Is it vulgar to resource art?
Not long after writing about the cost of feeling free last week, I happened to read that "managing money [is] a big problem for those who prefer to think of themselves above such vulgarities" in the Sydney Morning Herald's review (21 June 2014, Spectrum p. 36) of Justin Heazlewood's Funemployed: Life as an Artist in Australia (2014). A few pages later, the same paper reported on some of the artistic businesses behind this year's Vivid Sydney (Vivid breaks all records, p. 27).
Whatever the artists themselves think, I thought, there seem to be plenty of others who think artists ought to be above such vulgarities, as I've previously commented upon regarding free services supported by data collection, user-centric justification of copyright infringement, free content supported by advertising and Google's scanning of books.
Maybe I'd like to be above such vulgarities myself and, come to think of it, maybe everyone else would too except perhaps for the cynical types that Oscar Wilde described as knowing "the price of everything and the value of nothing". But I know that doing things requires resources and that many useful resources are not infinitely available. As noble as it might seem for my local fruiterer to give away apples to anyone who wanted them, for example, he won't be able to do it for long unless he obtains the resources to keep his orchard in bloom.
I think most people understand this reasonably well when it comes to physical goods like apples. Yet naïve free content advocates seem to at once think artistic goods so important as to have some sort of open access right attached to them, yet think that paying for them (that is, resourcing them) would be crass.
I think few people would doubt that commercial enterprises have contributed plenty of less-than-noble art to the world in pursuit of money. In fact, they've probably contributed plenty of less-than-noble products all of sorts. Yet nor does anyone produce great art without a significant input of time, labour and materials — and these cost money. (Sure, an artist can donate time and labour, but only so much as is left over after providing for his or her needs with some other source of money.)
Probably, both sides need to remind themselves that money is, at heart, a convenient proxy for providing and exchanging resources. Those who pursue it for its own sake (such those less-than-noble commercial enterprises) have been pilloried throughout history as superficial, greedy, and ultimately unsatisfied because money is, in itself, not particularly useful or interesting. On the other hand, those who think they (or someone else) can do without it might need to consider how much they could achieve without any resources.
