Recently rereading William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" and I'm struck by his belief that certain art or memes are objectively good and destined for virality. I think both Gibson and this author are wrong. No content is intrinsically destined for success. There are countless amazing artists, available to anyone. Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes. If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them.
>Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes
So that's why I ain't seeing much of those lately. You sayin' someone left 'em on the table?
>If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them.
Yes. Meaning, if you're big, I simply do not wish to hear about you or what you have to express; you're simply the thing that ascribes to the money its value.
Relatedly, an ancient saying: "I do not happen to be a connoiseur of the different flavours of excrement".
The objective parts of quality (technical skill) are fairly easy to saturate, most serious artists do so, but it's not sufficient to be successful.
Objective quality is common, but it sounds like you've just defined subjective quality to exclude anything mainstream.
You're right that Gibson would not have defined quality and virality to be the same. I should have used "or" in that sentence. However, he still seems to believe that they depend on properties of the content: some things have broad appeal, some things have genuine quality, some things have neither or both, and their success depends on that. I think it's all a crapshoot.
Your definition, that most art (or even things in general) are of roughly the same quality above some bar of competency is... Difficult to defend.
There are things that are just better than others. Sometimes it's because they take much longer to make (time, materials etc). Other times it's because they go into a new direction (inventions, new genres). Not all things doing these are good. In fact generally, spending more time on something or trying new things results in overbaked garbage. It's genuinely rare and special to hit upon a combination of all three - competent, new, and with high investment put into it.
Just spend time thinking about airport novels, or the countless pop artists the music industry tries to push that get no traction. Or failed hollywood blockbusters. Quality matters.
Not of the same quality, just that the objective parts of quality have been mastered by many people. What sets art apart beyond that is individual taste. "Newness" is definitely subjective; it depends on what you've seen before (though it is correlated for people within a culture.)
I suspect that you criticize airport novels, pop music, cliched movies because they are similar to stuff you've seen before. (I hope that you've tried them, and aren't just criticizing them on the perception that they're lowbrow.) But people who hadn't seen them before could still enjoy them.
You eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant. I eat a bowl of oatmeal and I enjoy it just as much. What makes your meal better?
I understand the hypothetical argument that you could enjoy a simple meal, a simple life, etc. And there are many that do - but that doesn't mean some things aren't preferable to other things to some people. It just shows that people's preferences are different.
But generally, we see that given the choice, people do rate art differently. That people prefer certain things to other things more often than chance. Some of it is perhaps cultural, sure. But does that really undermine the point? The trick of making good art/products whatever is literally hitting a thing a large group of people like. It's not cheating to try and make people of your culture, or any specific culture or subculture, like it. That's actually kinda most of the point.
You really can distinguish between a competent but otherwise uninteresting thing and something truly special by just like... Putting it out there. Many things that were widely distributed were not especially well liked, and others remain literal classics. Why?
Sounds like you mostly agree. We're not a monoculture. Mainstream culture is a compromise - consists of things that many people like, but not many people's favorite.
It's a little silly to say "mainstream is crap! Why doesn't the better stuff rise to the top?" It's because people don't agree on what's better.
Lately when I watch a video on YouTube, every single one of the recommended videos is AI slop. Not sure what the next 5 years holds. It does make me question the argument that bad AI generated content is equivalent to bad human generated content. And they all have hundreds of thousands of views, another mystery.
A dirty secret is the algorithms can't differentiate real users from fake.
The universe of content is so large now, if you don't start with a fake audience you go nowhere. Slop rises to the top, because slopfarms can spend all their money on the farming rather than the content. It's even worse if you look at short form video because it's trivial to clone anything that went viral and alter the message, no real human or attractive 20 year old American required.
If content requires a real human network for transmission, the cost of transmitting slop is your own reputation within your network. A bunch of bots circle jerking each other can't sell concert tickets or much of anything.
The idea that some artist is exceptionally talented and good and they deserve to be famous or sell out concerts is a myth. There are so many exceptionally skilled singers, songwriters, and musicians that are all unknowns. Many who are more talented than (insert famous living or dead pop star here.)
I think this is part of the reason why the AI ruins creativity is overblown. The music-art-talent pyramid always meant a tiny percent at the top walked away with all of the money. Look at the numbers from the last screen actor's guild strike, the majority of actors earn at or below minimum wage. It's a new world, and the old one people believe deserves to continue perpetually existed in but a blink of human civilization.
