30 Jun
2010
30 Jun
'10
4:57 p.m.
On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 7:37 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com> 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.
In many cases, once an artist "hits it big", the quality (subjective,
I know) of their art drops off hard.