Another crucial issue is that art nowadays is financed to a large degree by the government (either overtly or via its formally “non-governmental” organs such as large tax-exempt foundations, academic institutions, etc.). This creates the same perverse incentives as government-financed science: the work is optimized for the bureaucratic process that determines who gets funding and official recognition, not for any direct measure of quality.
Even the money that enters the system from private buyers doesn’t change these incentives much, since these buyers want to buy high-status art, not low-status kitsch—and people in charge of sorting these out are nowadays, for all practical purposes, government bureaucrats just as much as those in charge of renewing your driver’s licence. (Which makes their attempts at a “rebellious” image only more farcical.)
Moldbug once wrote a hilarious (and yet highly insightful) article about how this system works in poetry.
I think the bureaucratic aspect is more important than the government aspect. After all most classical and renaissance art was also funded by governments.
Yes, that is certainly true. I didn’t mean this as a general denunciation of government patronage, but as a comment specifically about the modern bureaucratic organization and financing of art. Clearly, the patronage of arts by, say, Renaissance popes or classical Greek rulers was a very different story.
Patronage by a patron works—indeed, there is no other satisfactory way of funding art. Patronage by a bureaucracy, by a committee, does not work so well.
The big problem is regulatory capture. Being an official artist becomes disconnected from any artistic talent.
This depends on where you are and your government. In the US, there really is practically no government support for the arts. The NEA does give some money, but almost all of it is to state and local arts organizations, and that seems to work out pretty well. However, the vast majority of arts in the US is privately funded.
In other countries I don’t think this is true though. In a lot of European countries the government does the majority of arts funding.
In the US, there really is practically no government support for the arts. The NEA does give some money, but almost all of it is to state and local arts organizations, and that seems to work out pretty well. However, the vast majority of arts in the US is privately funded.
Maybe the money doesn’t look that big when you count only funds specifically earmarked for “art.” However, it’s not that small when you count the money given to all sorts of academic institutions and non-profits that provide the infrastructure for the whole art scene nowadays. Above all, this infrastructure has a monopoly on career tracks that enable one to achieve the status of an esteemed artist and art critic, as opposed to a peddler of vulgar kitsch.
Moreover, “government” probably wasn’t the best choice of word in my original comment. As I noted, I used it in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which encompasses various formally “non-governmental” institutions whose organizational, financial, and decision-making structure is, for all practical purposes, inseparable from the de jure government organs. What I wanted to emphasize is the contrast between a true elite of artists, artistic connoisseurs, and rich patrons dispensing patronage based on their own taste versus patronage dispensed by vast, self-perpetuating, committee-run bureaucracies—even if the former were often rulers in the past, and the latter can exist in the form of theoretically “non-governmental” foundations, academia, etc.
Actually that post made me question the entire idea of poetry. How else could poetry possibly work? Does it take training? Do you ‘practice’ poetry? Is poetry skill-based at all? I really don’t understand.
The only way I could see it making sense is if there is no way to make a living as a poet and it’s just something that is attained after fame.
I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. The amount of money given by ‘bureaucracies’ in the US is vastly inferior to the money given out by rich patrons. Almost all of our arts is funded by individual people. Some larger organizations have some corporate sponsors, but I don’t know if that counts as bureaucracies.
Look at any theater, gallery, or orchestra in the US. More than 90% of their money comes from individual donors.
Private people nowadays fund art, either directly or indirectly, for two main reasons: because it’s tax-deductible and/or to buy status. The tax-deductibility already implies significant government involvement—who gets to dispense money, patronage, and status from tax-deductible funds is by no means a simple and straightforward question.
But more importantly, there is the question of status. Note the immense status contrast between people shopping for home decorations in a big-box store and someone buying something generally recognized as a “work of art” for a hefty price. The former is about people indulging their honest aesthetic preferences in a way that’s likely to be low-status; the latter is as close to a pure money-for-status transaction as anything gets—even if the actual “work of art” contains no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all. So who are these “artists” who get to have such high status that a whiff of it is readily paid for with piles of cash?