Modern payola. Fascinating but not entirely unpredictable. I’m excited by the focus on hyper-local, authenticity is the scarce resource. Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”. No amount of algorithmic magic can create that experience.
> Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”.
Agreed 100%, which is why my local city's (Brisbane) post-rock scene of the 2000s-2010s was so important to me
But it's also why despite being phenomenal musicians, they all worked normal jobs (even those related bands who were indie-rock enough to be played on Triple J even though they weren't) and they've all stopped playing because touring loses money.
I will always have the music and the years of amazing experiences and the photos of the shows I took, but hyper-local means niche and niche means unsustainable, I think.
I have found that the great artists you've heard of tend to also be great marketers, or at the very least found great marketers.
I know quite a few extremely talented artists who could never crack the marketing, and so nobody else has ever heard of them. Even local fame requires a fair bit of hustle. Talent alone doesn't get you there.
Isn’t this the point of the unique & real discovery process that actual connoisseurs of an art form participate in? We find you (great artist), because you are brilliant at your art but terrible at marketing.
Then you might become popular because
1) we (the finders, the influencers) talk about you (I mean personally here, friend to friend, in person, not social media) and
2) if your art has broad appeal, it just needed the marketing. word of mouth marketing is the most authentic kind so of course it’s being faked!
There are many artists that I love that “no one has ever heard of” and that’s fine! At some point, some of them will make something with broad appeal and it’ll catch on.
There’s money at stake so of course people are trying to juice the process, but that’s been going on for a very long time, hence my original reference to payola (pay to play on radio) which started in the 1930s!
None of this payola bullshit takes anything away from the true talent producing amazing art today! It just means, as it always has, that if you want the good stuff you have to do your own research. Most are too lazy and that’s fine! They have other interests. But the art form itself does not suffer because there exist grifters who distort mass perception. Connoisseurs are less interested in mass perception.
As a counterpoint to my own argument above — the Ramones made more money selling T-shirts; every artist must market somehow; so yeah it’s definitely more complicated, I am presenting an oversimplified view.
Not at all. Saying something like that is the loudest signal for how out of touch you are with how audiences are made.
From the article:
> "...it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”
What is this trying to say? For every 1 person who thinks about truth in some independent way, I don't care if it's spiritual or because they do scientific tests for what the best music is or all of this other stuff; there are 19 people who are, "LIKES = TRUTH".
Are you getting it? That has nothing to do with payola or authenticity or scarcity or whatever. You have no idea anyway, you've never had to make a creative product. Likes = truth. Authenticity is the seeming unlikelihood that social media content authors are bought and sold. It's the OPPOSITE of what you think. It is the OPPOSITE of payola. And look, they're right. The vast majority of opinions on TikTok are not paid for. This is the OPPOSITE of radio.
It doesn't surprise me at all that this is going on. There are lots of social media fan pages that are run by real people who post real content 99% of the time but are willing to post promo material for a fee. Usually that fee is pretty high, easily $100-500 depending on the account's follower count, with different price points for how long it stays up (pay more for a permanent post, pay less and it gets deleted after X number of hours). It's really effective because those accounts already have a well-established presence and function as tastemakers.
Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right.
It would be nice if that were true.
AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might.
Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
I believe that everyone deserves food housing and and security regardless of what they do or don’t do professionally. I have no logical argument only a moral one, which I sense would not be sufficient to convince you.
Nobody has an intrinsic right to anything, but I believe art makes the world a much nicer place to live in, inspiring people to behave and advance society in more direct ways.
It’s hard or impossible to fairly select people, because someone has to produce food, shelter, etc. But I believe society should strive to allow more people to spend little enough time and effort in other work so they can devote themselves to art and other creative pursuits.
Software engineers should be asking themselves that same question day in and out. All know workers actually. The cost to produce art has dropped to zero. The cost to get knowledge on a topic - effectively zero. The cost to write basic software - effectively zero. The cost to produce today’s software will never be higher than today. In six months the chances that it’s significantly cheaper to do so are very high.
The cost to produce an image has dropped to pretty much zero, but whether an image is 'art' is a question people have been struggling with for a long, long time. Art is usually considered to be the expression of something more meaningful than just making a picture, and in order to express something as a work of art you need to live, feel, and experience that thing (or a proxy of that thing.) There's a reason why we have entire art movements called things like "impressionism"; that's the artist creating what they believe impressed something on themselves, and trying to transfer some of that feeling on to the viewer of their artwork.
