> It's a more general question: should art be subject to the market laws, or should society subsidize art production?
Thought you were going somewhere completely different based off of the first sentence. Yes artists have been exploited for decades, but they aren't being exploited by their audiences aka their market. Fans of music, video, performance, etc. are willing to pay quite fair prices (even exorbitant ones) to consume or own the media that they love. The lion's share of that money never reaches the artist that produced it. Vast empires of wealth have been built on the backs of superstar artists and the problem as always is rent seeking which is the enemy of socialists and capitalists alike. We absolutely should not subsidize art production, I can guarantee you that money would also be siphoned off under the current status quo. We're already very close to a solution to this problem with the massive drop in cost of producing any kind of art that is amenable to digital production and distribution. It just needs to continue to tip in the direction of artists being their own producers or being able to hire the people who do the actual work directly rather than going through an established company built on exploitative practices. The next piece of the puzzle is going to be a better system for paying to consume the produced art without relying on the toxic ad ecosystem. We need to starve the greedy giants of the last century out of existence, their only benefit was in connecting people to art when that used to be difficult. Connecting is easy now, paying someone for their work should be too.
Thought you were going somewhere completely different based off of the first sentence. Yes artists have been exploited for decades, but they aren't being exploited by their audiences aka their market. Fans of music, video, performance, etc. are willing to pay quite fair prices (even exorbitant ones) to consume or own the media that they love. The lion's share of that money never reaches the artist that produced it. Vast empires of wealth have been built on the backs of superstar artists and the problem as always is rent seeking which is the enemy of socialists and capitalists alike. We absolutely should not subsidize art production, I can guarantee you that money would also be siphoned off under the current status quo. We're already very close to a solution to this problem with the massive drop in cost of producing any kind of art that is amenable to digital production and distribution. It just needs to continue to tip in the direction of artists being their own producers or being able to hire the people who do the actual work directly rather than going through an established company built on exploitative practices. The next piece of the puzzle is going to be a better system for paying to consume the produced art without relying on the toxic ad ecosystem. We need to starve the greedy giants of the last century out of existence, their only benefit was in connecting people to art when that used to be difficult. Connecting is easy now, paying someone for their work should be too.