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This wouldn't matter so much if 1) Arts Council funding hadn't been decimated under austerity and 2) Working class people could afford to buy art.
The pool of people who can afford to keep the arts alive is rapidly diminishing. I work with artists and see this week in week out but it's the same with everything.
Rich man moves to the village and everyone goes to work for him.
As a working class person who can't afford art and has always pirates everything this is accurate.
Just a few small questions, out of interest - would you buy art if it was significantly cheaper, or free? Or would it just be so low on your priority list that it would never be important enough?
If it was very cheap, or free, would you take "whatever was on offer", or would you still have very particular tastes in what you liked?
It's too low on the priority list. Rent, bills, food etc. all come first.
I only buy e.g. video games that are exceptionally enjoyable and exceptionally niche or an album on bandcamp of an artist who's work I particularly enjoy with exceptionally few plays where 1 sale might make a difference, and even then I usually limit any such spend in total to a max of £20 at most, and it's something I would only spend once a month at most, normally rarer.
Higher prices are a deterrent.
For instance when I was trying to leave Spotify, I had no good piracy sources for one of the albums from my Spotify library, so I went to the artist's page on bandcamp and it was priced at £12 or something as minimum, when she was some indie Lana del Rey type "moan to a synth a bit" and it was nothing special, just decent vocals. Long story short I just shrugged, removed the song from my playlists both on Spotify and locally and now I no longer remember who the artist in question was, I instead bought the entire discography of a different, more unique artist at £2 per album.
As for like, drawings/paintings, I intrinsically see them as having almost zero value and cannot see myself ever paying for one, I would sooner invest in a printer and print something off Google images for a poster than anything else If I even could put up posters without running afoul of the rental agreement. On an emotional level - when I grew up, all images were just something on the internet that was free, watermarks and Shutterstock meant to prevent you from right clicking and saving an image and all that crap to me are seen as enshittification.
I would definitely never buy art for art's sake, it would be highly specific things. Out of all the people I know IRL, I'm basically the only one who considers paying for art generally, which probably has something to do with the fact I'm sympathetic because I'm a hobbyist musician. In fact most people I know don't even seem to have the attention span for music at all anymore, they just don't listen to any music at all (which isn't my fault I swear lol).