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You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

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Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#71

Post by watwut »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #39
ohiovr wrote: post #21

Who paid for the great works of music in the period between 1700 and 1918? From such musicians as Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Bartok, Handel, Debussy, Bach etc... there were a heck of a lot of great composers in that period. I was analyzing Bach the other day. His Brandenburg Concerto #2 has tens of thousands of notes. That is a heck of a lot of work.

Patronage. Honestly music was profitable for a very brief period of time between around 1940s-1990's. Every other time in history it's required someone rich to like you enough to pay you to do it, or be a traveling minstrel who lived on the edge of society. Like even Wagner who is arguably one of the most influential and popular composers of all time spent most of his life destitute and only was stable when the Kaise…

Neither Mozart nor Bach were poor. Quite a lot of these were basically middle class - respectable good paid job, but you are not Elon Muck rich.

And some of them earned less then they could due to own habit of alienate people (Beethoven).

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#72

Post by luckylion »

swayvil wrote: post #41
thethethethe wrote: post #33

Seems a little entitled to me. Why should artists be able to spend their time doing exactly what they want while all the boring plebs have to pick vegetables/write CRUD apps? Sounds like someone is upset that more people dont find utility in their work

Because artists make the world an objectively better place in an uncommonly powerful way. Because it's an excellent investment, socially speaking. Because investment in the arts (I mean serious investment. Not like USA) has worked pretty well for some countries.

> Because investment in the arts (I mean serious investment. Not like USA) has worked pretty well for some countries.

I think that's just misunderstanding cause and effect. It's more that nations "invest" more in art as they get wealthier. It's not that they pay a bunch of people to do whatever they want and tada, the country becomes industrialized.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#73

Post by palijer »

joe_hills wrote: post #54

I hope anyone who wants to pursue the arts doesn’t let pessimists like this discourage them from expressing themselves in the ways they love best. I can say from experience that becoming a self-employed artist is possible, but not easy or quick. My path was to find a full-time job that used different parts of my brain from my art. I used my limited free time to brainstorm, create, and publish whatever I could make ti…

I think some of the best advice you can give folks who are looking to pursue arts as a full time career is 'don't do it'.

It's incredibly difficult, and not at all like arts as a hobby. I think it is terrible advice blindly telling folks to pursue arts because it makes it seem reasonably achievable, and sets people up to waste far too much of their time becoming miserable with real consequences for themselves and those around them.

If someone is discouraged by the "don't do it" advice that easily, then they were likely not going to be making it their full time employment.

And the folks who have the drive and determination to see their goals to the end that aren't going to be dissuaded by some random person on the internet or at a conference telling them they are going to fail.

Robin Williams had advice like that all the time, and along the same lines I really thing Cal Newport's 'So Good They Can't Ignore You' is incredibly beneficial to anyone at the beginning of a career path.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#74

Post by DubiousPusher »

ghaff wrote: post #22
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #12

There have been a few Spotify-clone studies that showed 70-80% of musical success was attributable to "quality" but the ranking of the top 10-20% was essentially random ("luck" to use the author's word). Now consider Dall-E and other art-making tools. If it becomes easier to make quality art, then the luck factor gets much more important, because the baseline quality is higher. So one can ask whether e.g. the Mona Li…

In fact, the Mona Lisa didn't become an iconic painting to the general public for a very long time. But, in general, while there's a lot of variation in musical styles/art styles/etc. that a given person likes, I find that there's fairly broad agreement that an expert list of, say, the 50 top classic rock songs are pretty good--among people who like classic rock even if they might disagree on the order.

Yeah but the "classic rock" phase came at a particularly unique time in history when hegemonic record labels and focused their efforts to popularize a very small cohort of artists. And cheap broadcast technology and syndicates made uniform radio the cheapest form of entertainment in human history. I can't say it enough. Mid 20th century America and Western Europe are one of the mlst unique media landscapes in human history.

Monopolistic mass media which reaches hundreds of millions of people is weird. Like most of the mid 20th century we should be cautious about using it as typical of anything.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#75

Post by jrh206 »

You're right. It sucks.

I think I might have stumbled on the impossible miracle passive income technique you're referring to, though. I'm trying to get some traction, but it's hard because of virality filters. Please could you take a look at this and see if it matches your experience?

https://gitlab.com/bartokio/bartok/-/blob/main/StartSomewher...