That is entirely missing in AI generated artwork.
The problem for artists is that very few people care about that aspect of art, and just want something nice to hang on a wall.
I am on the side of humanity here, but people don't pay for art. People pay for status, consumption, image and authenticity. But commercial art consumers, where most artists make a living, ie ad agencies, game studios etc, they actually don't give a shit about any of that. Some do, you can probably think of some, but they are the notable minority. Most don't, most are just out here to make money. They begrudgingly pay artists, and will love the day they can stop (some already have stopped)
Can we see that in their output? Absolutely, but if it doesn't affect their bottom line they will not care.
Anyway, to the GPs point, that is true for software in a much larger way. Nobody ever cared about the soul and craft of software except the developers. The moment we can be replaced for cheaper, it will be nothing but business.
>I am on the side of humanity here, but people don't pay for art.
Man, maybe you don't hang out with enough artists. It's true, people typically don't make the equivalent of a tech salary for art, but people absolutely pay for art, and artists are able to not only survive, but have the capacity to thrive.
I get what you're saying, and for ad agencies, game studios, etc. that's always been the case (I remember when office supply stores sold CD-ROMs full of Clip Art) All of the sound effects in Doom were from commercially available sample libraries. And this isn't even touching on "gallery scene and art auctions as money laundering facilities" side of things.
I get the impression that most of the people who post about this topic in tech circles are general consumers, already primed for slop by mass manufacture and pop culture. But even through that lens, "people don't pay for art" falls flat - looking at what people pay for Star Trek prop replicas, or buying into the now very diverse Disney ecosystem. Now, a lot of those kinds of folks might be more prone to slurping AI slop (Hey Gemini turn me into a Funko Pop!) but there are still tons of people who value artists and their artistry. I suspect you're just not among those people.
Hey fair criticism, I am not in the typical tech circle but I am not surrounded by artists making money either.
Maybe a better way to phrase my point would be "(companies) pay for output, not artistry" which is to say you can remove the artistry, and still sell it to (companies).
People making a living from music or commissioned art in their style and under there name are pretty lucky in my experience.
Sure i think i meant more consumer art. Mass produced art. The cost to take a professional level photograph from before 2010 is effectively zero now as well.
But photography as art still obviously exists. It’s just much harder to get paid for it.
I think that AI isn't the only thing exacerbating this issue. More people are doing artistic like things as hobbies. The internet makes it easier to learn and the cost of entry has gone down - paints, canvases, brushes, guitars, pianos, film equipment, the low end has gone up in quality and down in price.
I do some painting and I've met quite a few local artists. Some are amazing and some not so much. I haven't met anyone making a living from it though, not the creative stuff anyway. A couple of them do make a living by doing commercial work. One friend, who seems to try the hardest, does book illustrations, runs classes, prints and sells her own work, and makes a loss every year so is supported by her partner, who is a builder.
There are two art galleries in town. I go to both regularly. The work has never been flying off the shelves. And some of it deserves to.
None of the above has anything to do with AI. It was the same before AI, and AI doesn't paint physical pictures anyway. I've seen some digital art prints but they're really not popular for whatever reason.
To answer your question then: my argument is that most artists don't expect to earn a living from it at all. And if more people are engaged in creation (not a bad thing) then it would logically follow that there is less chance of making money.
Probably the most tragic thing in my opinion is that if I visit the art exhibition for my local town, the artwork on display is wonderfully varied in quality, style and imagination, and when I visited a national gallery recently displaying the works of modern artists who have "made it" to that level, it was all absolute shite. Actual technical ability seems to be being relegated to poverty artists.
>Probably the most tragic thing in my opinion is that if I visit the art exhibition for my local town, the artwork on display is wonderfully varied in quality, style and imagination, and when I visited a national gallery recently displaying the works of modern artists who have "made it" to that level, it was all absolute shite. Actual technical ability seems to be being relegated to poverty artists.
The artist becomes the artwork. The artifice here is precisely in "making it", in the act of convincing others of the value of the piece.
It's an acquired taste; I agree with you that not all people appreciate it. But surely, at the end of the pipeline, all this money must buy something of value?
