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>It might be nice to live in a world in which poets had the audiences of pundits. And maybe the making of carrot carnations should be an Olympic event.
I take the opposite message from all of this. It is nice to live in a world with such absurd levels of human productivity that people have the education and time for half a dozen "frivolous" hobbies. As a middle class person, I can learn carrot carving and wood turning and painting without expecting any financial gain, then stop at a free local art gallery on my way to hear some free live music at a bar.
Maybe the author thinks that the past was the time of greatness in the arts because the only people who could afford to participate in the arts were great.
There's never really been any money in poetry for people who were just published poets. "Great" poets were all subsidized by patrons, worked in odd jobs or other mediums, or died in penury (sometimes all three)! The same is true now as it was 200 years ago.
“I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”
There are some exceptions, of course. Lord Byron's poets regularly sold out and were very profitable. As was Tennyson and Robert Browning's poetry.
If we had perpetual copyright, I suspect Shakespeare's estate would be worth several billion dollars.
If we had perpetual copyright, Shakespeare would have been sued out of existence.
To expand on this, if we had perpetual copyright, we wouldn't have culture.
Love that somebody raised this. :-) Same applies to Disney.
Leonard Cohen managed to monetize his poetry through his music.
And even now we have spoken word and slam poets that sell out clubs & college gigs, and make ends meet on that. They are profound exceptions. And, also, Shakespeare's profits would be almost entirely due to his plays.
We can make a comparison with stand-up comedians. The majority don't make anything from it and a very large number don't even have any professional aspirations.
Yet, professional comedians make good money. The best are multimillionaires.
The developments the author points out aren't exactly new or exclusive to this century. You can trace them back to the Industrial Revolution. The 19th century English novelists I read seemed to populate their novels with characters who did nothing but drink tea, read books, make smart quips and over the summer, play a game or two of cricket (hallmarks of the quintessential Victorian gentleman, I was told). You had people who read as a hobby, and people who 'read' (and write about their reading) as a vocation (Matthew Arnold comes to mind, as do an unending list of independent lexicographers, researchers, and scientists).
The power curve in the arts is brutal. You're either in a handful of extreme successes, or you're making close to the nothing.
And extreme success isn't stable. You can fall from the top into nowhere-land at any time.
It's ironic that many engineers believe the arts are a soft career option.
Would anybody be teaching Shakespeare if you had to pay for it?
Plenty of courses get taught on literature recent enough that it is not yet in the public domain. Here's one:
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/david_foster_wallaces_199...
So yes, Shakespeare would probably still be taught, though the plays would cost a bit more.
Yes, but those are taught because they have a modern perspective which you won't get from Shakespeare. And it is hard to say that contemporary classics will last 300 years if you keep them locked under copy-write the whole time.
My point is that a world with Shakespeare under perpetual copy-write is different enough from this world that it would be very difficult to predict whether or not it would retain its status as a teaching necessity. It could very well be the case that we would be teaching modern renditions of folk tales instead. Or that someone else would write Shakespeare-style archetypes in a more accessible format, and we'd use that instead.
Everybody knows Shakespeare because everybody knows Shakespeare. Its hard to say exactly how much of that is undone by copy-write.
People who could afford to create art in past ages could do it only if a) They had benefactors, such as wealthy patrons, and b) They were independently wealthy.
It wasn't until the printing press that artists could look to the public to pay for their artistic endeavors. Shakespeare wasn't wealthy, but he could get by thanks to patrons and a devoted paying audience. Chaucer, on the other hand, needed his patrons, while Lord Byron was independently wealthy.
I appreciate the clarity of the difference between art and craft. Craft is when the audience is the practitioners. Clarifying that distinction alone was worth the read.
I think that's a poor definition.
I generally consider art to be an expression of ideas. A craft is an expression of skill.
Further "These are arts that have no audience, other than practitioners of the art itself. Another word for a craft is a hobby." This is patently false. Perhaps the archetypal craft is basket-weaving. It's a hobby for some, but for others (especially in certain regions) it's a profession. The "audience" is anyone that wants a basket. Perhaps some of that audience can appreciate the difference between a good basket and a bad one. That does not require that they be a practitioner of basket-weaving themselves.
