I'm reading a book called Culture Crash, which is relevant here. I also read Sinykin's Big Fiction a while back, so you could say I've been reading abou the culture industry.
Culture Crash makes this interesting point: Did you know there used to be widely read, culturally relevant, AND Nobel Prize worthy (like actual contenders to win), poets? Unimaginable now but true in living memory. They didn't even have to be attached to a University, financially speaking. Like your male or female co-worker might hear that such an such a poet was coming out with a new book, and buy it, and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
The general point of these books (summarizing a lot here) is that the cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now, and there isn't much left. At this point literature has been "captured" by the University, but it's for a good reason: you can't survive as a fiction writer without it. People complain "but they're so insular" but the truth is: they don't have an alternative. You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.
This is true of other industries too. Music: you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician. You might also be the guy who was the resident expert on classical music for the neighborhood at the store, who would recommend operas conducted by Karajan and the best recordings from Deutsche Grammophone (I remember those guys). Art: you could paint signs or design posters, back when there was a real demand. Writing: you could write for the alternative weeklies (I'd read those) or be a regular journalist, writing as little as one story a day. Movies: you could be a video clerk (I also remember this). And those 'subcultures' were incubators. Quentin Tarantino graduated from the video store in a sense. Who can follow him, if there are no video stores anymore?
So this crisis in nonprofit funding really is coming at the end of a much longer crisis in the arts in general. It should be seen in that context.
I don't think the bohemians you alluded to were so much funded by nonprofits, as by the public at large. 50 years ago we had Bob Dylan as the poet laureate, more or less, of his generation. Today we've got Taylor Swift. Both got big record contracts. No knock against her, but if you want to talk about cultural decay, I think it's more of a demand-side problem. The market will elevate artists who the public are willing to pay for. Yes, a publisher or a producer can "make a market" for something, but Francis Ford Coppola can put $100M of his own money into an art piece and, evidently, no one currently will pay to see it.
The idea that nonprofits should prop up art has always been wrong, in a way. Artists since the Italian Renaissance have produced most of their greatest / most famous works for wealthy patrons, not because governments paid them to do it. (Unless you count the Vatican as a government).
What I'm trying to say is that all art arises from pop culture, and pop culture can engender the height of artistic excellence, if the culture itself has good taste and demands quality. Or, pop culture can be a pit of garbage if the culture has degraded. This is what is meant about the transition from "Ideal" Hellenistic art to art which embodied "Pathos" around the 4th Century BC.
We have transitioned in the past 50 years from a culture which strives for the ideal, to one which worships pathos. That may be the mark of a civilization in decline (based on a relatively limited number of historical examples). But the "fix" isn't more public funding for art that no one looks at or listens to. All great art arose from popular desire for it; you can't force it on a population, or keep it alive if there's no audience.
What do you mean by cultural infrastructure? I think I agree with the general thrust of the argument but I’m fuzzy on the particulars.
For example, the video rental store has been replaced by a multitude of sources: Netflix et al, torrent sites, YouTube, Twitch. It’s never been easier to make a film and distribute it to a lot of people, yet I can’t deny a sense of loss from the demise of the video store. What is the difference here?
My hypothesis:
Lack of geographically local experts.
We've merged more and more into a megasociety. In a geographically distributed society, the power law for quality is more forgiving. You can be the best local band and make a living.
Now that we have ultra-efficient communications, there's less room for "mid-tier" art. Local art gets outcompeted by whatever the top stuff is among a much greater national or international population.
Because of this, there's also less of a breeding ground for maturing artists, or for experimental styles in isolated areas (think California surf rock, or NYC Salsa, etc). There's no place to go if you're not the best.
In one way that's true: An artist has to appeal to a global audience. A global audience does have a taste for local weirdness, but there's a lot less economic basis for locally weird things to spawn and germinate when every video goes online instantly. On the other hand, local weird shit blows up all the time on the internet into cross-cultural global phenomena. So it's not that it stopped existing, just that the economic model has changed.
If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding?
But should all art have commercial appeal? Do we force all artists to be marketers first and foremost? Are we going to get better art because of that?
The age-old question: how do we decide what is "good"? If we train a bunch of experts on the entire history of art and let them decide, then we seem to get decisions that are based around those experts competing amongst themselves for intellectual snobbery points. But if we let the masses decide, then we get art that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide.
Maybe we train an LLM to decide what deserves funding for us, and move one step closer to The Culture.
"Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide."
Except that civil servants are making those choices with money they took forcibly from people that don't have a real/significant say in the matter of the taking or what the takings are spent on. In kind it makes it much worse than any decision made by "rich folks". Sure some may agree with those bureaucratic choices, but others are simply giving their cash for no return in value.