And with passively consumable art such as music (which you can have playing in the background while looking at something else) it's that much easier. IIRC Blixa Bargeld predicted Spotify decades ago. Music on tap - like the power line and water mains; and that's all.
The problem is it's only whomever curates these spaces that needs to be persuaded. And they're hardly thrumming with people for all the millions they get in funding.
> Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right.
Comments like yours seem to be written with the unspoken assumption that everyone's life should be hard unless they can please the market, which technology makes increasingly difficult. It's deeply anti-human.
> AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might.
Is that news to anyone? But mid people exist, they worthy people, and they need to eat. AI is leading us to a dystopia where, unless you're in the top 0.1% of talent, the market has no use for you. And guess what happens to you then?
> Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
Because that was the last promise the tech bros made: our tech will replace you, then you get to be an artist, be creative! Now it will take your creative job, and free you up for draining monitoring tasks and manual labor.
People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly. I can’t just say that I’m a neurosurgeon because I want to be one. There has always been reward for merit and suffering for lack of merit.
> There has always been reward for merit and suffering for lack of merit.
But conflating merit with economical value is very recent invention.
> Nothing “anti human” about social Darwinism
It didn't arise until rise of capitalism and bourgeoise (lack of) morality. For most of human history, and among countless cultures, social Darwinism wasn't the case.
I am under the impression that for most of human history, the ability and willingness to inflict violence was what determined the social hierarchy. Would that not be the reason that almost all tribes were patriarchal?
It seems to be a very, very recent phenomenon that simply selling goods and services can elevate one in the hierarchy, due to the advent of legal systems and policing (e.g. women’s rights).
The social Darwinists that ran with nature red in tooth and claw and took survival of the best fitted to mean the physically fittest and most aggressively dominant win are the ones responsible for your impressions.
>As most things people today believe, this is not really true, at least not in such universal way as usually implied.
Might makes right is a rule of nature, is it not? Native Americans didn't choose to be moved onto reservations, enslaved people didn't choose to be enslaved, and colonized cultures did not choose to be colonized. And the ones making those choices always had the upper hand.
>There is no data to assert that.
What data could there be? It's not like the male leaders are going to write governing documents that state women will have fewer rights than men because we believe they will not be able to put up a sufficient fight. But you put the facts together that it was nearly ubiquitous around the world, and women are physically weaker than men, and women would not choose to have fewer rights, then what other conclusion can be had?
>People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly.
lol, lmao even.
In America at least, people pay for branding, and to give the impression that they're of a higher standing than they are - whether or not what they're buying is quality. Whether that's someone deeply in debt sporting Luis Vuitton, or a US President putting gold-painted foam ornamentation on the walls of the oval office.
When it comes to the arts, or boutique fashion, or small scale manufacturing, people also pay for parasocial reasons - a variation on the branding angle. Storytelling about the founder, or the people doing the work, pictures of the space where a thing is being made, will give potential buyers a sense that they're paying for authenticity. That's why there are so many garbage ads on social media of a twenty-something talking about the old "one weird trick" that changed their routine... just so they can dropship you some garbage from Aliexpress with a 300% markup.
I share the same opinion that, just because someone is or wants to be an artist, doesn't mean they deserve to make a living wage out of it. But I'm not a capitalist, far from it. I actually think people shouldn't have to work at all if they don't want to, but we're just not at all there yet.
From experience, this seems to be a very unpopular opinion. Everyone see themselves as hard working, and hate lazy people. But since a few years ago, all of the sudden, and mostly in relation to AI, everyone thinks all artists deserve to make a living. I find this hypocritical.
If you're not providing enough value for others to give you money, that's just how things are, artist or not. Too bad the mediocre work of a machine is good enough. The day the system changes, and it will, will be for everyone, so no one is required to provide value to be able to feed themselves. Artists are not special just for declaring themselves an artist.
>Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right.
Yeahp, it's pure ideology.
In contemporary civilization, the role of creator of shared aesthetic constructs (artist) is left to an elect few. This is, on the whole, a reduction in average individual capacity.
So how about this instead: anyone making a living should be making art, as if it's some sort of obligation.
The media technologies of the XX century (recording, photography, motion photograpy) made it that much easier to be audience, and that much pointless to be artist.
