"When arts die, they turn into hobbies."

boing
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A contradiction in terms if ever there was one!

Oh, FFS, that one’s even worse. So “art” is supposedly a matter of image and identity, and basically never existed in the first place. This essay still falls prey to the populist fallacy of defining the trends of art production based upon high-profile examples, who are always a minority. Sure, classic art was funded by wealthy patrons - except that most artists didn’t have wealthy patrons, or even any patronage at all. Art isn’t, and has never been, something to do because you want to make lots of easy money. People who do create art have some societal incentive to earn money from their chosen activity, but there are always easier ways to earn much more.

And don’t even get me started on the lazy and presumptuous writing style of framing for me what “we” perceive.

This is why capitalists can be so agonizing to argue with - anything which hints to them that something can not or will not be commodified for their marketplace sends them into fits of existential crisis. Most artists don’t get paid, but since The Market Is All we don’t concern ourselves with those.

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Yes, the author’s views on art may or may not be a bit odd. Unfortunately it is hard to be sure.

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A lot of things become much more fun when your life and livelihood don’t depend on them.

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You’ve reminded me of a facepalm incident from many years ago.

I was on the board of a modern dance company. The artistic director was discussing a possible new piece involving live rap (this was back in the early 1990s). Another board member with no Humanities/Classics/literature training past high school made the claim that all rap was inferior to all poetry. He actually used Milton as his example: Milton would hate rap and would never want to be associated with it, therefore we shouldn’t either.

And of course, that board member made the same claim: he wasn’t racist at all, this was just fact.

This is funny because Milton created the English form of the sonnet because the traditional forms used by Romance languages like Italian and French simply didn’t work in the English language. He was keenly aware of how hard it is to use our language to create rhythm, rhyme, and sense that doesn’t sound stilted or contrived. He was the cutting-edge artist of his time. He would have been FASCINATED by rap, and impressed at the creativity and craftsmanship of many current rap artists.

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Artists have always had to eat. Without an eye to “consumerism” this would be difficult to do, which is probably why lots of artists came from independently wealthy, elite families.

I don’t think it’s really until Van Gogh that the conception of starving artists was really born.

I don’t know how wide a following they had in their literary form. Certainly not more than current literary fiction, I imagine, especially given the low literacy rates. Homeric bards giving public performance were probably more like rap artists, especially since their performances had substantially improvised flow.

He doesn’t say they’re not enjoyable in their own right. He says that part of the reason they are appreciated is because of a feeling they are superior. As someone who listens to classical music (hence my name here) and
reads literary fiction, I can’t say I disagree.

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I really think given what you just said there that you ought to read that article from The Atlantic a bit more closely. I think it agrees with you.

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This relates to the point I was making about populism. Why Van Gogh is an archetypal example of starving artist is because he is famous. Hardly any artists are famous. Most well know artists could be the wealthy ones because their social stature caused their work to be recognized. It might not follow to assume that this means most artists are wealthy. The opposite appears to be more accurate.

Many people remain surprisingly blind to this even when its explained in detail. For example, trends of most athletes or movies. People I talk with nearly always assume that this refers exclusively to those which are publicized in so-called “popular media” (which are actually owned and run by a small minority). The reality is that Hollywood movies and professional athletes make up less than 1% of either category, so the trends are based upon a sampling which is anything but representative. This is based upon the ideology of market significance, that these few examples are the only ones that matter. The truth is that they have less relevance to most people’s daily lives than the larger, mostly unknown majority.

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Yes, but people need to eat. I don’t know how non-famous artists pay their bills, or how much of their time is spent on their art. I suspect that, fairly or unfairly, the answers to these questions go a substantial way in most people’s minds about whether that person really is an artist or not.

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It’s hard to read closely because I find the style of writing painful. But I agree that their position and mine don’t explicitly contradict each other. But I think the author’s focus is odd in relying mostly upon shifting labels and identifications rather than process. I didn’t find it elucidating, but this could simply be because I am opinionated.

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Certainly the Elizabethans considered verse a major art, and Shakespeare’s plays have created a small industry that thrives today,

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Certainly the Elizabethans considered sophisticated verse a major art, and Shakespeare’s plays have created a small industry that thrives today,

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Look to me like this is exactly what chgoliz said. The point seems to be: “People like things because it makes them feel superior, rather than because these things are good.” Whether this is “part of the reason” or “the main reason” is a question of degree.

Of course, since the entire argument is based on this guy’s feeling, I am inclined to disagree. I read literary fiction and genre fiction. I find both enjoyable, and I am, in fact, hesitant to even separate the two. Furthermore, while I haven’t tried writing short stories since high school, I still enjoy reading them. I do not write poetry, yet I enjoy poetry readings.

