room for "mid-tier" art. Local art gets outcompeted by whatever the top stuff is among a much greater national or international population.
Because of this, there's also less of a breeding ground for maturing artists, or for experimental styles in isolated areas (think California surf rock, or NYC Salsa, etc). There's no place to go if you're not the best.
In one way that's true: An artist has to appeal to a global audience. A global audience does have a taste for local weirdness, but there's a lot less economic basis for locally weird things to spawn and germinate when every video goes online instantly. On the other hand, local weird shit blows up all the time on the internet into cross-cultural global phenomena. So it's not that it stopped existing, just that the economic model has changed.
Definitely an important factor. Industrial scale can wipe out diversity and with it subtlety, which in cultural terms means impoverishing artistic vocabulary and range.
My dim view is that it's just a rapacious monopolistic society. Why are there only three (four-ish) cell phone carriers in the US? Why are there only two app stores? Three (four-ish) major music platforms? The internet should have brought a diversity of choice that has failed to materialize because enforcement of monopoly laws in this space has been nascent and aggressively fought against.
> Local art gets outcompeted by whatever the top stuff is among a much greater national or international population.
It's the lack of access to infrastructure. Look at ticketmaster. You have to be this giant internationally recognized act to be able to afford the grift they're going to apply against you and your fans. The mid teir acts just can't access this space without financially or legally ruining themselves.
It's similar to the labor market. Monopolies _do_ make for more efficient consumer experiences. They completely _destroy_ the labor market to do this. Gains don't come from nowhere. It's no different for communications. Why are there only 6 major consumer ISPs? And look at who we let own some of them.
> there's also less of a breeding ground for maturing artists
I don't think that's true. There are cities where the venue spaces have been bought out and there are few places where these artists could draw a paying audience. It's not true everywhere though, and in those places, local artistry still thrives, but they run into the next problem...
> There's no place to go if you're not the best.
I think back to the 70s to 90s period of music. It was _incredibly rare_ that a new artist had a "good first album." It was usually barely tolerable, but you could see the kernel of something, something worth _investing_ in. Bruce Springsteen famously didn't make "good music" until his third album. Like anything else it takes time, experience, a little assistance, and long tours all across everywhere to build up the fan base.
Once the pipeline of Talent Agencies -> Production Companies -> Studio Companies -> Venue Ticketing got built you didn't need to do any of that anymore. You could literally grab 5 guys from a mall and _force_ them to be a hit in a few months. Being "the best" simply wasn't a factor anymore, they monopolized everything, why would they bother? Managing "the best" artists is a legal and marketing nightmare. Scumming up pretty girls and boys from malls and locking them down in embarrassing contracts is so much easier.
Anyways there are viable talent pipelines that still exist, but they need real investors, which they can only get if we break up the monopolies that prevent them from functioning somewhat properly, as they used to.
> enforcement of monopoly laws in this space has been nascent and aggressively fought against.
Monopoly laws in every space, since the ‘70s. Chicago School judges in the mid and late ‘70s changed the criteria for the government to pursue antitrust enforcement, so now it’s damn near impossible. The results were predictable.
> My dim view is that it's just a rapacious monopolistic society. Why are there only three (four-ish) cell phone carriers in the US? Why are there only two app stores? Three (four-ish) major music platforms? The internet should have brought a diversity of choice that has failed to materialize because enforcement of monopoly laws in this space has been nascent and aggressively fought against.
I think some of this aggregation is due to economies of scale, though.
> You could literally grab 5 guys from the mall and __force__ them to be a hit in a few months.
This is sort of a corollary to my hypothesis. Since we have a megasociety, everyone has access to music from everywhere, but limited time. There’s too much music being produced. So we now have a signaling game (advertising and marketing) to determine who people listen to. Signaling games will naturally be dominated by capital.
In terms of breeding grounds for local music, where are you thinking? Nashville?
