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I get that NYT has a viewpoint. I know about manufacturing consent. What I'm saying is, if you wanna catch the media serving capitalist aims, you picked a lame example. For your argument to make sense, the times would have to conciously benefit from this story. Does anyone think that the tiny percentage of financially succesful artists makes a dent in the labor pool for NYTs ownership? The impact to capitalism from someone quitting their job as a taxi driver to sell paintings is miniscule. Even on a sub concious level, this is probably on nobody's mind at the nyt board, never mind the editorial staff. A better explanation for this story: its the sort of middle brow gee whiz art stories nyt readers love to click on.

Your argument makes even less sense when you realize that artists who quit their dayjob are still part of the capitalist system, and continue to get exploited. History is ripe with examples of musicians getting screwed by a label or writers getting screwed by their publishers. Even idependent artists still work within the capitalist system and get taken advantage of. So even if nyt was part of a capitalist conspiracy, theres no reason for them to care if the artist has a job or not.

Thanks for quibbling over the semantics of freedom. Yes i know that id be more free if i could just make art all day and not work. Im not independently wealthy though. And we dont live in a socislist paradise. When i said freedom, i meant freedom from making money with art, and i thought that was understood. You cant deny that creative control with no paying audience you must answer to is one type of freedom.

Lastly, im not implying that having a job lets your art mirror society. Its possible to think outside of it. That has nothing to do with whether your employed or not. What it requires is imagination.