Comment by sorcerer-mar
7 days ago
> If you need incentive to pursue artistic mastery, you will never really be a true master.
Deploying fortune-cookie wisdom to defend against allegations of astounding ignorance of the real world is... a choice.
Which "true masters" didn't do do art commercially? According to your theory, not only should this list be of non-zero length, but it should include every master. So please tell me which ones.
An obvious example would be Van Gogh, who famously during his lifetime only sold a single painting.
I don't fully agree with the statement you quoted, as I think it overstates things a bit - there certainly are famous artists who not just lived of their work but sometimes were on permanent contracts. E.g. Haydn spent much of his career as music director for the Esterhazy family. Haydn also credited his relative isolation from other composers due to his position as part of the reason for his originality.
But at the same time, we see the vast majority of artists of all kinds not making much money. In the UK, the average full time author would do better as a fry cook at McDonalds if it was money they were after, for example.
A lot of these fields skew very heavily toward a very tiny sliver of the top, and while some of them are undoubtedly great artists, the correlation between the highest earners and most critically celebrated is rarely straightforward.
Furthermore, often the wealth comes after many of their great works, with the odds so long that very few people have a rational basis for going into it chasing the odds of a large payout. Chasing the hope of eeking out an existence, maybe.
Van Gogh spent his life failing to sell his artwork. I.e. he was commercially motivated, just failed.
None of your other points are relevant.
People get good at art when they dedicate absolutely obscene amounts of time to it. If you take away all commercial incentive to do so, people won't spend as much time doing that craft.
This is called basic incentives and it applies to artists too.
After a few of those failures, it stopped being rational to think he'd make money from his art, yet he persisted with his art.
Your argument is entirely backwards.
Artists who dedicate a lot of their time to art sometimes want to sell for whatever reason, sometimes commercial, often ego, but also a lot of the time are forced to spend some of their time trying to sell because they want to eat and would rather not take another job.
That doesn't mean making money was their primary or even a motivation for their art, but a reflection that money is a necessity to survive, and that if you make the art anyway there's often very little reason not to at least try to sell it.
It is not rational to assume that this mean that if the odds of finding a buyer becomes even much smaller that it will cause fewer people to make art, or even try to sell it, given that the choice to continue making art to sell it is already an emotional, irrational choice already.
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You don’t think there are? Then what do you care if masters go extinct and all masterworks are produced by AI? The end result is the same.
Give me examples please.
If you think the end state is the same, it's because you misunderstand the argument being made. Try being more curious and less fortune-cookie! Nobody said "making money from art is bad."
I have no examples.
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