I actually pay a lot for art every week. Most people do. It’s called music and movies. So the translation is, “everyone wants to make some random art but no one wants to pay for random unsolicited art.”
Which seems fine by me!
If you take away visual and experimental arts you also lose good music and movies. And good graphic design. And good architecture. And more.
If you think this is exaggeration, consider that not a few household name musicians - Eno and a long list of others - went to art school, not music school.
Seems like an obscure reference more than a household name :-)
At least outside of DACH.
He's not a "household name musician", either.
Elvis, Beatles, Queen, Kanye West, Rihanna, Madonna, Beyoncé, Adele, etc are household name musicians.
Brian Eno is maybe a strong influence in the field, but few regular people outside of actual musicians have heard of him around the world, I'd venture.
I hadn't known about him before reading his Wikipedia page, just now. And I tend to read a lot :-)
I did list Elvis and Beatles and I can list more stuff from the 50s and 60s onwards. Brian Eno would not be on those lists.
How do we determine who is? Is Vangelis?
This is not rocket science.
Artsy musicians ain't it.
Vangelis îs a lot closer to that than Eno, amusingly :-)
That said, I completely agree that you can't expect any young people to know who he is.
Food is an art, too. Good food is ... good
I understand that "if there's an act of buying, there's consumption" from your perspective, but I'd mostly disagree with that statement and actually, I think it's quite a narrow perspective.
For every act of buying, there's an act of selling. But in the reality I see, many artists sell to produce rather than they produce to sell. So the act of selling is quite flawed from, say, a company selling its products, and the same is true for the act of buying: many don't buy to own or consume, but to support or for a naively genuine sense of beauty.
You may very well boil it down to "money give, money take" but the symbolic here is far stronger than the capitalist perspective of art as a market.
Also, I'm not ignoring the attraction of the market for artists and buyers alike, it's just not the whole story.
How much of what you pay goes to the artists? If most of it goes to rentiers, then the artists themselves need other means of support so they can keep making art.