The key point is that nowadays the hierarchy of status in art is essentially a vast and sclerotic bureaucracy. Within this system, there are still some classic forms of art that have been traditionally high-status for many generations, such as classical music. However, these are rarely (if ever) tremendously profitable, and also require a lot of skill to practice. On the other hand, the modern art scene is almost purely about bureaucratic careerism. Those on the very top are laughing all the way to the bank, getting vast sums for random junk, sometimes made by hired low-wage labor and just signed upon completion. For those in the lower levels, it’s the standard dreary bureaucratic fight over small stakes but with no alternative life prospects.
Overall, the point is that artistic status itself has been monopolized by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that has led to its almost complete disconnect with skill and aesthetic value (as measured by satisfying people’s honest aesthetic preferences). If you work outside of this system, even if you get rich, and even if your work is vastly above anything made by the top-ranking official artists by all objective measures, you will always be assigned to the low status of a kitsch peddler.
If you work outside of this system, even if you get rich, and even if your work is vastly above anything made by the top-ranking official artists by all objective measures, you will always be assigned to the low status of a kitsch peddler.
You’d think some of them would attempt to counter-signal by doing just that.
The former is about people indulging their honest aesthetic preferences in a way that’s likely to be low-status; the latter is as close to a pure money-for-status transaction as anything gets—even if the actual “work of art” contains no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all.
I didn’t say anything about modern art or art that contains “no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all” or whatever. I said bureaucracies do NOT fund the majority of art in the US. And it doesn’t.
Your claim is that basically it’s either art that’s low-status or art that people like. And that’s just blatantly false. Not all art today is modern you know. There are still ballets, operas, shakespeare theaters, orchestras, realism galleries, and independent film theaters. These are high-status but high-quality. You have a warped view on the art world today.
Within this system, there are still some classic forms of art that have been traditionally high-status for many generations, such as classical music. However, these are rarely (if ever) tremendously profitable, and also require a lot of skill to practice. On the other hand, the modern art scene is almost purely about bureaucratic careerism.
Yea, I think you overestimate the power of bureaucracy here. Maybe if you showed that modern art makes way more money than non-modern art you’d have a case.
Those high-status individuals are the ones supporting the art system because they want to. It isn’t because they’re part of some invisible bureaucracy. It’s because they have money and they see something they like and give their money to it. That is the way it works. Have you ever worked in art development? Everything is individuals.
Overall, the point is that artistic status itself has been monopolized by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that has led to its almost complete disconnect with skill and aesthetic value (as measured by satisfying people’s honest aesthetic preferences).
And I call bullshit. There is nothing “bureaucratic” about what you’re talking about. Rich people like the art they support. It is not just about status. Or else it wouldn’t matter what kind of organization they donate to, but that’s not true (donors typically have very specific preferences). Many rich people care about status but don’t support the arts at all (they can always donate to churches and charities after all). Many donors are heavily involved in the organizations that they donate to.
If you work outside of this system, even if you get rich, and even if your work is vastly above anything made by the top-ranking official artists by all objective measures, you will always be assigned to the low status of a kitsch peddler.
Uhm. No? I mean there are artists that have became wildly famous and everything, but high-quality artistry is still around and still high-status. So I don’t understand where you get this idea from.
There is nothing “bureaucratic” about what you’re talking about. Rich people like the art they support. It is not just about status. Or else it wouldn’t matter what kind of organization they donate to, but that’s not true. Many rich people care about status but don’t support the arts at all.
It doesn’t follow that because not all rich people who care about status support the arts, support of the arts by rich people is not just about status. Not everyone takes every possible action in support of their goals, indeed, for something like status, with so many avenues of pursuit, it’s unlikely that anyone does. I’d be willing to bet that more rich people care about status than give to charity as well.
I don’t doubt that there are rich people who care strongly about the arts. There are certainly non-rich people who do, and I don’t think richness would filter very strongly for people who don’t care about the arts. But I think you underestimate the importance of status signalling; being seen to be heavily involved in a cause is a stronger status signal than being seen to merely donate.
I’m not saying that they aren’t status-signaling, but I would argue that it isn’t just status-signaling and tax-deductions.
