• It sounds like you’re the kind of person who generally does useful stuff all the time, aside from music, while perhaps not getting paid enough for everything.

    And it sounds like you want to economically rely on music as your marketable skill, and it’s core to who you are. People will pay for music, even if they’re irrational for it, it still seems rational for you to want to be one of the musicians they pay. Because you want to focus on music, if I’m understanding correctly?

    So you can survive by marketing your other skills, but you try to make money on music and you want the arts to be well funded.

    But funding the arts wouldn’t work as a generalist idea because not all artists are the same kind of person as you. Not all actually do useful stuff when they can. Taylor Swift just flies around polluting shit for example.

    I see it as a problem that our culture had the idea of music as an economically marketable skill before the idea of ending world hunger. I don’t think our culture should make you feel like relying on that is a viable option. Taylor Swift shouldn’t be so rich. Wealth should be so evenly distributed that your drive to make the world a better place makes it easier for you to earn enough from side jobs and focus on music.

    But since that’s not the world we have, it’s understandable that you think the way you do. I don’t judge it.

    It sounds like our core disagreement might even boil down to one term - “on the side.” It sounds like you envision doing music with other work on the side, and I envision doing other work with music on the side. It sounds like, if you get rich on music, you’d probably buy a home and start a community garden or do something for the hungry in your community. Then I’d say you’re earning your position with that stuff and the music is on the side, but you and society would say you’re earning your keep with music and that other stuff is on the side, I guess. You don’t envision flying around pointlessly like Taylor Swift, your vision is more like mine, just with different words, maybe.

    • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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      15 hours ago

      You keep using the word “useful” in a way that suggests you’ve narrowly defined it in your head to exclude art. Life without art quickly results in a whole lot of death. Even the poorest humans throughout history have created music and art, because it’s a fundamental part of human life. Just because art is less critical to immediate survival in most cases than eating doesn’t make it any less necessary than it; shelter being more or less critical than food in a given situation (deadly sub-zero blizzard, more critical. Temperate area with no dangerous weather or predators, less critical) also doesn’t make it more or less necessary, it’s just a varying order of necessity. Being anti-Capitalist is important, but I feel like you’ve written off “professional” art as the domain of Capitalism rather than another victim of it (which food is as well, for that matter).