This effectively robbed the common person of any reason to participate in the collective meaning-making process that is art. Eventually this was substituted by the clicktivism, the dogpiling, and all that. If you are never permitted to develop a sense of scale beyond the ouroborically narcissistic, participating social media fills a much similar psychological niche, to you, as influencing people through creative media.
Those who aspire to star status must first sacrifice a fixed amount of integrity to reproducing the kayfabe. Speakers of dead balamatomic languages may be wise to observe induction into "artist" status by humiliation-transfer - those natives were so dumb they thought they had to show publically how it's done at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBaC0IRc1Bk
>Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
Anyone [cut] is owed a living [cut]; done.
No person asks to be born; much of "what you are" and "what your function in society is" is involuntary and immutable; nobody is owed a useful function; nobody is owed a meaning.
But, through art, one can make one's own meanings, and share them in a voluntary way; as opposed to resource-constrainments (money) which is at its root an instrument of coercion.
That's the thing about art which has always terrified the money people. Eager beavers that they are, they've built (well, more like had us build for 'em) these whole elaborate semi-sensible institutions for reducing art to a special ritual for emitting high-denomination banknotes (paintings, album profits, walking banknotes in the form of performing artists who "made it big (sus)" - always loved the honesty in how the Japanese call their pop stars literally "idols"...)
> One day after this piece went up, Chaotic Good made significant changes to their website — including pulling the “Narrative Campaign” section completely.
I checked the Internet Archive but I cannot access any of the archived versions. Apparently the website uses JS to display its content and the IA can't deal with it. Internet searches show that the page existed, though, so I'll take the content deletion as proof.
I'd like to know more about "Chaotic Good Projects" [1]. Isn't it fascinating that they so openly do "UGC" (user-generated content) and "Fanpages" even though they are neither users nor fans, but paid consultants. And even openly displaying the musical acts they performed these dark-pattern services for.
Not sure how this is ethically different from industry plants or payola. Things which have been in the industry since the dawn of time. Astroturfing with fake fans is just the natural next step due to how easy it is. Back in the day some labels would drum up fake engagement by handing out tickets to influential people, paying certain people to go, and things like that.
>destined for virality
Antonyms, in my book.
>Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes
So that's why I ain't seeing much of those lately. You sayin' someone left 'em on the table?
>If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them.
Yes. Meaning, if you're big, I simply do not wish to hear about you or what you have to express; you're simply the thing that ascribes to the money its value.
Relatedly, an ancient saying: "I do not happen to be a connoiseur of the different flavours of excrement".
Objective quality is common, but it sounds like you've just defined subjective quality to exclude anything mainstream.
You're right that Gibson would not have defined quality and virality to be the same. I should have used "or" in that sentence. However, he still seems to believe that they depend on properties of the content: some things have broad appeal, some things have genuine quality, some things have neither or both, and their success depends on that. I think it's all a crapshoot.
There are things that are just better than others. Sometimes it's because they take much longer to make (time, materials etc). Other times it's because they go into a new direction (inventions, new genres). Not all things doing these are good. In fact generally, spending more time on something or trying new things results in overbaked garbage. It's genuinely rare and special to hit upon a combination of all three - competent, new, and with high investment put into it.
Just spend time thinking about airport novels, or the countless pop artists the music industry tries to push that get no traction. Or failed hollywood blockbusters. Quality matters.
I suspect that you criticize airport novels, pop music, cliched movies because they are similar to stuff you've seen before. (I hope that you've tried them, and aren't just criticizing them on the perception that they're lowbrow.) But people who hadn't seen them before could still enjoy them.
You eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant. I eat a bowl of oatmeal and I enjoy it just as much. What makes your meal better?
But generally, we see that given the choice, people do rate art differently. That people prefer certain things to other things more often than chance. Some of it is perhaps cultural, sure. But does that really undermine the point? The trick of making good art/products whatever is literally hitting a thing a large group of people like. It's not cheating to try and make people of your culture, or any specific culture or subculture, like it. That's actually kinda most of the point.
You really can distinguish between a competent but otherwise uninteresting thing and something truly special by just like... Putting it out there. Many things that were widely distributed were not especially well liked, and others remain literal classics. Why?
It's a little silly to say "mainstream is crap! Why doesn't the better stuff rise to the top?" It's because people don't agree on what's better.