After all, because there are so many avenues of pursuit, there must be some way for people to decide which to take. I mean if there’s a contemporary art gallery I’m bored of, and an impressionist art gallery I like, I wouldn’t donate to the contemporary art gallery because of status. I would donate to whichever I like the most. Both of them give me status.
Yea, I believe it’s per capita, but I wouldn’t be surprised in general as well.
It’s more about public vs private funding. Not discouraging or encouraging art. Though I have heard from my friends in art development that it is more difficult to find private donors in countries with more government funding due to it. Quick google search yielded this, but there’s probably more to the debate.
Most of it is bad art. But when members of SEAL Team Six, from concealed positions on a rocking boat, simultaneously fire at pirates, on a different, distant rocking boat, who are holding hostages, and achieve one kill per shot, and the hostages are unharmed, what else does one call that?
Whether or not a round semifurry purple object is really a blegg, I would be surprised if the aesthetic value of a special ops team would be large enough to justify its price relative to more conventional forms of art (which normally get larger audiences, too).
Once again, military planning at any level and/or execution of plans is short of aesthetic value to the average person (usually?), and requires various amounts of background to understand, but if all these other things are “really” bleggs despite also having that deficiency, let military spending be considered public spending on art, let a tenth of it be considered spending on art, and the USA spends more on art than any other country.
I don’t really know how the art could evolve besides just accurate shooting.
However, most composers and visual artists before Beethoven considered composition a craft, not an artform. So I don’t necessarily think it needs hard delineation. “What is art” discussions tend to go in circles though.
“Art” typically implies constructive, expressive creativity. There may be some measure of creativity involved in some instances, but it’s not expressive and it’s not constructive. It’s up to those using the word to decide whether this places it sufficiently far outside the typical “art” grouping to not deserve the label, for whatever purposes they wish to put it to.
Technically, anything done by humans (at the very least) can be art, and everything is—or so I’ve been told. However, I would argue that the vast majority of art, as diverse as it is, does share one property: its primary purpose is to be observed by other humans.
For example, consider a masterfully carved wooden chair that was commissioned by a millionaire, who intends to put it in his library so that he has something to sit on. According to the above-mentioned model, this chair is not art, because its primary purpose is purely utilitarian. If the same chair were created by an artist for the purpose of being exhibited at an art gallery, then the chair is art.
I think this is one way to interpret the term “constructive, expressive creativity”, though there may be others.
Google gives as sense 1, “effectively conveying thought or feeling,” and this is more or less what I meant.
constructive
Whereas money is the unit of caring, I’m not sure what difference in kind could apply.
I am not sure precisely what you are getting at. What I had meant was that art is typically the creation of something new, rather than the destruction of something existing. One could argue that they are creating new corpses, but broadly we perceive corpses as broken people, not people as aspiring corpses.
In any case, remember (as you earlier emphasized) that we are talking about clustering and relative degrees of similarity, not necessary and sufficient binary conditions. Can you stretch definitions to fit? Absolutely. But with each tug, we’re representing a point a little further from the center of the cluster.
I think this is present in military planning, and inferable from outcomes.
art is typically the creation of something new, rather than the destruction of something existing. One could argue that they are creating new corpses
That’s not at all how it seems to me. There is a good deal of inferential distance here.
Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.
There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.
--Sun Tzu, translated
The art lies in reducing the number of corpses,etc.
we are talking about clustering and relative degrees of similarity
Excellent, yes! I agree that in English “art”, unmodified, does not refer to war and should not be used to refer to war or a broader category of art of which one thinks war is a member. However, this is significantly due to historical use, rather than being the simplest stroke circumscribing a concept in concept-space. Excluding the art of war from “art” is somewhat like considering dolphins “fish”.
I acknowledge there is some tugging involved, but what hasn’t been shown to my satisfaction is that less tugging is involved for modern art, or other things generally considered art.
Your stretching pulls the word over so large an area as to render it almost meaningless. I feel as though it exists to further some other goal.
The last time I heard art defined, it was as “something which has additional layers of meaning beyond the plain interpretation”, or something like that. I’m not sure even that’s accurate.
