Publicly Funded Artists as Government "Attack Pets" - Stefan Molyneux

President Trump to Defund PBS/NPR? | True News - Stefan Molyneux

Now Stefan is a jabber box and can talk and talk and talk before delivering his punchline, but in the meantime he is saying some of those things that really and honestly need to be said.  Whose responsibility was it for any of the Impressionist painters to challenge the "system" that existed at that time?  It was they themselves.  They went out there and certainly found their paying audience.  Ever wonder why there are so many paintings of little girls by Renoir?  Because he got paid to do them.  He got a reputation for it and he earned his living thereby.  The others had their struggles, but that is what makes true artists and true art apparently.  

My oldest and dearest friends are among musicians and artists of various kinds.  But they all manage pretty much to make a living on their own without too much public money required.  Frankly, a lot of them may be alienated from society and that's why they're artists.  There were according to a psychologist friend of mine from another lifetime ago, certain unhappy people in this world for which normal human life would often be a great burden; artists, psychics, homosexuals and mystics.  These people may or may not have other disabilities.  A huge percentage of the public suffers innumeracy as well as illiteracy and more than you think can't possibly write by now because of the technical devices we all use.  Imagine losing the ability to write or never having learned, but knowing enough about how to use texting to get away with it.  There are such people, I assure you. 

Of course, if artists really want to be artists, they have to figure out how best to get attention and to sell their work.  That goes for composers too.  How do arts and artists survive?  I think the first question any artist needs to honestly ask is whether their art is actually any good at all.  Can anything they think they're accomplishing actually stack up favorably against known masterpieces in whatever their field of art happens to be.  If you are copying or extracting from someone else of known fame and caliber, or some school that you might happen to like, will it seem to the people who know the market for such artifacts that your efforts are mere affronts to that original school?  Where there is anything less than some kind of objectification, even of arts and artistic mastery, then matters of artistic value are pretty impossible to value.

If there is any objective reality, and I assure everyone that life itself would be impossible without it, then any artistic venture has its necessary risks and where there are none or where patronage is wanton or proscribed for some political objective of the state paying for the art ... then frankly, a lot of trash is the usual result.  How can one tell the difference?  VERY easy.  If one hears someone play the piano or a guitar or sings or dances or has painted pictures or made sculpture or made anything of any known artistic product, the question is one of enjoyment: I liked that, I want to hear more of that, I enjoyed seeing that, I would be willing to travel many hundreds of miles from home to experience that.  You know what's artistic and makes money?  Summer arts festivals at all possible levels.  The most monetarily successful tell one the true state of most people's willing artistic tastes.  

Of course, if one really wants to plan ahead, one will need economic lifeboats.  We need a concerted effort to get this project off the ground as it is to ultimately make public funding for most things obsolete: HERE.

Be seeing you.