You've ignored the fact that discovery is now a new service component that really didn't exist before. We can tag music and artists and we can automatically discover related music and artists very easily. All the major services do this. Think of an expanded and federated (all the way back to the artist) open source version of this.
There's no reason to think that the previous model somehow produced the most efficient way of "determining who people listen to." It was almost certainly suboptimal. It's no surprise then that this suboptimal model was more or less copied onto the internet and all new players bought out so no new model could be revealed.
The lack of available artistry and market for it extends through multiple levels, and in this case, right into the software stack that _should_ exist for artists to self publish and for listeners to automatically discover.
> You've ignored the fact that discovery is now a new service component that really didn't exist before. We can tag music and artists and we can automatically discover related music and artists very easily. All the major services do this. Think of an expanded and federated (all the way back to the artist) open source version of this.
This is a good point. We have gone from diffusion-constrained to search-constrained. No clue what to make of that. I would submit to you that the amount of time people have to consume art has not changed, and that improved search now pushes people to consume the globally best art rather than niche content. Are there any domains or platforms that you think do a good job of surfacing specific niche content? Or am I misunderstanding your point?
>There's no reason to think that the previous model somehow produced the most efficient way of "determining who people listen to." It was almost certainly suboptimal. It's no surprise then that this suboptimal model was more or less copied onto the internet and all new players bought out so no new model could be revealed.
It's not about efficiency. I think the current system is more efficient (hence economies of scale). It's just that the rent extraction/profits are concentrated among the platform owners rather than spread out among local venue owners and artists.
> The lack of available artistry and market for it extends through multiple levels, and in this case, right into the software stack that _should_ exist for artists to self publish and for listeners to automatically discover.
I agree it should be possible, the problem is setting up the incentives correctly.
> It's not about efficiency. I think the current system is more efficient (hence economies of scale). It's just that the rent extraction/profits are concentrated among the platform owners rather than spread out among local venue owners and artists.
Chiming in again. In some ways, this is "efficiency". Serving the globally best stuff is more efficient. The problem is we are trading exploration/variety for exploitation/efficiency. Reasonable minds may differ as to how that should be handled.
There was also something about scarcity driving exploration. You'd go to the video store for a certain movie, it wouldn't be available, so you'd grab something else. Now when you hear "X is on netflix" you go there and there are infinite copies, so you're never forced to explore. The only time it really happens is when your streaming service of choice doesn't have the specific thing you're looking for.
I remember the same thing happening in music stores. You'd go to buy a tape/CD and it wouldn't be in stock, but you'd be primed to buy one, so you just start browsing until you found something that looked interesting enough to buy.
The video store provides all the advantages of a physical place. Bookstores were probably more of a popular hangout spot than video stores, at least for me, but record stores were great for meeting like-minded people with deep knowledge of music. Video stores were at least similar in that the staff were often pretty happy to talk shop with you. My best friend from college worked at a Blockbuster and somewhat amazingly met the singer Pink there and got us invited to a party. That's the kind of thing that could almost be the plot of a movie and it can't happen browsing Netflix.
One day I will write the longest rant about "the academization of the arts"; today is not that day, but boy when it comes I will make lots and lots of enemies. It's a fight I am looking forward to, because I am passionate about the fine arts and I have some serious beef with the people that led to the current state of affairs.
Can't wait to read that, I'll gladly take up arms on your side.
The "academies" are mostly incubator for future bureaucrats, professors and bullshitters. I've seen so much talented artists get their spirits broken when they entered the world of Academics, where your art is less important than "He was a student of Mr. Z who was an apprentice of Mr. X which was a semi-relevant local artist".
I've worked with "digital art" teachers (famous academies) who didn't understand video formats, image formats, compression or had any taste in discerning what's good and what's bad.
I've been to art fairs where the most discussed thing is "price per square meter of a painting" instead of the actual emotional value itself. Fairs where most sought after items were "abstract spray of paint #3" style things by Academics who have lost all inspiration and are hard to differentiate between strip-mall furniture store 4.99$ paintings.