However, if you’re going to insist on calling a spec ops team in action “art”, then that level of stretching is such that so could designing a diesel locomotive, or any number of other purely practical exercises which are not performed for their aesthetic value.
A “found object”, or Jackson Pollock painting, or what-have-you, is created primarily for aesthetic value and/or communication of additional layers of meaning.
Another crucial issue is that art nowadays is financed to a large degree by the government (either overtly or via its formally “non-governmental” organs such as large tax-exempt foundations, academic institutions, etc.). This creates the same perverse incentives as government-financed science: the work is optimized for the bureaucratic process that determines who gets funding and official recognition, not for any direct measure of quality.
Even the money that enters the system from private buyers doesn’t change these incentives much, since these buyers want to buy high-status art, not low-status kitsch—and people in charge of sorting these out are nowadays, for all practical purposes, government bureaucrats just as much as those in charge of renewing your driver’s licence. (Which makes their attempts at a “rebellious” image only more farcical.)
Moldbug once wrote a hilarious (and yet highly insightful) article about how this system works in poetry.
I think the bureaucratic aspect is more important than the government aspect. After all most classical and renaissance art was also funded by governments.
Yes, that is certainly true. I didn’t mean this as a general denunciation of government patronage, but as a comment specifically about the modern bureaucratic organization and financing of art. Clearly, the patronage of arts by, say, Renaissance popes or classical Greek rulers was a very different story.
Patronage by a patron works—indeed, there is no other satisfactory way of funding art. Patronage by a bureaucracy, by a committee, does not work so well.
The big problem is regulatory capture. Being an official artist becomes disconnected from any artistic talent.
This depends on where you are and your government. In the US, there really is practically no government support for the arts. The NEA does give some money, but almost all of it is to state and local arts organizations, and that seems to work out pretty well. However, the vast majority of arts in the US is privately funded.
In other countries I don’t think this is true though. In a lot of European countries the government does the majority of arts funding.
Maybe the money doesn’t look that big when you count only funds specifically earmarked for “art.” However, it’s not that small when you count the money given to all sorts of academic institutions and non-profits that provide the infrastructure for the whole art scene nowadays. Above all, this infrastructure has a monopoly on career tracks that enable one to achieve the status of an esteemed artist and art critic, as opposed to a peddler of vulgar kitsch.
Moreover, “government” probably wasn’t the best choice of word in my original comment. As I noted, I used it in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which encompasses various formally “non-governmental” institutions whose organizational, financial, and decision-making structure is, for all practical purposes, inseparable from the de jure government organs. What I wanted to emphasize is the contrast between a true elite of artists, artistic connoisseurs, and rich patrons dispensing patronage based on their own taste versus patronage dispensed by vast, self-perpetuating, committee-run bureaucracies—even if the former were often rulers in the past, and the latter can exist in the form of theoretically “non-governmental” foundations, academia, etc.
Mencius has issued a wonderful post on this topic, skewering a example of bureaucratically generated pseudo art.
Actually that post made me question the entire idea of poetry. How else could poetry possibly work? Does it take training? Do you ‘practice’ poetry? Is poetry skill-based at all? I really don’t understand.
The only way I could see it making sense is if there is no way to make a living as a poet and it’s just something that is attained after fame.
I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. The amount of money given by ‘bureaucracies’ in the US is vastly inferior to the money given out by rich patrons. Almost all of our arts is funded by individual people. Some larger organizations have some corporate sponsors, but I don’t know if that counts as bureaucracies.
Look at any theater, gallery, or orchestra in the US. More than 90% of their money comes from individual donors.
We have a lot of rich people in the US.
Private people nowadays fund art, either directly or indirectly, for two main reasons: because it’s tax-deductible and/or to buy status. The tax-deductibility already implies significant government involvement—who gets to dispense money, patronage, and status from tax-deductible funds is by no means a simple and straightforward question.
But more importantly, there is the question of status. Note the immense status contrast between people shopping for home decorations in a big-box store and someone buying something generally recognized as a “work of art” for a hefty price. The former is about people indulging their honest aesthetic preferences in a way that’s likely to be low-status; the latter is as close to a pure money-for-status transaction as anything gets—even if the actual “work of art” contains no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all. So who are these “artists” who get to have such high status that a whiff of it is readily paid for with piles of cash?