It's only taken by force from misanthropes. The average person understands that collective action is a positive, and participates without the threat of force.
> Except that civil servants are making those choices with money they took forcibly from people that don't have a real/significant say in the matter of the taking or what the takings are spent on.
Do you have an alternative idea we could easily disabuse you of?
That is a fair point. Maybe taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing sports stadiums either, instead of cities forcibly imposing culture on us. Of course, public funding has an added benefit of being generally accessible to everyone unlike private funding.
> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding?
Paper mache turds are gauche. Real artists produce works that are extensions of themselves, capturing the very essence of their being. The texture should be genuine and the scent unmistakably original, challenging conventional aesthetics. True art requires a visceral connection formed through a process of personal evacuation. It's about creating something so authentic viewers can practically taste the artist's commitment.
I guess a corollary to your question would be at what point should we let old forms of art die? New forms of art are being constantly created, and if we gave each form equal funding, art funding would increase forever. Since it must remain constant (or decrease) some forms must lose funding. Perhaps they will even go extinct as a result.
> Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide.
A lot of the best art in history has been done because of rich people's money and influence. No doubt the 'urinals are art' crowd would disagree with that though.
The same argument holds for lots of things: e.g. most pre-enlightenment scientific progress was made by priests (because they had an education and were able to spend time thinking about stuff). This is no longer true because we live in more enlightened times.
Just because rich people used to be the only source of arts funding doesn't make them the best source of arts funding.
If you’re referring to Fountain, it was more of a statement about the art world than something with intrinsic value that requires funding to preserve imo. Those kinds of things can be done with duct tape and a banana.
Let the public decide, and you get popular art. Let the rich people decide, and you get whatever art the elites value. And also have some public funding, and you get the kind of art experts and some politicians value.
Let the rich decide by their own preferences. Let the public decide by their own preferences. Take money from the public and give it to politicians and bureaucrats so they can decide for the public. The first two make sense. The last does not.
But there is an argument that some people are truly experts in art, they have studied it and made it their life's work. That we should allow them to make the decision for us, because they will be able to make better decisions. We do this in a lot of other areas, after all.
> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding?
Slovenia has I think a pretty good solution to this: If you are registered as an independent artist, don't have a full-time job, and fulfill some reasonable criteria for being active (art exhibitions per year, poems published, etc), then the government pays you minimum wage. You are welcome and encouraged to freelance (or make royalties) for more.
For some reason, it feels like artists always need to somehow justify their existence. Meanwhile, tech gets billions of dollars of private and public funding. As long as what you're doing in tech fits within the current hype cycle and milieu, then no one blinks an eye.
I'd much rather "throw money away" at the arts rather than waste more money on self-driving cars, fintech, going to Mars, or whatever else the Bay Area thinks will make the world a better place.
They don't think it will make the world a better place, only that it will make them boatloads of money. And lo and behold, an artist whose work holds the same promise won't have to justify anything.
But I think that would be comparing apples with oranges. If we make art with the same motivations that produce tech, is it still art?
Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money.
By all means, donate to your local artist. Tech gets all of this funding because it produces tangible results, tech provides what people ask for. Piss Christ, however ... well, give money to the artist if it pleases you.
There's a sculpture park not too far away from me. It has very large metal polygons, gently rusting. It certainly fits my modern art criteria: is it ugly? Is it incomprehensible?
And then comes the question of "What do you get out of this particular bit of art?" The standard defense is "anything you like." Which sounds great until you realize that only one piece of art is ever required, the rest being superfluous. That one piece is "anything you like," which is congruent with any other piece's identical "anything you like." No need for anything else.
With these sorts of things, modern art is backing itself into a corner. It isn't surprising that people aren't eager to open their wallets.
ideally the economy is nice and efficient and is optimized so that everybody can afford to live a decent life while having plenty of money to spare, which they can spend however they want, and which they will in practice spend on lots of arts and culture.
Instead we have an economy that is ruthless about costing as much as everybody can afford, and a culture that when there's more resources wants more and bigger stuff, leaving little surplus for culture, which often has to be funded with ads and grift because it is counterintuitive to fund it directly.
at least we've still got government-backed culture like arts councils and grants ... without that we'd be even more desperate.
but if you want a lot more art, make food, rent, education, and healthcare affordable, so that people have time and resources left over and don't feel the financial anxiety of capitalism breathing down their neck.
People in this thread will spend more time deciding if they agree or disagree with various aspects of this article, fret over some nonsense about the 'economics' of art, or paint with broad brushes a world they do not understand... instead of doing what they really ought, which is to close the spreadsheet/terminal/pitch deck and...