Complaining to these people gets you - "oh but you don't understand art".
Complaining to actually talented artists gets you the same visceral disgust I feel when seeing that shit.
the cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now
In many areas of the arts, the infrastructure you speak of was controlled by oligopolies: local broadcasters with allotted bandwidth, record distributors who only worked with certain labels, an insular book industry that favored certain types of literature and nonfiction and poetry, magazines which promoted a "cultural conversation" but overwhelmingly favored artists who happened to live in or near New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo.
Some great art came out of that environment, but there was a lot of garbage that made its way past the gatekeepers because of broken incentives, bias, and outright bribery.
Few artists made a living solely from their art. Almost everyone had a day job - Phillip Glass driving a taxi, Cormac McCarthy doing odd jobs, Gene Wolfe editing Plant Engineering magazine. And those are the ones who eventually hit escape velocity.
The interesting stuff was happening at the margins - the alternative weeklies you mentioned, the independent presses, the music scenes in second and third tier cities, the artists in remote locales driven to do what they needed to do and hopefully could connect with audiences, albeit small ones.
That's a very naïve and nostalgic retelling of history. Artists have always been very dependant on money, and art has been a very hard to access pursuit. I'd say the opposite is true: it is now more accessible than ever.
> you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician.
That is still true and I am not sure if it's any less true, than it ever was.
For one, a lot of musicians are playing more instruments (I suspect because instrument prices have fallen) so there's less need for a dedicated musician.
Also experimentation has gotten a lot cheaper: You can do a lot of recording at home. When you don't need to rent a studio at high rates, you don't need someone who can deliver in an hour.
Then, of course, there's the digitalization of music: You have virtual instruments and you have sample libraries at your disposal. Somebody makes and uses those – but usually not the studio musician.
What it comes down to is that more musicians can support themselves off of making music than ever before. This part is not a crises in the arts, not in general, or at all, but a shift in how the arts are created, where and who exactly a "studio musician" is today.
>You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.
If you work at a University are you really a full-time writer though, you do have classes to teach.
At any rate there is one other choice, which would be crime. If you're a good enough criminal you can spend little effort in your trade and still have plenty of time for reading and writing. And if you're caught and do time you can devote that time to literature. Crime also gives you a more interesting subject to write about than University life - it was good enough for Verlaine and Rimbaud.
This is of course half facetious, as you have to be somewhat determined to take that course, and probably also have some other problems.
when I was like 21 I read a piece of advice by Anna Wintour to aspiring couturiers - get a day job.
I have a day job as a programmer, it's pretty chill, lets me make music. And write code for more "artsy" stuff in my spare time, which I mentally liken to Renaissance painters painting portraits for money.
I'm considering going back to school for a maths PhD at some point, that would also be a pretty nice day job.
> Like your male or female co-worker might hear that such an such a poet was coming out with a new book, and buy it, and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
I do still occasionally read books based on word of mouth, they're just not "high" culture.
E.g., Dungeon Crawler Carl, or the Murderbot series.
I guess that puts me in the same camp as the commoners who were supposedly one of Shakespeare's target audiences.
There was never a possibility of making a living of poetry. In order to survive as an author, you need to make a bestseller list at least once (preferably, multiple times). Barring some rare exceptions, I don't think any book of poetry was ever best selling. In Eastern Europe, that was the lure of Communism for very many poets - the Communism government guaranteed them cushy upper-class lifestyle, in exchange for doing what they love, i.e. writing poetry (as long as it didn't criticize the system of course and, at least once in a while, writing on a theme decided by Ministry of Culture). Whereas they remembered how, under capitalism, they all needed jobs and poetry was just a hobby. That was true 100 years ago and is still true today.
Poetry sucks. short form video is a new form of art that is popular. I feel like so many of these takes confuse "things have changed since i was young" and "art is dead"
I think you made a good point with "short form video is a new form of art", but it's diluted by the "poetry sucks". Your very first words are doing what you accuse others of - not understanding specific media.