The key point is that nowadays the hierarchy of status in art is essentially a vast and sclerotic bureaucracy. Within this system, there are still some classic forms of art that have been traditionally high-status for many generations, such as classical music. However, these are rarely (if ever) tremendously profitable, and also require a lot of skill to practice. On the other hand, the modern art scene is almost purely about bureaucratic careerism. Those on the very top are laughing all the way to the bank, getting vast sums for random junk, sometimes made by hired low-wage labor and just signed upon completion. For those in the lower levels, it’s the standard dreary bureaucratic fight over small stakes but with no alternative life prospects.
Overall, the point is that artistic status itself has been monopolized by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that has led to its almost complete disconnect with skill and aesthetic value (as measured by satisfying people’s honest aesthetic preferences). If you work outside of this system, even if you get rich, and even if your work is vastly above anything made by the top-ranking official artists by all objective measures, you will always be assigned to the low status of a kitsch peddler.
You’d think some of them would attempt to counter-signal by doing just that.
I didn’t say anything about modern art or art that contains “no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all” or whatever. I said bureaucracies do NOT fund the majority of art in the US. And it doesn’t.
Your claim is that basically it’s either art that’s low-status or art that people like. And that’s just blatantly false. Not all art today is modern you know. There are still ballets, operas, shakespeare theaters, orchestras, realism galleries, and independent film theaters. These are high-status but high-quality. You have a warped view on the art world today.
Yea, I think you overestimate the power of bureaucracy here. Maybe if you showed that modern art makes way more money than non-modern art you’d have a case.
Those high-status individuals are the ones supporting the art system because they want to. It isn’t because they’re part of some invisible bureaucracy. It’s because they have money and they see something they like and give their money to it. That is the way it works. Have you ever worked in art development? Everything is individuals.
And I call bullshit. There is nothing “bureaucratic” about what you’re talking about. Rich people like the art they support. It is not just about status. Or else it wouldn’t matter what kind of organization they donate to, but that’s not true (donors typically have very specific preferences). Many rich people care about status but don’t support the arts at all (they can always donate to churches and charities after all). Many donors are heavily involved in the organizations that they donate to.
Uhm. No? I mean there are artists that have became wildly famous and everything, but high-quality artistry is still around and still high-status. So I don’t understand where you get this idea from.
It doesn’t follow that because not all rich people who care about status support the arts, support of the arts by rich people is not just about status. Not everyone takes every possible action in support of their goals, indeed, for something like status, with so many avenues of pursuit, it’s unlikely that anyone does. I’d be willing to bet that more rich people care about status than give to charity as well.
I don’t doubt that there are rich people who care strongly about the arts. There are certainly non-rich people who do, and I don’t think richness would filter very strongly for people who don’t care about the arts. But I think you underestimate the importance of status signalling; being seen to be heavily involved in a cause is a stronger status signal than being seen to merely donate.
I’m not saying that they aren’t status-signaling, but I would argue that it isn’t just status-signaling and tax-deductions.
After all, because there are so many avenues of pursuit, there must be some way for people to decide which to take. I mean if there’s a contemporary art gallery I’m bored of, and an impressionist art gallery I like, I wouldn’t donate to the contemporary art gallery because of status. I would donate to whichever I like the most. Both of them give me status.
You mean, less per-capita funding than there is in other countries?
I have seen lower than average state cigarette taxes described as “encouraging smoking”.
Yea, I believe it’s per capita, but I wouldn’t be surprised in general as well.
It’s more about public vs private funding. Not discouraging or encouraging art. Though I have heard from my friends in art development that it is more difficult to find private donors in countries with more government funding due to it. Quick google search yielded this, but there’s probably more to the debate.
As a separate point, what “simple boundaries around concentrations of unusually high probability density in Thingspace” exclude the military from being “art”? The best I can think of is that it’s not intended as “art”.
