Capitalism versus Art: the winner is clear

[Burgerbob]

Had this on my mind lately and made a video about it.

[Chronos91]

I really feel the statement about the thought of making money being a constant thing on the mind. And it definitely seems like an American thing. I'm just an amateur musician, but I see that thought creeping into my hobbies, including music. When buying instruments, I find myself sometimes wondering if I could do basic repair. And some of my amateur chemistry projects have potential for mild commercializing. Nickel and copper plating can be applied to piston valve repair and I have an ambitious project to try to make sodium metal that could likely be sold depending on transport restrictions. Not to mention stock research and options trading turned into a hobby.

Finding side hustles and ways to get extra income is pushed culturally a ton. It's an undercurrent to basically everything and it really is a shame that the balance is the way it is here.

[Burgerbob]

Finding side hustles and ways to get extra income is pushed culturally a ton. It's an undercurrent to basically everything and it really is a shame that the balance is the way it is here.

Yes, and it's insidious how little we think about it on a conscious level.

[harrisonreed]

I agree with your sentiment and I believe it is possible, eventually, to get to a kind of "Star-Trek" society where people work because they want to, and can make art because they have time and energy to dedicate to it. That will likely take overtly benevolent Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) combined with real government owned fusion power plants *and* a benevolent government that exists only to manage an automated food production and distribution industry. The government would have to take it upon itself to give away free energy, and use that free energy to produce free food.

It's possible, you just need a lot of advanced automated systems and limitless free energy, with a government set up to make sure it is controlled and distributed fairly.

That is also really scary because of the unknown factor. So much could go wrong.

I think, though, that you are missing the point that you grew up in a society where you are able to think about and understand art *at all*. Prior to capitalism, only the elite got educated, and artistic endeavors were taught as an apprenticeship. You could be a trombonist, maybe, but only if you got taken on as an apprentice first. Otherwise you might be vaguely aware of what a trombone was but would definitely not be educated, ever, on how to play one. Not to mention that pre-capitalism, very few trombones would have been actually made and the average person likely wouldn't have any money to buy one. And that goes for pretty much any artistic endeavor at the time -- education and the ability to buy materials would be severely limited in a pre-capitalist society. So I see your complaint, but I don't think you'd even be concerned about music or art at all if you had not been born into a capitalist/ materialist society that educated you.

Concurrent with capitalism, we had socialism/ communism. I don't think anyone will argue that those societies predisposed themselves to the free production of great art by the masses, or the opportunity for the creation of art by anyone other than the elite.

FWIW, when you were in Tokyo the chill people you saw were either on their day off or tourists. You weren't seeing the "salaryman" workers who are at the office from 7am until 8pm, and then have to go out drinking with their boss out of obligation, and then decide to head back to their corporate dorms (rather then home to their family) because they have too early of a day the next day. Their family might even be back in the country or whatever while they work in Tokyo. Tokyo is hyper capitalist to the point that you likely just didn't see the workers -- those skyscrapers are full of them from before the sun is up until after it sets. There are also people there living in 60 sq ft apartments so that they can live close to their job because they have to work and live in Tokyo ... because where they came from is a dying dead end town full of old people. Most of my Japanese friends tell me that they are treated like crap by their boss and co-workers. One of my Japanese friends expatriated to the US because her same-sex marriage is not recognized as "real" there and societal pressure is oppressive. It can be rough and is generally *not* chill over there. The people there do seem to be more chill and I think that is a coping mechanism. People are often bullied relentlessly there from elementary school until they retire (or are promoted to an executive suite) to conform with Japanese society, and I saw the effects of this every day on the news with discussions of school bullying, workplace bullying, and "hikikomori" shut-ins, and even going to the station to catch the subway where you would see, almost weekly, a notification of a delay due to a "human incident", meaning someone purposely jumped onto the tracks.

I love Japan so much but it is capitalist and consumer driven as all get-out.

[AndrewMeronek]

I've been seeing people start to specify our modern system as "neo-liberal" Capitalism lately, to distinguish it from classical "Adam Smith" Capitalism, which is different and is what most people learn in basic economics classes in schools. At least, as far as I know. The neo-liberal version appears to be a kind of political corruption of Smith's version, where the former advocates as "free market" (or "trickle down") meaning creation of monopolies to extract as many resources as possible and bypassing the intended supply and demand balance that Smith advocated for.

This is not a new thing in America. The same kind of economic bullying happened after our Civil War, where Rockefeller (oil), Vanderbilt (railroads) and others did the same thing: created monopolies (using whatever means they could get away with) and became obscenely rich by extracting as many resources as possible.

I think that this framing makes it clear: it's not just art that is struggling.

I also think that urban sprawl makes specifically music harder. It just takes more time and travel to get people together and make music, and that means that only those people who have gotten wealthy enough to have that time can do it . . . and because of growing income inequality due to modern neo-liberal Capitalism this pool of people is shrinking.

[harrisonreed]

I feel like, as rough as capitalism can be and as bad as selling your time for money feels, there really has been no other point in human history where there has been any sort of chance for someone to move between economic classes and pursue their own goals. I'm thinking about it, and even limiting it to the trombone, I don't think that anyone prior to the industrial revolution could just decide one day to get educated in art, take out a risky loan to pay for that education, buy a trombone and supplies to write music, and pursue that. It would have been nearly impossible unless you were born into the elite class. Or born into the one position where you were taken on as a successor in an apprenticeship.

