If it becomes impossible to make a living as an artist, the only people becoming creatives will be the kids of rich people. Mummy and daddy can pay for them to spend 10 years flouncing around Hollywood, making loss making tv shows, or whatever before they stand a chance of being paid enough. Already a huge problem.

If only rich people are making art, it's inevitable that mass culture will be dominated by the ideology and beliefs of out of touch rich people. If you want culture that criticizes the status quo, you need more poor or working class kids in the creative sector.

This being said, my pension plan is a rope, so I'm quite happy pirating rather than paying for luxuries. Especially if I'm stealing from a company that engages in wage theft, avoids paying tax, etc. If anything it then becomes perfectly moral.

But if you have some spare money, go support artists and creatives who deserve it.

Not that I'm judging anyone.

[–] nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 hour ago

Paywalls only move this to the consumer:

If art doesn’t make you money, only rich people can make art.

Under the current system, you can make money making art, but only access it if you’re not poor (or pirate it lol).

Either way, much of art becomes an image of the experiences of rich people, either through the artists themselves or the audience.

A more fundamental change is needed if you really want to solve this issue.

[+] iloveDigit@piefed.social -6 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Nah, that's all fundamentally wrong.

Paying artists for their work, especially when there's not enough food for everyone, is capitalist bullshit that perpetuates and is perpetuated by letting rich people dominate society. Your post makes the problem worse by not expressing any loss of respect for artists who enrich themselves while others starve.

If Eminem read your reply, he'd probably take it as a sign his low income background makes it OK for him to be so famous we both know him, while other people are starving to death and other artists have zero audience - but you're trying to twist it the other way around, like rocket launching him into capitalist mental illness is actually keeping things grounded or something.

That's how you get a society where people like Eminem aren't organizing to overthrow Trump, because instead of the situation being "I'm known and paid as an artist for the useful stuff I do in that position aside from art," the situation is "anything useful I do aside from art will detract from my career as an artist so I should just shut up and be less political, at least less political than organizing a revolution."

If someone doesn't care enough about art to do it when it's hard, their opinion isn't more valuable than mine just because they're poorer than me.

I have been homeless before and probably will again because I have a spine - people who waste their lives doing whatever corporations tell them, do not have more valuable opinions than me just because they have less money than me.

It would be more reasonable if no one paid artists for their work until there was enough food for everyone, and art had to come from people like me who can afford to do it regardless of how much money we have, because we'd rather face stuff like homelessness than waste our lives. That's how you would get a society that isn't culturally dominated by capitalist bullshit.

Then I'd be making money for the useful stuff I do instead of facing possible homelessness, Eminem would be making money for the useful stuff he does including making any political statements he wants instead of staying quiet to get paid for music, and Trump wouldn't be a topic.

Edited this comment a lot. Made it too long. Removed one angry paragraph because all the paragraphs are too angry as it is. Sorry.