What i meant was to show that this person seems to think poetry going away is bad in some objective sense as opposed to just something they liked. Both are totally arbitrary opinions and have nothing to do with death of art or anything like that
art is subjective, you need to really think about it, and reflect on it, to engage with it and enjoy it at its greatest depths. For some, this exercise is part of the joy of art. It's like discovering new things, every time. Discovering and considering things in subjective art is almost addictive, and it's very fulfilling.
but that's a lot of mental energy. Intellectual laziness would prefer things be black and white, correct or incorrect, good or bad, and then once things are sorted into one of those binaries, lean back and stop thinking about it because it's now sorted. Once everyone's decided that the Rothko paintings are just big blocks of a single colour, they're easy to make and boring to look at, then there's no further thought needed.
I feel like generative AI art is kindof a culmination of this: the idea of artists and creative people deserving to live and be supported simply by the things they contribute to society in the form of art and humanities, because it isn't hard labour or a trade, is laughable to the point of genuine hostile animosity. It's hard to even describe it until you've experienced it. Seeing people get angry at artists or writers or creators and thinking them being paid for the art they create is unfair: they produce it like a cow makes milk, so why the hell should they be paid for what they'd be making anyway? And if an artist labours to create their art it's more valuable and "better" than someone who piles candy in a corner and writes a story about it resembling how their gay partner was slowly diminished by AIDS. Anyone can do that!
I wish I knew how better to instill appreciation of art and artists in people. Seeing AI generated picture enthusiasts laugh and jeer openly at the artists whose pieces comprised its dataset in the first place as useless and that they're going to starve now has left a bitter taste in my mouth.
I think you and share all of the same premises about art, and I'd love to get a drink and have a conversation... But: Please don't use Rothko as a negative example! Have you seen any Rothko pieces in person? They are by no means solid blocks of color (though some do look it in reproduction), and they grab my attention immediately. Like, they dominate any room they're in, and pull me back towards them over and over again. It's hard to articulate, but there's something both stimulating and restful about his canvases. Especially after walking through a gallery, or a city, where my visual senses can get overloaded, standing in front of a Rothko is like an immensely welcome psychic reset. I used to walk across the bridge to the Tate Modern specifically to go stand in the Rothko room for a while.
I realize that's all subjective taste, but I'm hardly the only person who reacts to him that way. You're right that lots of people assumed the secret was "hey, it's just large blocks of color", but none of his imitators produce anything like his effect on me. There's something else going on with his work.
I used Rothko as an example of a famous and in my opinion highly underrated artist that those who "hate art" love to use an example of "bad art" because "anyone could just do that". Of course his pieces are breathtaking and once you're aware of the process of how they're created it changes them forever for you.
Culture Crash makes this interesting point: Did you know there used to be widely read, culturally relevant, AND Nobel Prize worthy (like actual contenders to win), poets? Unimaginable now but true in living memory. They didn't even have to be attached to a University, financially speaking. Like your male or female co-worker might hear that such an such a poet was coming out with a new book, and buy it, and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
The general point of these books (summarizing a lot here) is that the cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now, and there isn't much left. At this point literature has been "captured" by the University, but it's for a good reason: you can't survive as a fiction writer without it. People complain "but they're so insular" but the truth is: they don't have an alternative. You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.
This is true of other industries too. Music: you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician. You might also be the guy who was the resident expert on classical music for the neighborhood at the store, who would recommend operas conducted by Karajan and the best recordings from Deutsche Grammophone (I remember those guys). Art: you could paint signs or design posters, back when there was a real demand. Writing: you could write for the alternative weeklies (I'd read those) or be a regular journalist, writing as little as one story a day. Movies: you could be a video clerk (I also remember this). And those 'subcultures' were incubators. Quentin Tarantino graduated from the video store in a sense. Who can follow him, if there are no video stores anymore?
So this crisis in nonprofit funding really is coming at the end of a much longer crisis in the arts in general. It should be seen in that context.