Oh hell no. Apart from the difficulty of making a living if there's no way to get paid - and don't go telling me you support basic income, because I can't pay my bills your support and I'm guessing that you don't have an action plan to redesign the economy on any sort of meaningful time horizon - I don't want Free Art. Free art isn't subject to any sort of quality control, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day to spend browsing all existing art. Putting a price on things, even if it's just a monthly Netflix subscription fee, promotes selectivity, and as an artist that's what I care about. I want you to be emotionally engaged with the art I make in some way (even if you dislike it; there's lots of art I dislike that I nevertheless consider to be Good Art), but if art is free then there's no incentive have strong preferences and so no real engagement occurs.
Of course, you might find a piece of my art and love it. But I would much rather sell it to you and see you express your interest albeit indirectly by buying a ticket or a copy of it. Think of how you donate to charity - you give some money to an organization or in response to a particular event or to someone on the street who seems sincerely needy to you. You could just throw a $10 bill in the air on a windy day every so often and the money would likely wind up helping someone, but that wouldn't be very rewarding for you, would it?
Free Art just says that art has no economic value and therefore the time spent on it doesn't either. It says some 3 year-old's finger paintings are no better or worse than the expression of someone's craft that took years to develop. It says that art isn't important enough that you should be willing to sacrifice anything to get it, and that anyone who chooses to spend their time producing it is being self-indulgent.
I realize this is far from what you intended, but I think that's because you haven't through through the ramifications. I get that you think art is great and that you'd like everyone to be able to educate, entertain and edify themselves by making it widely accessible. But you haven't figured out how this works for people who produce art, or what signal it sends to the general public about the value of the art. Your proposal doesn't say anything about subsidizing artists or how any such subsidy would be funded, and even if there were subsidies then you've put artists in the position of appealing to a few charitable gatekeepers, who are inevitably going to take it on themselves to decide what is or is not art, while simultaneously wrecking the marketplace. You wouldn't expect a chef to come to your house and cook a meal for free, and somehow I doubt you'd expect that chef to give away all her recipes for free. Why do you think that people who labor over paintings or music or literature or _________ should be required to forgo any economic interest in their output?
>Free Art just says that art has no economic value and therefore the time spent on it doesn't either. It says some 3 year-old's finger paintings are no better or worse than the expression of someone's craft that took years to develop.
So if someone gives a 3 year-old a nickel for their fingerpainting, does that make it as significant as The Last Supper? Or is the significance of art directly proportional to its dollar valuation? When one person thinks it's worthless and another thinks it's priceless, what dollar valuation does it have?
>You could just throw a $10 bill in the air on a windy day every so often and the money would likely wind up helping someone, but that wouldn't be very rewarding for you, would it?
That actually describes quite well what shopping for CDs used to be like (except it was a $20 bill). Since you couldn't hear the music first, you were taking a random chance that there would be at least 1 or 2 songs that you might like on it. It was like an expensive lottery scratch ticket (complete with the joy when you found a rare winner and went to buy more of that band).
Artists absolutely should be able to make a living as well as anyone else (and make better money as they improve their skills/knowledge/experience). But I don't think the 'old' system was any better at that, except for the few who were both smart and lucky.
It's a difficult problem because the value of art is not always easily measured in dollars. Aside from some commercial or pop art, it's one of those cases where supply & demand and capitalist economics is insufficient for both the suppliers and the consumers. Traditional ownership also breaks down a bit when the thing becomes a part of you and also because the thing is not a physical object.
We do need a better solution that provides decent money to artists while not arbitrarily restricting access, censoring, or controlling what people have access to, or punishing/shaming them for accessing it. Crowdfunding and things like Patreon have made some progress toward providing alternatives, but there's still plenty of room for improvement.
A lot of people make a decent living now working with (and to some degree contributing to) open source software which is made freely available. I hope that more artists will soon be able to make a decent living while people can also have free access to (at least some of) their art.
Oh hell no. Apart from the difficulty of making a living if there's no way to get paid - and don't go telling me you support basic income, because I can't pay my bills your support and I'm guessing that you don't have an action plan to redesign the economy on any sort of meaningful time horizon - I don't want Free Art. Free art isn't subject to any sort of quality control, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day to spend browsing all existing art. Putting a price on things, even if it's just a monthly Netflix subscription fee, promotes selectivity, and as an artist that's what I care about. I want you to be emotionally engaged with the art I make in some way (even if you dislike it; there's lots of art I dislike that I nevertheless consider to be Good Art), but if art is free then there's no incentive have strong preferences and so no real engagement occurs.
Of course, you might find a piece of my art and love it. But I would much rather sell it to you and see you express your interest albeit indirectly by buying a ticket or a copy of it. Think of how you donate to charity - you give some money to an organization or in response to a particular event or to someone on the street who seems sincerely needy to you. You could just throw a $10 bill in the air on a windy day every so often and the money would likely wind up helping someone, but that wouldn't be very rewarding for you, would it?
Free Art just says that art has no economic value and therefore the time spent on it doesn't either. It says some 3 year-old's finger paintings are no better or worse than the expression of someone's craft that took years to develop. It says that art isn't important enough that you should be willing to sacrifice anything to get it, and that anyone who chooses to spend their time producing it is being self-indulgent.
I realize this is far from what you intended, but I think that's because you haven't through through the ramifications. I get that you think art is great and that you'd like everyone to be able to educate, entertain and edify themselves by making it widely accessible. But you haven't figured out how this works for people who produce art, or what signal it sends to the general public about the value of the art. Your proposal doesn't say anything about subsidizing artists or how any such subsidy would be funded, and even if there were subsidies then you've put artists in the position of appealing to a few charitable gatekeepers, who are inevitably going to take it on themselves to decide what is or is not art, while simultaneously wrecking the marketplace. You wouldn't expect a chef to come to your house and cook a meal for free, and somehow I doubt you'd expect that chef to give away all her recipes for free. Why do you think that people who labor over paintings or music or literature or _________ should be required to forgo any economic interest in their output?