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Originally Posted by phoenix

You do need to take into account though that right now there are more artists on this planet than there ever have been, with better acccess to money and media than what they've ever had before. It's going to take time for the good to filter from the bad..

exactly. the deep recession might actually help with that. i think having too much mone slushing around might encourage pandering to the corporate dog.

Originally Posted by demonrail666

I just finished reading the article. It'll be interesting to see if art really is able to negotiate its way through the recession and manages to inspire (albeit out of necessity) artists to re-think their position.

The great thing about a time when all conventional ideas seem inadequate is that unconventional ones have to start coming into play. Comfort zones, by their very nature, never inspire change and art has, for too long I think, been operating within such a zone. As such I really do hope that the arts follow the lead of those leading economists who are now starting to examine new (and often previously ridiculed) ideas. Not (as seems to be the case with the economists) to eventually return things to a status quo similar to the one we were used to, but rather in the hope of finding a new, better and more dynamic way for the arts to function within society.

Exciting times indeed.

right-- as a matter of fact, government help might be a good things for artists at this point. during the great depression, roosevelt created the WPA (works progress administration) which gave artists work in public projects-- they helped paint murals, make furniture, and work in post offices, schools, courthouses, and all manner of public buildings. many great artists came out of that era-- they supported writers, they collected oral histories, they supported plays and public theatre, adult education, etc etc. a lot of great artists were helped by the wpa-- jackson pollok, dekooning, rothko, eugene o'neill, john cheever, eudora welty, saul bellow, etc. i don't know if the federal writer's project was a part of the wpa but yeah, there was a lot of government support.

this is also kind of in response to your posts and suchfriend's above.

by the way, the stimulus package kept a nice chunk of dough for the NEA (national endowment for the arts). hurray.

Originally Posted by This Is Not Here

Radio 4 said that the art market enjoys relative stability throughout financial recessions. Apparently because the art market is fairly seperate from the global economic market, people invest in art because of it's inherent worth, much like you'd invest in gold and silver for the same reason. Good art will always be good art I suppose. I dunno, I'm just regurgitating what Radio 4 said, I know very little about the finances behind art.

in the long term art tends to appreciate quite well, but i think the problem is that with too much real estate bubble cash looking for a place to be spent, the art world might have enjoyed a bit of a bubble itself in recent years, supporting artificially prosperous lifestyles for too many artists. that's going to change, and as the article says, a lot of people are going to have to find a day job.