So in that sense capitalism is actually extremely compatible with artistic endeavors. The only thing more compatible so far is the patron system under feudalism or theocracies, where a miniscule slice of the lower rung of the elite would be paid to produce art. Again, almost zero chance of someone being able to freely choose to do that work in those times. But, possibly unsurprisingly, that kind of system seems to be where some of the best art is produced in history. I suppose a parallel in modern society is the artistic grant or artist diploma scholarship, where an institution funds a seriously talented individual's artistic output for a few years.

It'll be exciting to see where our society is headed and if we can pull off the Star-Trek society or not in the future.

[Wayne]

We are living in the worst point in history, except for everything that has come before.

The rat race is real. There are always pressures that impinge on our absolute freedom to be what we want and do what we wish. Even the armature bands I hang with these days are susceptible to the pressure with the need to rent concert space or pay insurance premiums on rehearsal space making leaders wonder how much longer those groups can continue. But I think it has always been possible to see things as not very good.

I was a teenager in the 80’s. We used to make doodles of nuclear war with missiles flying between the continents. We just expected it to happen. And that hole in the ozone layer!

My point is that it is normal to think the world is teetering on the edge of the abyss. The latest existential threats are quite frightening and the challenges to personal well being are great (I have a kid graduating into very crappy job prospects when just four or five years ago a computer degree was billed as a sure thing.) but so far in human history, the general trajectory has been better health, more wealth, rising standards of living for even the lowest rung and improved rights and freedoms at least in spots where democracy and freedom prevail. We have the pleasure of putting a little beauty into the equation when we can.

[Burgerbob]

I feel like, as rough as capitalism can be and as bad as selling your time for money feels, there really has been no other point in human history where there has been any sort of chance for someone to move between economic classes and pursue their own goals.

Yes, if you were talking about the '60s-'70s I'd agree. But the move towards shareholder value above all else in the '80s (and the awful economic policies of Reagan) have moved us far away from that nice goldilocks zone. Obviously life is better now than the Renaissance, but that doesn't mean it's still going in the right direction. The incentives just aren't working that way for the people with money. The capitalist class, not the middle class.

We are living in the worst point in history, except for everything that has come before.

The rat race is real. There are always pressures that impinge on our absolute freedom to be what we want and do what we wish..

Yup... And it's hard to argue that the last 10 years are better than the 10 years before that. Not just in the US, but globally. Life on earth is not a inevitable march towards progress- we've seen real regression in economics, freedoms, safety, all sorts of things. It's really hard to criticize the systems in which we live (and all our ancestors in memory have), but we need to.

[harrisonreed]

Yes, it is true that the rich have never been richer and keep getting richer. There will always be a few who know how to game the system, and exploit it to the point that the system is torn down. We're certainly hitting that point. But in some insidious way a lot of people don't even seem to realize it.

I think a major issue with capitalism as it currently exists isn't so much that there isn't time to make art (you, for example, make a lot of videos which probably take hours to edit and publish and I know how long it takes to beat BG3 -- you definitely have time, most people have a surprising amount of it -- myself included (see: this post )), or that the time spent might be money lost in a hyper-capitalist world.

I think the real problem, especially in America, is that there are less and less people to make art for. I don't know anyone who isn't a musician who enjoys going to the symphony. I don't know anyone who isn't a jazz musician who will sit down and listen to a jazz album. I know only a few people my age (38) who are avid book readers. It might be a false observation on my part, but it seems like very few people younger than me read at all. From what I've read of serious assessments of American education, most recent high school graduates really can't read period. The vast majority of young people seem to prefer vertical short form videos over long form wide videos. The vast majority of Americans prefer superhero movies over *films*. Art museums that I've visited recently are mostly empty. The Louvre apparently is just a big queue to see the Mona Lisa and take a selfie with it....

Remember when "No Country for Old Men" came out in the theaters? Not many studios or filmmakers even risk movies like that any more. And it's not because they can't do it or don't want to do it. It's because they might not sell tickets. There are no superheroes in films like "There Will Be Blood". Hollywood got so good at duping adults to pay for plotless kid movies for the last 25 years that their audiences for real films straight up don't exist anymore.

There are not just a few but a *huge* number of people in the USA who do not know how to cook. They think the stove is for heating up boiling water for instant ramen. They sell their time for money so that DoorDash will bring them whatever is for dinner. Cooking is likely the most fundamentally human thing you can do, and so many people have given it up or were never taught. If you don't know the joy of digging into a braise that you've thought about and put effort into making, or if you haven't put out a spread for your friends or family, how can you understand or seek out art?

This is depressing and hopefully a too-critical look at modern society ... but I feel like it rings true. You said in the video that time taken to work on art projects that you want to work on feels like time wasted because time is money ... but the darker flip side of that same coin is that it's not just that time is money, it's that even if it is the equivalent to the work of Rembrandt or Mozart or Kubrick, nobody is buying.

In many ways the movie "Idiocracy" might really be coming true, and on a much faster timeline than it lays out.

So ... It's not just capitalism. Maybe that is the root cause, who knows. But people seem to have very different minds now than they did even twenty years ago. I think the Internet and social media have seriously changed how people's minds work.

[Burgerbob]

That's still capitalism. Those vertical videos make big companies a lot of money, and they have every incentive to hook people onto them as much as possible.

And cheap food, and doordash, etc. Follow the money!