Artists must be allowed to make bad work • Hacker News Board

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#161

Post by badpun » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:27 AM UTC

js8 wrote: post #159

badpun wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it has downsides, too. People are human, not machines, and sometimes need to rest too. That's why we shouldn't leave everything up to the free market People are competing against other humans, who need rest too. Hence, everybody rests, and things work out for everybody in the free market scenario.

Um, no. This could only work out if there was no capital accumulation, which is pretty much a prerequisite for a civilization. And even in hunter-gatherer societies humans evolved past that. I mean, this guy got sick for a month, let's not feed him anymore, he's not competitive enough. Surely humans would flourish with that attitude!

What capital accumulation has to do with it? People with enough capital obviously don't have to work anymore, so they're out of the working pool, and don't have an impact on the level of competition. There are intermediate states, like someone drawing a pension from his capital, but still working part-time for extra income, but there aren't enough of them to disrupt the fundamental dynamics.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#162

Post by GoblinSlayer » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:42 AM UTC

dsign wrote: post #72

This has been coming to my mind in the context of fiction writing. Today, the writer's gold standard is publication. In fact, many readers say they won't read anything that hasn't been "published" by a publisher. But the incentive of a publisher is money and sales, which means they will search for things that sell in volume, or handicap the writer's work so that "it sells." And how the publisher guesses if something…

Unpublished works are the only ones that I reread. At first I was even mildly surprised by this.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#163

Post by epiccoleman » Wed, May 17, 2023, 1:21 PM UTC

aigoochamna wrote: post #142

epiccoleman wrote: post #84

I have a page for quotes in Notion. There are only a few, I try to save it for really good ones. But this quote from Ira Glass made the cut: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential,…

This brought another quote to mind for me, > "You know, the whole thing about perfectionism.. perfectionism is very dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in— it's actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is." -- David Foster Wallace

I like this quote a lot. There's something about actually instantiating what's in our head into the world that always seems to result in some kind of fundamental loss of fidelity. But at the same time, that's kind of what makes things beautiful, in a wabi-sabi "there is a crack in everything" kind of way.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#164

Post by esquivalience » Thu, May 18, 2023, 1:20 PM UTC

js8 wrote: post #158

esquivalience wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in your comment about copyright being proposed for stability. Can you direct me to a source please? If you have a reference or a hint for further research, I'd like to read into it more.

You're probably reading too much into that comment. In the U.S., the copyright was justified "to promote progress of science and useful arts", which I interpret in a way that it provides certain stability of income needed to promote learning and experimentation (and also allows for a failure). It was understood even then that it is an anti-free market policy. And that seems to be what OP was complaining about, the la…

thanks

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#165

Post by watwut » Sat, May 20, 2023, 1:21 PM UTC

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #156

stale2002 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, explain what does any of that has to do with “not being allowed" What it has to do with that, is not that artists are literally prevented by the law from making bad art. Instead, it is that artists should be able to make bad art, without suffering significant negative consequences from doing so. So, you should interpret the statement as being "artists must be able to make bad art, without suffering significant…

And since we both agree that it has nothing to do with freedom, why do you think it is justified to talk about it as "being allowed to"?

Because that is how English language works.