The survival of art and artists

[The following is a reworking and slight expansion of a Bluesky thread. I have deliberately resisted trying to overthink things too much in revising it for publication here.]

I’ll muse here about art and artists in the world to come, a world I assume is not too far removed from the world today (for example, no AGI-induced apocalypse or rapture). If Cohost were still operating I would post this there, since my thinking is too unsettled to consider this my final and definitive take on the topic. But Cohost is dead (RIP), so here we are.

I suppose I should first define what I mean by “art.” Dictionary definitions abound, but I like the anthropologist Richard Anderson’s definition as quoted and endorsed by Cynthia Freeland: “culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium.”¹ “Artists” are those who encode (and in many cases create) that meaning.

I take it as self-evident that art is good and that we should have more of it. We never know where great art may come from, or what futurity may deem great.

I also take it as self-evident that we want humans to make art. I leave to others the question of whether human-instructed and -directed LLMs can produce art in the sense above. If presently-hypothetical AGIs were to be created, we can certainly imagine them having a culture and creating art. However, such art would likely be alien to us: human-influenced but ultimately profoundly nonhuman, born of different concerns in a different existence. Let the AGIs enjoy it, we need our own art.

We also want people to be able to do art full-time. While a day job may be fruitful for some, others are best suited to making art their whole existence. They would be wasted making house or baking bread (like Emily Dickinson and many other women), delivering babies (like William Carlos Williams) or managing corporations (like Wallace Stevens).

This requires artists having the means to live and create without impoverishing themselves: Suffering may sometimes create great art, but we should not needlessly inflict it on artists. Life will likely bring it to them in any case and in many forms, unrelated to their economic circumstances.

But therein lies the present-day problem: if lots of people want to make art, and they do so within a globalized market that pits all against all, they will likely (really, almost inevitably) end up on the wrong end of the log-normal distribution, in which a few make millions and almost everyone else makes nothing—a difference of four, five, or even more orders of magnitude.

What to do? First, make it cheaper for artists to live by making it cheaper for everyone to live. Reduce the economic burdens of housing and health care in particular (ubiquitous in the GoFundMe and related appeals I see on Bluesky and elsewhere). Increasing supply can help here: The more houses built, the more doctors and nurse educated, the more generic drugs approved, the less expensive life will be for artists and everyone else.

What about government subsidization of artists? Again, I think it’s best to be universal, e.g., support people through general tax credits, wage subsidies, etc., as opposed to having artists be designated wards of the state, directly or indirectly. New art forms or artists don’t look like art to bureaucrats or grant committees, so government grants and other subsidies often end up benefiting a favored few insiders at the expense of outsiders.

How could artists make more money otherwise? One possibility is to have distribution platforms do their own redistribution, e.g., “taxing” top earners to give greater payouts to low earners (for example, by charging them lower fees). It’s an interesting idea, and you can see versions of this in other contexts (for example, Apple’s app store small business program). However, since payouts for most artists on the main “creator economy” platforms (e.g., YouTube, Patreon, Substack) are so low, I suspect that to be truly effective such a program would have to provide compensation to artists above and beyond what they actually earn in sales and subscriptions, analogous to the US Earned Income Tax Credit. I think the chances of such a program being put in place are slim to none.

What about unionization? I think it’s definitely worth pursuing for animators, commercial comic artists, and others, by analogy to SAG-AFTRA, Actors’ Equity, the American Federation of Musicians, and other organizations representing artists to the organizations that hire them. But those unions were formed during a rise in labor’s power, in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th. The present-day political, economic, and cultural environment, along with the nature of some arts, make comparable organizing efforts harder today, possibly even fruitless in some cases.

What else can we envision to make the life of an artist less fraught? Some have proposed, and others are actively working to create, alternative venues for the economy of art: artist-owned cooperatives like Subvert or Comradery, tightly-curated services like Metalabel that emphasize the physical as much as the digital, and so on. In their various ways these all offer artists a potentially beneficial bargain: trade universal reach and a (very small) chance of outsized rewards for the opportunity to better engage their (possibly niche) audiences and exercise more control over their fate.

But what do I know? In the context of art I’m a consumer, patron, and (occasional) critic, not a practitioner. Feel free to tell me (e.g., on Bluesky) where and when I’m talking out of my hat, and let me know what specifically you’d propose instead.