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And who is to say what that is? Is there some sort of artistic etalon that will allow us to measure the merit of one art over another?

Perhaps the measure of whether an art is enjoyable or considered worthwhile is… if there are people who enjoy it or consider it worthwhile.

If not, not.

There might be a few people who hold up corn shock arranging as the pinnacle of achievement, but does that mean it is? Or isn’t?

I write (poetry) and I still can’t stand most of them. Where does one find these mythical, enjoyable beasts?

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It’s called “art” because art means “to be”.

Citation needed. “Art” as we are speaking of here comes from Latin “ars,” translated as “art or skill.” “Art” as in “thou art” comes from Old English “eart,” second-person singular conjugation of “wesan,” translated as “to be.” They are completely unrelated convergent linguistic evolution false friends.

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I’m told (for what that’s worth) that this is the reason that a parcel of land across from Dallas’ Northpark Mall remained undeveloped for so long. The owner of the land (who also happened to own the mall) put a couple of cows on it, and bingo, there’s his farm.

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I don’t think this is what he means unless he is full of self loathing:

In the course of numerous readings of my own published verse, I
gradually came to the conclusion that almost everyone in the audience at
a poetry reading is a poet or aspiring poet. My guess is that a
majority of people who read poetry also write poetry.

Its evident that poetry is at least important to poets. He may be saying that poets are delusional in thinking that their art has any objective value because it has no market value though. But even then this is confused because he then says:

Poetry in the twenty-first century is like pottery, woodworking, or the making of carrot carnations

But pottery and woodworking, and even making carrot carnations are more valuable today than they were a few years ago because of the renewed perceived value of craftmanship in a world where everything has become a commodity. He wants poetry to be at least as meaningful as tangible real world objects like handcrafted jewelery and ceramic pots (See etsy.com)

While I agree that listening to classical music can be a classist excercise, the underliying mechanism, using art to craft an identity is not derived from classical music theory or technique, I don’t think its controversial to say that among people who listen to rock, techno or rap there are groups who use taste in music as an identity marker.
Taking into account a growing inequality between the rich and the poor and a slowing of socio-economic mobility, its odd to single out a claim about “classism” in art like opera and ballet and then demote them in cultural heirarchy by drawing a line at popularity. He’s shooting an arrow and painting the target around it.

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related…


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It would appear that the author is making use of a semi-explicit ‘highbrow/lowbrow’ distinction in defining their list of minor arts. “Literary fiction” may, indeed, be gasping for life in the same ICU as opera; but “Fiction” still moves a lot of units, even if much of it is shlock. If anything, while it isn’t clear that authors are doing so well as Amazon’s content peons of tomorrow, fiction(and books in general) have held on surprisingly well against the continued improvements of glowing-screen-stuff entertainment.

Maybe I’ve just been tainted for life by some professors who (while they avoided autoparaodic enthusiasm for ‘deconstruction’) generally operated on the assumption that there are almost no cultural products so vacuous that they cannot be attacked with the same sort of analytical tools that you would use when dealing with The Canon Of Serious Literature; but I’m not 100% sure that there’s actually a nice, neat, rule of assignment that divides the ‘literary’ from the merely ‘fictional’.

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Thanks for my new band name!

Even having looked it up before, I never found any mention of the “eart” etymology, so I wrongly assumed that it and “ars” shared a common root.

That’s typical of the fascinating truth to be gleaned from contemporary market shenanigans. Art is as common as confetti in the streets, but food… Food doesn’t grow on trees, does it?

[quote=“bwv812, post:28, topic:50870”]I don’t know how non-famous artists pay their bills, or how much of their time is spent on their art. I suspect that, fairly or unfairly, the answers to these questions go a substantial way in most people’s minds about whether that person really is an artist or not.
[/quote]

Why would you know how other people pay their bills? I would be extremely surprised if the average person made their evaluation of artistic value based upon how a given artist acquired food, or paid their bills. Firstly, that information doesn’t tend to be available. Secondly, they would never have even heard of artists who aren’t visible in the marketplace, so no such evaluation of them as an artist would even occur.

Another populist factor is the notion that it could possibly even matter whether or not the average person considers a given practitioner to be an artist. Art being arguably a somewhat specialized activity, the artist would by default know more about what constitutes artistic work than a layperson. Not being familiar with the creative process, to outsiders it is mere commodity.

This, I think, is not the case. Many things cannot be commodities, but in a culture where market activity is construed as a measure of existence, only that which can be commodified can be recognized as real. Media which conveys social values too outre to be sold, or performances which are too difficult or ephemeral to be recorded could be examples. Since you can’t sell raw experience, media have tailored their output to allow for easier commodification,