[banannaise]

Rephrased: Any artistic direction done in the interest of creating or increasing profits is overwhelmingly likely to be tasteless.

I don't think that's particularly controversial. Profitability doesn't imply tastelessness, but profit motive certainly does.

[bluGill]

I would argue that if you can't make a profit you have shown you are tasteless. If other people don't enjoy it enough to pay you, that says a lot about how out of step you are.

[i80and]

This would make a number of great artists of history "tasteless".

[bluGill]

A would agree with that for a number of well known artists often called great.

[cwnyth]

If I were to bet on whether the critical consensus or some random person on HN had no taste, I would certainly bet on the latter. This post reeks of "Am I wrong? No! It is the artists, critics, collectors, and community who are wrong!"

[bluGill]

There is no objective measure here. What i call good and bad is right for me and doesn't apply to anyone else-

wait - I though I was arguing for consensus here and everyone else was calling me wrong

[cwnyth]

Did I mix that up? Regardless of whoever it may be, taste is indeed subjective (de gustibus and all that jazz).

[yifanl]

Making profit with art and making art for profit are tangentially related topics at best.

[tauroid]

Saying "out of step" rather than "out of touch" seems like a bit of a Freudian slip.

[watwut]

The "only thing that matters are money" ideology at its peak.

[bluGill]

Money isn't all that matters but it is one of the few objective signs we have.

[banannaise]

Having a number doesn't make the number a good measure.

If all I have is a yardstick, and I'm trying to measure weight, then I would probably be much better served using a qualitative method than by trying to use the yardstick.

[NateEag]

Money is subjective. Like countries, it exists only in people's minds.

Its value comes from agreement by a large number of humans that it is valuable.

A stack of Benjamins would be nigh-valueless to people from 9th-century China.

[nradov]

Not at all. The actual value of money comes from violence. This is objective, not subjective. If you have a certain amount of taxable income in the USA (or subject to US legal jurisdiction) then you're required to pay tax in US dollars: the IRS won't accept Euros or gold or anything else. If you fail to pay then eventually IRS employees will seize dollars from your financial accounts, or seize other assets and sell them for dollars. And if you try to physically stop them then they'll arrest you, or even shoot you.

And to be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing. It's necessary to keep civilization working.

[NateEag]

A good point. Thank you.

The violence, once enacted, is an objective fact.

The threat of violence is still there only due to the collective subjective agreement that countries exist.

The IRS would have no functional power if Washington, D.C. and other major US cities were destroyed in a nuclear exchange.

I could imagine many citizens still choosing to pay taxes of some sort and/or respect the value of physical dollars in such a scenario, but it would likely not be due to fear of the federal government. Possibly fear of local police, though.

[red-iron-pine]

the only objective sign that it provides is that you objectively have a lot of money.

if I inherit $44 million dollars because I happened to fall out of the right vagina the only thing it symbolizes is that I got lucky -- I could be a fat, degenerate bastard underserving of anything.

ditto for lottery winners.

[bluGill]

there is always luck. For most we are not talking about such luck and can just say money is a result of hard work. So if/how you choose to spend it matters.

[saubeidl]

A true artist is ahead of the tastes of the common rabble.

[krapp]

The vast majority of artists, many of the best, are common rabble.

[saubeidl]

Not artistically, they aren't.

[krapp]

Art isn't an expression of class hierarchy, so phrases like "common rabble" don't really mean anything.

[muststopmyths]

aren't you then equating taste with popularity ?

not sure if that's a popular opinion. In which case it would be tasteless.

[bluGill]

There is no objective measure of taste. Popularity says that at least a lot of other people agree there is taste here.

[tavavex]

Popularity says that a lot of other people agree there is value there. While I'm not informed enough to say what 'taste' means exactly, the common understanding that seems to be present in this comment section is that it's not a direct proxy for goodness, usefulness etc, like what you imply. I think most would agree that there are tasteful things that aren't also mass-marketable immediately useful goods or services.

[dingaling]

Profit is surplus revenue, which means money that people paid you but which you didn't spend on improving your product, paying your staff better etc.

That's why making profit is sometimes seen as greedy, because it's money that could have been reinvested in the product.

Amazon in its early expansion phase never made a profit, because every cent was reinvested. And they didn't need to pay a cent of tax for that reason.

[nlitened]

Profit is “how much your whole is more valuable than the sum of parts it consists of”. If your taste is what makes it valuable, then more profits reflect more taste.

[rhetocj23]

Kinda. But also not true.

When music production was tightly controlled, the competition among labels produced some really, really great songs. Timeless type stuff.

I dont hear anything of that quality anymore.

Tradeoffs. They exist.