SEE
ART
Loving art is extremely sexy, sophisticated, fun, complex, challenging, and indulgent. It also breaks you out of a rut, gives you totally bonkers 'out there' fresh ideas, helps you be less of a self-centered human.
Anyone can do it.
The more interested and involved you are in up-and-coming artists –people who are struggling to make it in that world – the better. You can go to a gallery show once a week, or buy every art book you can get your hand on, or dedicate your next vacation to visiting a world class museum.
You can find this world aligned with your tastes - maybe you like abstract expressionism, maybe you like bronze sculptures of cowboys, maybe you like slutty polaroids. There are niches nested in niches, one you'll be comfortable in and ones you won't be, (which is even better, to be uncomfortable).
BTW you can start this journey on the internet but it cannot be fully realized from the comfort of a screen. You will have to go outside, be near other humans, smell the glue and the wine and the turpentine of real art; what better excuse is there? Oh and one more thing, since this is HN: stupid AI art isn't art at all, for the reasons above and more.
Going to a gallery and smelling glue and wine and turpentine is a fine thing to do but it’s not like it is The Worthwhile Thing To Do. Reading magazine articles and thinking about them is a fine thing to do sometimes too.
A classical philosopher once told me that many ultra-wealthy people have ancient papyrus scrolls hidden away in their collections -- full of ancient Greek and Roman knowledge currently unknown to the outside world.
Keep the value up by keeping it secret. Or at least keep your bragging rights with fellow ultra-rich apex parasites.
If you're ever in Kyoto, be sure to check out the Miho Museum to see what one billionaire family's private collection of works from antiquity looks like. I don't recall any papyri, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit if they have things tucked away that aren't ever on display.
If I heard someone brag about depriving the public of historical documents, I'd see them as nothing more than slime. Even the Vatican Secret Archive is finally getting digitized https://digi.vatlib.it/
That's importantly different, unless the existence and authenticity of the scrolls is public and only the contents are secret (which is not what I understood the commenter to be suggesting).
I'm reading a book called Culture Crash, which is relevant here. I also read Sinykin's Big Fiction a while back, so you could say I've been reading abou the culture industry.
Culture Crash makes this interesting point: Did you know there used to be widely read, culturally relevant, AND Nobel Prize worthy (like actual contenders to win), poets? Unimaginable now but true in living memory. They didn't even have to be attached to a University, financially speaking. Like your male or female co-worker might hear that such an such a poet was coming out with a new book, and buy it, and then for a few weeks the cultural conversation would be dominated by this - a book of poetry. Which people 50 years from now would be reading in lit classes.
The general point of these books (summarizing a lot here) is that the cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now, and there isn't much left. At this point literature has been "captured" by the University, but it's for a good reason: you can't survive as a fiction writer without it. People complain "but they're so insular" but the truth is: they don't have an alternative. You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.
This is true of other industries too. Music: you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician. You might also be the guy who was the resident expert on classical music for the neighborhood at the store, who would recommend operas conducted by Karajan and the best recordings from Deutsche Grammophone (I remember those guys). Art: you could paint signs or design posters, back when there was a real demand. Writing: you could write for the alternative weeklies (I'd read those) or be a regular journalist, writing as little as one story a day. Movies: you could be a video clerk (I also remember this). And those 'subcultures' were incubators. Quentin Tarantino graduated from the video store in a sense. Who can follow him, if there are no video stores anymore?
So this crisis in nonprofit funding really is coming at the end of a much longer crisis in the arts in general. It should be seen in that context.
I don't think the bohemians you alluded to were so much funded by nonprofits, as by the public at large. 50 years ago we had Bob Dylan as the poet laureate, more or less, of his generation. Today we've got Taylor Swift. Both got big record contracts. No knock against her, but if you want to talk about cultural decay, I think it's more of a demand-side problem. The market will elevate artists who the public are willing to pay for. Yes, a publisher or a producer can "make a market" for something, but Francis Ford Coppola can put $100M of his own money into an art piece and, evidently, no one currently will pay to see it.
The idea that nonprofits should prop up art has always been wrong, in a way. Artists since the Italian Renaissance have produced most of their greatest / most famous works for wealthy patrons, not because governments paid them to do it. (Unless you count the Vatican as a government).
What I'm trying to say is that all art arises from pop culture, and pop culture can engender the height of artistic excellence, if the culture itself has good taste and demands quality. Or, pop culture can be a pit of garbage if the culture has degraded. This is what is meant about the transition from "Ideal" Hellenistic art to art which embodied "Pathos" around the 4th Century BC.