If content requires a real human network for transmission, the cost of transmitting slop is your own reputation within your network. A bunch of bots circle jerking each other can't sell concert tickets or much of anything.
The idea that some artist is exceptionally talented and good and they deserve to be famous or sell out concerts is a myth. There are so many exceptionally skilled singers, songwriters, and musicians that are all unknowns. Many who are more talented than (insert famous living or dead pop star here.)
I think this is part of the reason why the AI ruins creativity is overblown. The music-art-talent pyramid always meant a tiny percent at the top walked away with all of the money. Look at the numbers from the last screen actor's guild strike, the majority of actors earn at or below minimum wage. It's a new world, and the old one people believe deserves to continue perpetually existed in but a blink of human civilization.
Agreed 100%, which is why my local city's (Brisbane) post-rock scene of the 2000s-2010s was so important to me
But it's also why despite being phenomenal musicians, they all worked normal jobs (even those related bands who were indie-rock enough to be played on Triple J even though they weren't) and they've all stopped playing because touring loses money.
I will always have the music and the years of amazing experiences and the photos of the shows I took, but hyper-local means niche and niche means unsustainable, I think.
And then commerce is commerce, and you make money and more money means you did something good.
And then you put the two together and it’s the same shit we’ve seen for thousands of years. tbh no surprises! This is all as expected.
There’s still phenomenal live music in every city I’ve ever visited, to the present day. Just go out and find it, it’s not hard!
Support live local music
I know quite a few extremely talented artists who could never crack the marketing, and so nobody else has ever heard of them. Even local fame requires a fair bit of hustle. Talent alone doesn't get you there.
In the real world there is no If You Build It They Will Come, you've got to get the word out
Isn’t this the point of the unique & real discovery process that actual connoisseurs of an art form participate in? We find you (great artist), because you are brilliant at your art but terrible at marketing.
Then you might become popular because 1) we (the finders, the influencers) talk about you (I mean personally here, friend to friend, in person, not social media) and 2) if your art has broad appeal, it just needed the marketing. word of mouth marketing is the most authentic kind so of course it’s being faked!
There are many artists that I love that “no one has ever heard of” and that’s fine! At some point, some of them will make something with broad appeal and it’ll catch on.
There’s money at stake so of course people are trying to juice the process, but that’s been going on for a very long time, hence my original reference to payola (pay to play on radio) which started in the 1930s!
None of this payola bullshit takes anything away from the true talent producing amazing art today! It just means, as it always has, that if you want the good stuff you have to do your own research. Most are too lazy and that’s fine! They have other interests. But the art form itself does not suffer because there exist grifters who distort mass perception. Connoisseurs are less interested in mass perception.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473673
From the article:
> "...it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”
What is this trying to say? For every 1 person who thinks about truth in some independent way, I don't care if it's spiritual or because they do scientific tests for what the best music is or all of this other stuff; there are 19 people who are, "LIKES = TRUTH".
Are you getting it? That has nothing to do with payola or authenticity or scarcity or whatever. You have no idea anyway, you've never had to make a creative product. Likes = truth. Authenticity is the seeming unlikelihood that social media content authors are bought and sold. It's the OPPOSITE of what you think. It is the OPPOSITE of payola. And look, they're right. The vast majority of opinions on TikTok are not paid for. This is the OPPOSITE of radio.
sounds like pop culture = art
which is obviously not true
"Clap along, if you feel that happiness is the truth..." Then one of those days someone comes along and claps back.
It would be nice if that were true.
AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might.
Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
It’s hard or impossible to fairly select people, because someone has to produce food, shelter, etc. But I believe society should strive to allow more people to spend little enough time and effort in other work so they can devote themselves to art and other creative pursuits.
The cost to produce an image has dropped to pretty much zero, but whether an image is 'art' is a question people have been struggling with for a long, long time. Art is usually considered to be the expression of something more meaningful than just making a picture, and in order to express something as a work of art you need to live, feel, and experience that thing (or a proxy of that thing.) There's a reason why we have entire art movements called things like "impressionism"; that's the artist creating what they believe impressed something on themselves, and trying to transfer some of that feeling on to the viewer of their artwork.
That is entirely missing in AI generated artwork.
The problem for artists is that very few people care about that aspect of art, and just want something nice to hang on a wall.
Can we see that in their output? Absolutely, but if it doesn't affect their bottom line they will not care.
