Why Real Art is Priceless and Most Artists are Poor
The clash between artistic and business standards
Technological advances in the computer age eliminate middlemen and enable more and more people to produce and to publish paintings, songs, movies, and writings. It might seem clear, though, that this greater ease of entry to the market of content-creation is made irrelevant by the encroachment of capitalist values which makes it harder to earn a living as an artist. Specifically, the aim of seeking profit from work seems antithetical to the artistic concern about maximizing the work’s quality.
The Progressive Promise of Modernity
But the truth is that it was never easy to make a living as an artist, and only a minority could ever manage to do so. For most of the Christian theocratic period in Europe, for example, artists sold out not to private corporations but to the Church and to wealthy patrons. In the Middle Ages, there was no question of democratizing the fine arts; instead, the fine arts were meant to be impractical, because for centuries they suited the tastes of the Church censors and of the aristocratic patrons. You had to go through years of rigorous training under a master artist to learn to produce the kind of art that appealed to those elites.