We have transitioned in the past 50 years from a culture which strives for the ideal, to one which worships pathos. That may be the mark of a civilization in decline (based on a relatively limited number of historical examples). But the "fix" isn't more public funding for art that no one looks at or listens to. All great art arose from popular desire for it; you can't force it on a population, or keep it alive if there's no audience.
What do you mean by cultural infrastructure? I think I agree with the general thrust of the argument but I’m fuzzy on the particulars.
For example, the video rental store has been replaced by a multitude of sources: Netflix et al, torrent sites, YouTube, Twitch. It’s never been easier to make a film and distribute it to a lot of people, yet I can’t deny a sense of loss from the demise of the video store. What is the difference here?
My hypothesis: Lack of geographically local experts.
We've merged more and more into a megasociety. In a geographically distributed society, the power law for quality is more forgiving. You can be the best local band and make a living.
Now that we have ultra-efficient communications, there's less room for "mid-tier" art. Local art gets outcompeted by whatever the top stuff is among a much greater national or international population.
Because of this, there's also less of a breeding ground for maturing artists, or for experimental styles in isolated areas (think California surf rock, or NYC Salsa, etc). There's no place to go if you're not the best.
In one way that's true: An artist has to appeal to a global audience. A global audience does have a taste for local weirdness, but there's a lot less economic basis for locally weird things to spawn and germinate when every video goes online instantly. On the other hand, local weird shit blows up all the time on the internet into cross-cultural global phenomena. So it's not that it stopped existing, just that the economic model has changed.
I'm always torn by this.
If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding?
But should all art have commercial appeal? Do we force all artists to be marketers first and foremost? Are we going to get better art because of that?
The age-old question: how do we decide what is "good"? If we train a bunch of experts on the entire history of art and let them decide, then we seem to get decisions that are based around those experts competing amongst themselves for intellectual snobbery points. But if we let the masses decide, then we get art that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide.
Maybe we train an LLM to decide what deserves funding for us, and move one step closer to The Culture.
"Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide."
Except that civil servants are making those choices with money they took forcibly from people that don't have a real/significant say in the matter of the taking or what the takings are spent on. In kind it makes it much worse than any decision made by "rich folks". Sure some may agree with those bureaucratic choices, but others are simply giving their cash for no return in value.
It's only taken by force from misanthropes. The average person understands that collective action is a positive, and participates without the threat of force.
You can’t really believe this. If taxes were optional, people would not pay. How much do you really believe people gift the government?
https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.h...
Sounds like what you're describing is a government funded by taxes, except using scary sounding verbiage.
> Except that civil servants are making those choices with money they took forcibly from people that don't have a real/significant say in the matter of the taking or what the takings are spent on.
Do you have an alternative idea we could easily disabuse you of?
That is a fair point. Maybe taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing sports stadiums either, instead of cities forcibly imposing culture on us. Of course, public funding has an added benefit of being generally accessible to everyone unlike private funding.
> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding?
Paper mache turds are gauche. Real artists produce works that are extensions of themselves, capturing the very essence of their being. The texture should be genuine and the scent unmistakably original, challenging conventional aesthetics. True art requires a visceral connection formed through a process of personal evacuation. It's about creating something so authentic viewers can practically taste the artist's commitment.
If it's not visceral, it ain't art: Kiss My Art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWTcAAtMj4
ceci n'est pas une turd
I see what you did there.
I can't tell whether this is serious or satire.
I guess a corollary to your question would be at what point should we let old forms of art die? New forms of art are being constantly created, and if we gave each form equal funding, art funding would increase forever. Since it must remain constant (or decrease) some forms must lose funding. Perhaps they will even go extinct as a result.
> Letting the rich folks decide isn't any better (or worse) than letting civil servants decide.
A lot of the best art in history has been done because of rich people's money and influence. No doubt the 'urinals are art' crowd would disagree with that though.
The same argument holds for lots of things: e.g. most pre-enlightenment scientific progress was made by priests (because they had an education and were able to spend time thinking about stuff). This is no longer true because we live in more enlightened times.
Just because rich people used to be the only source of arts funding doesn't make them the best source of arts funding.
If you’re referring to Fountain, it was more of a statement about the art world than something with intrinsic value that requires funding to preserve imo. Those kinds of things can be done with duct tape and a banana.
They're largely in 100% agreement, eg: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2...
wouldn't have happened without rich people's money and influence.
Thankfully there are 8 billion people on the planet, each with different art tastes, and hence a different definition of what is good art.
So all of your versions are ok and coexist. There is a market for your turd, for people-art and for you elite-driven art and for many others.