Anyway, to the GPs point, that is true for software in a much larger way. Nobody ever cared about the soul and craft of software except the developers. The moment we can be replaced for cheaper, it will be nothing but business.
Man, maybe you don't hang out with enough artists. It's true, people typically don't make the equivalent of a tech salary for art, but people absolutely pay for art, and artists are able to not only survive, but have the capacity to thrive.
I get what you're saying, and for ad agencies, game studios, etc. that's always been the case (I remember when office supply stores sold CD-ROMs full of Clip Art) All of the sound effects in Doom were from commercially available sample libraries. And this isn't even touching on "gallery scene and art auctions as money laundering facilities" side of things.
I get the impression that most of the people who post about this topic in tech circles are general consumers, already primed for slop by mass manufacture and pop culture. But even through that lens, "people don't pay for art" falls flat - looking at what people pay for Star Trek prop replicas, or buying into the now very diverse Disney ecosystem. Now, a lot of those kinds of folks might be more prone to slurping AI slop (Hey Gemini turn me into a Funko Pop!) but there are still tons of people who value artists and their artistry. I suspect you're just not among those people.
Maybe a better way to phrase my point would be "(companies) pay for output, not artistry" which is to say you can remove the artistry, and still sell it to (companies).
People making a living from music or commissioned art in their style and under there name are pretty lucky in my experience.
But photography as art still obviously exists. It’s just much harder to get paid for it.
I do some painting and I've met quite a few local artists. Some are amazing and some not so much. I haven't met anyone making a living from it though, not the creative stuff anyway. A couple of them do make a living by doing commercial work. One friend, who seems to try the hardest, does book illustrations, runs classes, prints and sells her own work, and makes a loss every year so is supported by her partner, who is a builder.
There are two art galleries in town. I go to both regularly. The work has never been flying off the shelves. And some of it deserves to.
None of the above has anything to do with AI. It was the same before AI, and AI doesn't paint physical pictures anyway. I've seen some digital art prints but they're really not popular for whatever reason.
To answer your question then: my argument is that most artists don't expect to earn a living from it at all. And if more people are engaged in creation (not a bad thing) then it would logically follow that there is less chance of making money.
Probably the most tragic thing in my opinion is that if I visit the art exhibition for my local town, the artwork on display is wonderfully varied in quality, style and imagination, and when I visited a national gallery recently displaying the works of modern artists who have "made it" to that level, it was all absolute shite. Actual technical ability seems to be being relegated to poverty artists.
The artist becomes the artwork. The artifice here is precisely in "making it", in the act of convincing others of the value of the piece.
It's an acquired taste; I agree with you that not all people appreciate it. But surely, at the end of the pipeline, all this money must buy something of value?
And with passively consumable art such as music (which you can have playing in the background while looking at something else) it's that much easier. IIRC Blixa Bargeld predicted Spotify decades ago. Music on tap - like the power line and water mains; and that's all.
The problem is it's only whomever curates these spaces that needs to be persuaded. And they're hardly thrumming with people for all the millions they get in funding.
Comments like yours seem to be written with the unspoken assumption that everyone's life should be hard unless they can please the market, which technology makes increasingly difficult. It's deeply anti-human.
> AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might.
Is that news to anyone? But mid people exist, they worthy people, and they need to eat. AI is leading us to a dystopia where, unless you're in the top 0.1% of talent, the market has no use for you. And guess what happens to you then?
> Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
Because that was the last promise the tech bros made: our tech will replace you, then you get to be an artist, be creative! Now it will take your creative job, and free you up for draining monitoring tasks and manual labor.
Why is it anti-human to suggest that an underwater basket weaver should not make the same amount of money as a neurosurgeon?
Because that's a hyperbolic exaggeration to make you feel fine about ignoring the plight of others?
The machine should serve society, society shouldn't serve the machine. Unfortunately, what we have is far closer to the latter.
Nothing “anti human” about social Darwinism
But conflating merit with economical value is very recent invention.
> Nothing “anti human” about social Darwinism
It didn't arise until rise of capitalism and bourgeoise (lack of) morality. For most of human history, and among countless cultures, social Darwinism wasn't the case.
Peak ideology, btw.
I am under the impression that for most of human history, the ability and willingness to inflict violence was what determined the social hierarchy. Would that not be the reason that almost all tribes were patriarchal?
