| > At the same time, a part of me feels art has no place being motivated by money anyway. Perhaps this change will restore the balance. Artists will need to get real jobs again like the rest of us and fund their art as a side project. As someone who has experienced both the career paths of a full-time musical artist and technical employee in the tech ecosystem, I find this comment saddening, because it revolves around a highly prevalent way of thinking in our society that needs to die. Why shouldn't artists have their own career? Why wouldn't you consider this a "real job"? My experience as an individual artist is that it feels very much like being the founder of a company. You’re dealing with technical, administrative, logistical, marketing issues every day, and you’re required to wear many hats until you generate enough revenue to use external actors/hire a few people. With all due respect: best-case scenario, these lines might be fuelled by a form of untold jealousy; at worst, they reveal how deeply pessimistic and capitalist our worldview has become. Because such situations have long been observable in modern society, we listeners confuse this longitudinal data with empirical truth, when in reality it’s very much preserved by corporate interests and power dynamics within the music industry. Artists have long been the last agent of the music business to be paid, and usually get the smallest slice of the cake. This is mostly preserved by a handful of actors who benefit most from this situation. Enter:
1. Labels (including, but not limited to, majors) exploiting the complexity of music rights (master, publishing royalties, ancillary rights, etc.) and imposing harsh contractual conditions on artists.
2. Digital streaming platforms (DSPs) built on vastly unprofitable, VC-money-ridden business models and making up for it by squeezing every possible bit of revenue they can. The ever-persistent myth of the romantic, tortured artist who needs to live on skid row and experience dire living conditions to create the purest piece of art, devoid of any mercantilism is another problematic piece of the puzzle. Empirically, extreme precariousness throughout the art world leads to mental health issues I’ve experienced first-hand and observed with many colleagues. When you don’t have the physical or mental resources to produce art, because you’re living from hand to mouth and focused on making a buck on the side, it directly and negatively impacts your practice. A steady, albeit small, income goes a long way. But because gig-economy mechanisms and atomization of the artistic practice vastly profit the aforementioned actors (you could also throw in social networks, with their black-box, engagement-driven algorithmic updates), it stays the same. Bottom line, it doesn’t have to be this way. That the ad-tech bubble is about to burst, or that some startup relied way too much on free VC money to prolong its ill-thought-out business model should not have such a drastic impact on the vast majority of artists. And more importantly, citizens like you and I should have no part in perpetuating these toxic mentalities. Van Gogh was commercially unsuccessful during his lifetime and suffered from severe depression when he cut his left ear off; and here we are arguing this social model is the right one. My 2 cents. |
It is fundamentally another piece in the collapse of materialism and capital. Soon, all work will be machine-renderable, and what then? We will all be out of “jobs” and will need to rediscover what it means to be humans. A pursuit of experience, meditation, exploration, and significantly less tedious creation — it will be a radically different experience, and far more fundamental to our true nature, than what we experience now.
Me personally? I love to paint, write, and make video games. I love nature and would rather be hiking in remote terrain than pretty much anything else. But there is a lot of work to be done to make what I described in the previous paragraph a reality, and I have skills that can contribute to it, so I do that instead of what personally want. None of us are entitled to simply do what we want while most of us suffer and struggle. Some artists are skilled and lucky enough where they can make money. That bar is going to go a lot higher now with AI.
Artists should be compensated, but for whatever reason, fate would have it that work of the soul might involve acceptance of poverty. It isn’t about capitalism, it is about purity. I think we need universal basic income so that people can pursue their passions without concern of the finances. I also think that passionate people don’t care much about riches; and if they do, that occupies space in a mind that could otherwise be used for their art, and so someone else who properly uses that space will be more capable than them. This is why parasites can take so much from the top artists; they just don’t have the capacity left for that kind of bullshit.
The term “get a real job” might be harsh, but it simply means “get a job capital is interested in paying for”. This criteria constantly changes and AI is pushing it radically. Most people trudge through the shit show of that reality, just because someone calls themself an artist doesn’t make them exempt. I don’t agree with this reality so I would like to see it changed, but we cannot be offended by speaking about the way something is. This is the way it is. If we don’t like it, let’s change it.