A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

What a bizarre distinction. I'm not even sure I understand the classification. Art can make the ordinary transcendent - it's the treatment not the subject matter.

> But now let us follow the subsequent development of photography. What do we see? It has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, 'How beautiful.' The World is Beautiful - that is the title of the well-known picture book by Renger-Patzsch in which we see New Objectivity photography at its peak. It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment. For it is an economic function of photography to supply the masses, by modish processing, with matter which previously eluded mass consumption.

-- Walter Benjamin, lecture at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, 27th April 1934

> The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumers’ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment… To believe that such a society will become more “cultured” as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumers’ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Between Past and Future"

> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world

No, it's not.

> it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween

When did nations not have skeletons in their closets?

Not sure how the author decides what is ordinary and what is transcendent. According to him, there is nothing special about folks creating podcasts, but there is something special about a singer-songwriter. He does not say why.

Take https://www.patreon.com/sonicether who earns $50k a month creating shaders for Minecraft. That sounds mundane until you realise that he's probably enabling tens of thousands of people to create transcendent art from the comfort of their homes.

He doesn't think much of the artists creating comics either. Maybe he thinks only artists that display their work in galleries are "real" artists. Personally I think artists like Bill Watterson and Randall Munroe have done more to push the cultural zeitgeist than any artist in the last 30 years.

If you want to appreciate your fine classical works in a museum while listening to an orchestra and sipping your Pinot Noir, that's fine. But I think it's incorrect to presume to know what "real" culture is and labeling everything else "ordinary".

> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world

I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".