It seems to be a very, very recent phenomenon that simply selling goods and services can elevate one in the hierarchy, due to the advent of legal systems and policing (e.g. women’s rights).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
They're very much a fork from the Alfred Russel Wallace / Charles Darwin theory of natural selection.
As most things people today believe, this is not really true, at least not in such universal way as usually implied.
> Would that not be the reason that almost all tribes were patriarchal?
There is no data to assert that.
Might makes right is a rule of nature, is it not? Native Americans didn't choose to be moved onto reservations, enslaved people didn't choose to be enslaved, and colonized cultures did not choose to be colonized. And the ones making those choices always had the upper hand.
>There is no data to assert that.
What data could there be? It's not like the male leaders are going to write governing documents that state women will have fewer rights than men because we believe they will not be able to put up a sufficient fight. But you put the facts together that it was nearly ubiquitous around the world, and women are physically weaker than men, and women would not choose to have fewer rights, then what other conclusion can be had?
lol, lmao even.
In America at least, people pay for branding, and to give the impression that they're of a higher standing than they are - whether or not what they're buying is quality. Whether that's someone deeply in debt sporting Luis Vuitton, or a US President putting gold-painted foam ornamentation on the walls of the oval office.
When it comes to the arts, or boutique fashion, or small scale manufacturing, people also pay for parasocial reasons - a variation on the branding angle. Storytelling about the founder, or the people doing the work, pictures of the space where a thing is being made, will give potential buyers a sense that they're paying for authenticity. That's why there are so many garbage ads on social media of a twenty-something talking about the old "one weird trick" that changed their routine... just so they can dropship you some garbage from Aliexpress with a 300% markup.
From experience, this seems to be a very unpopular opinion. Everyone see themselves as hard working, and hate lazy people. But since a few years ago, all of the sudden, and mostly in relation to AI, everyone thinks all artists deserve to make a living. I find this hypocritical.
If you're not providing enough value for others to give you money, that's just how things are, artist or not. Too bad the mediocre work of a machine is good enough. The day the system changes, and it will, will be for everyone, so no one is required to provide value to be able to feed themselves. Artists are not special just for declaring themselves an artist.
>Because that was the last promise the tech bros made
Tech bros are to be believed?!
>And guess what happens to you then?
Nothing as simple as you might hope for ;-)
Yeahp, it's pure ideology.
In contemporary civilization, the role of creator of shared aesthetic constructs (artist) is left to an elect few. This is, on the whole, a reduction in average individual capacity.
So how about this instead: anyone making a living should be making art, as if it's some sort of obligation.
The media technologies of the XX century (recording, photography, motion photograpy) made it that much easier to be audience, and that much pointless to be artist.
This effectively robbed the common person of any reason to participate in the collective meaning-making process that is art. Eventually this was substituted by the clicktivism, the dogpiling, and all that. If you are never permitted to develop a sense of scale beyond the ouroborically narcissistic, participating social media fills a much similar psychological niche, to you, as influencing people through creative media.
Those who aspire to star status must first sacrifice a fixed amount of integrity to reproducing the kayfabe. Speakers of dead balamatomic languages may be wise to observe induction into "artist" status by humiliation-transfer - those natives were so dumb they thought they had to show publically how it's done at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBaC0IRc1Bk
>Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
Anyone [cut] is owed a living [cut]; done.
No person asks to be born; much of "what you are" and "what your function in society is" is involuntary and immutable; nobody is owed a useful function; nobody is owed a meaning.
But, through art, one can make one's own meanings, and share them in a voluntary way; as opposed to resource-constrainments (money) which is at its root an instrument of coercion.
That's the thing about art which has always terrified the money people. Eager beavers that they are, they've built (well, more like had us build for 'em) these whole elaborate semi-sensible institutions for reducing art to a special ritual for emitting high-denomination banknotes (paintings, album profits, walking banknotes in the form of performing artists who "made it big (sus)" - always loved the honesty in how the Japanese call their pop stars literally "idols"...)
I checked the Internet Archive but I cannot access any of the archived versions. Apparently the website uses JS to display its content and the IA can't deal with it. Internet searches show that the page existed, though, so I'll take the content deletion as proof.
This is going to become more and more popular sadly.
[1] https://chaoticgoodprojects.org/
it's no secret that being an artist is a tough path with little chance of success