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#76

Post by nine_k »

mikkergp wrote: post #66
nine_k wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the church(es) which employed many of them. On top of that, music was not a commodity back then. Live performances literally made a living for many of them as these performances were the only source of music. (And a church needs this music for every mass, for instance.) Now music is abundant, recordings are cheap / free, and the best performance is easily available in a recorded form. Live performances are stil…

Dall-E for music will be interesting, but I think it's different. In a sense I think we're already there. Not in the sense that AI makes music but that music is so abundant, and there already aren't a ton of jobs in music writing. It's not a trade in the same way that like graphic design is. I mean, maybe Hans Zimmer loses his job but socially it doesn't seem like that big of an impact. Musicians don't tend to make m…

A "Dall-E for music" will put much of the control into hands of listeners. That is, you will not search for the music that matches your mood, you will ask for it directly, and maybe adjust in near-real time.

A DJ will arrive with a unique set, likely with every track custom-made for a given gig.

Selling any records at all will become very-very hard, except for rare hits with outstanding human vocal performance. In music clips, music will be relegated to the position of a movie soundtrack, if not lower.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#77

Post by watwut »

thethethethe wrote: post #33

Seems a little entitled to me. Why should artists be able to spend their time doing exactly what they want while all the boring plebs have to pick vegetables/write CRUD apps? Sounds like someone is upset that more people dont find utility in their work

I like programming, actually. I have a sense that most my collegues currently like it too.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#78

Post by a4isms »

bulatb wrote: post #68
a4isms wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's how I use the word "quality." Yes, it is not synonymous with popularity. But no, I don't think there's something wrong with the world that people prefer a certain thing that is "lower" quality. Is champagne higher-quality than coca-cola? Of course it is, but no serious person argues that the world ought to prefer champagne to coke. Quality is a combination of a bundle of--cough--qualities, not al…

> Is champagne higher-quality than coca-cola? Of course it is Hm. I don't think I'd use the normal definition that way. I see it, but I wouldn't compare them. But maybe that's why I'm suggesting this weird definition. The thing that people point to with the word, even in your example, is a bundle of traits that either stops existing or becomes irrelevant when you remove the speaker's preference. I don't think there's…

"Quality" may be hard to pin down in super-objective terms, but that doesn't mean it has no value as a word or a concept. To paraphrase, "Quality is like art. I know it when I see it."

Sure, you and I might have slightly different ideas of what quality is, but in various fields, we find established consensus on these matters. I happen to know a little about music.

But surprise, surprise, while I listen to Bach, I also listen to Cameo. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't presume that Bach's music can't be considered of higher quality just because it's hard to write an algorithm to score quality, or just because Cameo were more popular than Bach in the 80s and early 90s.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#79

Post by ghaff »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #74
ghaff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, the Mona Lisa didn't become an iconic painting to the general public for a very long time. But, in general, while there's a lot of variation in musical styles/art styles/etc. that a given person likes, I find that there's fairly broad agreement that an expert list of, say, the 50 top classic rock songs are pretty good--among people who like classic rock even if they might disagree on the order.

Yeah but the "classic rock" phase came at a particularly unique time in history when hegemonic record labels and focused their efforts to popularize a very small cohort of artists. And cheap broadcast technology and syndicates made uniform radio the cheapest form of entertainment in human history. I can't say it enough. Mid 20th century America and Western Europe are one of the mlst unique media landscapes in human h…

I could make the same statement about classical music, opera, ballet, film, "oldies," folk for at least some subcategory, etc. and I think it would still be generally true.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#80

Post by Mathnerd314 »

mikkergp wrote: post #61
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #12

There have been a few Spotify-clone studies that showed 70-80% of musical success was attributable to "quality" but the ranking of the top 10-20% was essentially random ("luck" to use the author's word). Now consider Dall-E and other art-making tools. If it becomes easier to make quality art, then the luck factor gets much more important, because the baseline quality is higher. So one can ask whether e.g. the Mona Li…

One thing that interests me about Dall-E and other art-making, is, I wonder if it will eventually lead to individuals making their own high-quality animated feature films and "triple-a" games. Will these tools get to the point that an individual can make a unique triple-a game in their bedroom?

Well, there are already high-quality films / games by small teams with no external funding, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A, Braid, and Celeste. But for long form stuff like these, the tools don't matter as much, it is more like writing a novel where the key is to get something done every day. The main issue is perseverance - a tool dropping the workload from 100 days to 10 days is nice, but it doesn't change the fact that most people will get bored and give up in 10 minutes.
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