In fact, of the terms art and craft, the latter is the one that is reasonably well defined. Things only get fuzzy when you get into whether or not a craft is art. Not because of the fuzzy definition of a craft, but because of the fuzzy definition of art.
> Perhaps some of that audience can appreciate the difference between a good basket and a bad one. That does not require that they be a practitioner of basket-weaving themselves.
This is actually pretty close to how I personally define a "professional": A professional is someone whose work can only be judged by other professionals of the same domain.
Obvious failure modes are exempted. Anyone can tell you about a bad bridge after it has failed. But it would take a bridge engineer to tell you that before it fails.
> Anyone can tell you about a bad bridge after it has failed. But it would take a bridge engineer to tell you that before it fails.
Right, especially since bridge engineers don't produce bridges, but rather produce designs for bridges, the quality of which can only be judged by other bridge engineers.
I like your definition.
I generally consider art to be an expression of ideas. A craft is an expression of skill.
A normal viewer will look at, say, a David Lynch film and feel a sense of unease. Someone with a deeper interest in film will feel that sense of unease and know the tricks David Lynch uses to achieve that effect.
I've always seen the difference as 'craft' ends up with a device whose function is orthogonal to its art. That is, something functional whose function isn't 'to be looked at/experienced'.
The Aubrey-Maturin series, including "Master and Commander", is actually quite good and of significant literary merit.
You can go deeper and apply the author's argument to literary fiction itself. "Master and Commander" is probably literary fiction's "major art", while something like Finnegan's Wake is the 'craft' of the literary fiction writers.
Sure, but it's not "literary fiction". You can tell because it has a plot and I can find it in a bookstore. Literary fiction is the "art for art's sake" side of fiction writing.
No... that's not true at all. Books like Lolita, Catch-22, Animal Farm, and To Kill a Mockingbird are all considered literary fiction.
Couldn't you argue art is pretty much a hobby for all participants except the 1% in each field that makes a living from it?
Isn't this the case for many sporting activities... even for Tennis... supposedly the 1% are the ones who make a living, the rest may well class it as a hobby..
ref : http://www.news.com.au/sport/tennis/gap-between-the-haves-an...
So, people printing stuff out of PLA plastic on an extrusion printer as a hobby means what, that product design as an art is going away? Will an army of hobbyists with the much improved descendants of Makerbots make employing someone like Jony Ive obsolete in 50 years?
It sure looks like that - it appears to me that Marx's "workers owning the means of production" argument for collective ownership of workplaces is being conquered by tool prices going down by successive orders of magnitude.
Industry begins as a hobby, art dies as one.
I'm not sure I buy this argument. By his criterion, porn is more or less the major art.
I'm not quite sure you can make that leap. While it certainly fits his criterion of a large non-practicing audience, you forget that it actually lacks art (99% of the time). It's as workman-like as accounting or perhaps more akin to a sport.
that would require the audience to consist of people who make porn
No, his argument is that "major art" is widely consumed by people who do not practice it. He uses poetry -- consumed by a small audience of people who almost entirely consider themselves poets -- as an example of "craft." I disagree with his definitions here. They aren't meaningful.
oops, yes, i misread your argument. agreed, porn would definitely be a "major art" by that criterion. (and really, who's to say it isn't? it's an orthogonal classification to good/bad art.)
An excellent article about what this culture considers art. I earned an MFA a few years back and spent a lot of time with the "literary crowd." I love both literary and genre writing, but I think most academics who favor literary writing do so because it is esoteric. I honestly don't think many of them actual "enjoy" these works; they just delve into them because they are not popular, and they, therefore, make the academic feel smart.
An art that is out of favor is called a craft. Religions are called cults for the same reason.
I didn't know religions were called cults.
You don't think cults are religions?
Arts don't die.
Ugh. Such an arrogant writer.
Next, music. "I'm in a band" - big deal. There were how many million Myspace bands?
The "underground" music scene in most cities mostly consists of bands going to see other bands
Seems like the next logical thing to apply this trichotomy to is fields of study. Uh oh, looks like math is just a hobby now. But since I've convinced someone to pay me to do that hobby, I guess I don't care what label it's given.