Most of it is bad art. But when members of SEAL Team Six, from concealed positions on a rocking boat, simultaneously fire at pirates, on a different, distant rocking boat, who are holding hostages, and achieve one kill per shot, and the hostages are unharmed, what else does one call that?
Whether or not a round semifurry purple object is really a blegg, I would be surprised if the aesthetic value of a special ops team would be large enough to justify its price relative to more conventional forms of art (which normally get larger audiences, too).
I’m not saying that it really is a blegg, but that if modern art is a blegg, and the NEA stuff is all bleggs, then this is a blegg too.
The pro-spending public money on art/pro-art/pro-modern art “side” also argues that aesthetic value isn’t as important as you seem to think it is.
Once again, military planning at any level and/or execution of plans is short of aesthetic value to the average person (usually?), and requires various amounts of background to understand, but if all these other things are “really” bleggs despite also having that deficiency, let military spending be considered public spending on art, let a tenth of it be considered spending on art, and the USA spends more on art than any other country.
“Skill” ? Or “craft”, maybe.
It’s zawa all right.
Doesn’t make it not art.
I don’t really know how the art could evolve besides just accurate shooting.
However, most composers and visual artists before Beethoven considered composition a craft, not an artform. So I don’t necessarily think it needs hard delineation. “What is art” discussions tend to go in circles though.
“Art” typically implies constructive, expressive creativity. There may be some measure of creativity involved in some instances, but it’s not expressive and it’s not constructive. It’s up to those using the word to decide whether this places it sufficiently far outside the typical “art” grouping to not deserve the label, for whatever purposes they wish to put it to.
I don’t really know what this means.
Whereas money is the unit of caring, I’m not sure what difference in kind could apply.
Technically, anything done by humans (at the very least) can be art, and everything is—or so I’ve been told. However, I would argue that the vast majority of art, as diverse as it is, does share one property: its primary purpose is to be observed by other humans.
For example, consider a masterfully carved wooden chair that was commissioned by a millionaire, who intends to put it in his library so that he has something to sit on. According to the above-mentioned model, this chair is not art, because its primary purpose is purely utilitarian. If the same chair were created by an artist for the purpose of being exhibited at an art gallery, then the chair is art.
I think this is one way to interpret the term “constructive, expressive creativity”, though there may be others.
Google gives as sense 1, “effectively conveying thought or feeling,” and this is more or less what I meant.
I am not sure precisely what you are getting at. What I had meant was that art is typically the creation of something new, rather than the destruction of something existing. One could argue that they are creating new corpses, but broadly we perceive corpses as broken people, not people as aspiring corpses.
In any case, remember (as you earlier emphasized) that we are talking about clustering and relative degrees of similarity, not necessary and sufficient binary conditions. Can you stretch definitions to fit? Absolutely. But with each tug, we’re representing a point a little further from the center of the cluster.
I think this is present in military planning, and inferable from outcomes.
That’s not at all how it seems to me. There is a good deal of inferential distance here.
--Sun Tzu, translated
The art lies in reducing the number of corpses,etc.
Excellent, yes! I agree that in English “art”, unmodified, does not refer to war and should not be used to refer to war or a broader category of art of which one thinks war is a member. However, this is significantly due to historical use, rather than being the simplest stroke circumscribing a concept in concept-space. Excluding the art of war from “art” is somewhat like considering dolphins “fish”.
I acknowledge there is some tugging involved, but what hasn’t been shown to my satisfaction is that less tugging is involved for modern art, or other things generally considered art.
Your stretching pulls the word over so large an area as to render it almost meaningless. I feel as though it exists to further some other goal.
The last time I heard art defined, it was as “something which has additional layers of meaning beyond the plain interpretation”, or something like that. I’m not sure even that’s accurate.
However, if you’re going to insist on calling a spec ops team in action “art”, then that level of stretching is such that so could designing a diesel locomotive, or any number of other purely practical exercises which are not performed for their aesthetic value. A “found object”, or Jackson Pollock painting, or what-have-you, is created primarily for aesthetic value and/or communication of additional layers of meaning.
Art is a blast, un.
In my experience they tend to select the ones with the worst taste.