I was just thinking today about how rampant, unfettered piracy and ad-block plug-ins forced me to give up on my dream of being a professional writer. Looking around, technology has pretty much laid waste to every career in the arts in the United States. It was never an easy career path but now it's basically like trying to make a living by playing slot machines at a casino.
What do you think it would take to bring back the arts as professional careers? Would we have to abridge the 1st Amendment? Would we have to adopt draconian copyright laws like some other nations have?
(And don't try to say that the arts are still great career fields. Just look around. 'Nuff said.)
It depends on what you mean by "the arts". It's a huge field. Since I'm in the visual arts, I'll stick to that.
There are many different roles, most fall under three categories:
* 1 - the makers (a.k.a. people who call themselves artists, most trained, others spectacularly good at what they do/self-promotion)
* 2 - those who display the work (galleries commercial and non-profit, some artist-run, other orgs, curators)
* 3 - and those who acquire it (collectors, museums, collections, archives).
Contemporary visual arts - installation, video art, performance art, painting in all its diverse manifestations - has become highly professionalized, perhaps more than ever before. This explains in part its remoteness from everyday life. Its inaccessibility ('my kid could do that!' - no, not really) increases the apparent rarity and sophistication of what is considered contemporary art. There is more money and there are more gatekeepers to 'the artworld' than ever. This has created a lot of jobs in second category. Design and illustration fields work differently btw.
Artists have not historically been 'professionals' - people with secure jobs and regular salaries. They have always been entrepreneurs, then as now intermediaries between the upper class (patrons) and the working class (models, painting subjects, neighbors). In the European Renaissance, artists were designers, hustlers, and businessmen who ran studios with apprentices who learned from their masters and eventually opened their own. The patron model is based on an artist's appeal to wealthy benefactors. If your work doesn't appeal to someone with money - whether a collector or an institution (university, museum, etc, your work must be in fashion) you won't make a living at it, then or now.
The 'starving artist' trope comes from 19th century Romanticism, perpetuated by later artists, gallerists (who like to spin stories of artists who appeal to collectors) and far too many of my uni professors, and is a relatively new role for the artist in society.
