micromoog wrote:
On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 7:37 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yeh, yeh, yeh, artists made art before copyright. What they didn't make was
as much money as they now stand to make because of it. Ezra Pound once wrote
that knowing a little hunger isn't necessarily bad for an artist, but
starvation is definitely not good.
It is _not_ self-evident that a high profit-motive produces better art
in the same way it produces better widgets/business methods/etc. In
fact, looking around at the output of today's highly-paid artists, an
argument could be made for the opposite.
Sigh. I didn't suggest that it's all about high profits. It isn't just
about pop/rock music either.
In many cases, once an artist "hits it big", the quality (subjective,
I know) of their art drops off hard.
Elliott Carter arguably "hit it big" quite some time ago. That's when
his finest work began to appear. According to Wikipedia he's produced
"more than 40 works between the ages of 90 and 100^
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Carter#cite_note-nytimes-100-0> ,
and three more since he turned 100".
Did Charlie Parker "hit it big" ? Miles Davis ? John Coltrane ? Duke
Ellington ? Leonard Bernstein ? Aaron Copland ?
Buell Neidlinger told me that Cecil Taylor makes great money playing in
Japan. I doubt that Cecil's music has suffered since he started making
better money.
Best,
dp
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