In other words... No, if you can't attract and audience, there is no funding. But there is an audience for many things.
Yeah, I agree. But that does mean that the primary skill of a good artist is finding that audience... y'know, marketing. Is that what we want?
This is not an either-or question.
Let the public decide, and you get popular art. Let the rich people decide, and you get whatever art the elites value. And also have some public funding, and you get the kind of art experts and some politicians value.
Let the rich decide by their own preferences. Let the public decide by their own preferences. Take money from the public and give it to politicians and bureaucrats so they can decide for the public. The first two make sense. The last does not.
But there is an argument that some people are truly experts in art, they have studied it and made it their life's work. That we should allow them to make the decision for us, because they will be able to make better decisions. We do this in a lot of other areas, after all.
> If you can't attract an audience for your art, does it deserve funding? How do we decide that? Can anyone just make a papier-mache turd and get funding for it? If not, then who decides what is worth funding? On what basis? How do we stop nepotism and elitism from being the main factors for arts funding?
Slovenia has I think a pretty good solution to this: If you are registered as an independent artist, don't have a full-time job, and fulfill some reasonable criteria for being active (art exhibitions per year, poems published, etc), then the government pays you minimum wage. You are welcome and encouraged to freelance (or make royalties) for more.
It's basically UBI for the arts.
That's a great answer. Is it working? Is Slovenia producing more/better art as a result?
For some reason, it feels like artists always need to somehow justify their existence. Meanwhile, tech gets billions of dollars of private and public funding. As long as what you're doing in tech fits within the current hype cycle and milieu, then no one blinks an eye.
I'd much rather "throw money away" at the arts rather than waste more money on self-driving cars, fintech, going to Mars, or whatever else the Bay Area thinks will make the world a better place.
They don't think it will make the world a better place, only that it will make them boatloads of money. And lo and behold, an artist whose work holds the same promise won't have to justify anything.
But I think that would be comparing apples with oranges. If we make art with the same motivations that produce tech, is it still art?
Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money.
By all means, donate to your local artist. Tech gets all of this funding because it produces tangible results, tech provides what people ask for. Piss Christ, however ... well, give money to the artist if it pleases you.
There's a sculpture park not too far away from me. It has very large metal polygons, gently rusting. It certainly fits my modern art criteria: is it ugly? Is it incomprehensible?
And then comes the question of "What do you get out of this particular bit of art?" The standard defense is "anything you like." Which sounds great until you realize that only one piece of art is ever required, the rest being superfluous. That one piece is "anything you like," which is congruent with any other piece's identical "anything you like." No need for anything else.
With these sorts of things, modern art is backing itself into a corner. It isn't surprising that people aren't eager to open their wallets.
> Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money.
I reiterate my comment. Scientists and engineers get billions of dollars of other peoples' money, both private and public.
Regarding the rest of your comment, art is not the arts. The arts include theater, music, dance, etc.
ideally the economy is nice and efficient and is optimized so that everybody can afford to live a decent life while having plenty of money to spare, which they can spend however they want, and which they will in practice spend on lots of arts and culture.
Instead we have an economy that is ruthless about costing as much as everybody can afford, and a culture that when there's more resources wants more and bigger stuff, leaving little surplus for culture, which often has to be funded with ads and grift because it is counterintuitive to fund it directly.
at least we've still got government-backed culture like arts councils and grants ... without that we'd be even more desperate.
but if you want a lot more art, make food, rent, education, and healthcare affordable, so that people have time and resources left over and don't feel the financial anxiety of capitalism breathing down their neck.
The artists themselves do, in the era of easy creation we are all conceptual artists now.
People in this thread will spend more time deciding if they agree or disagree with various aspects of this article, fret over some nonsense about the 'economics' of art, or paint with broad brushes a world they do not understand... instead of doing what they really ought, which is to close the spreadsheet/terminal/pitch deck and...
SEE
ART
Loving art is extremely sexy, sophisticated, fun, complex, challenging, and indulgent. It also breaks you out of a rut, gives you totally bonkers 'out there' fresh ideas, helps you be less of a self-centered human.
Anyone can do it.
The more interested and involved you are in up-and-coming artists –people who are struggling to make it in that world – the better. You can go to a gallery show once a week, or buy every art book you can get your hand on, or dedicate your next vacation to visiting a world class museum.
You can find this world aligned with your tastes - maybe you like abstract expressionism, maybe you like bronze sculptures of cowboys, maybe you like slutty polaroids. There are niches nested in niches, one you'll be comfortable in and ones you won't be, (which is even better, to be uncomfortable).
BTW you can start this journey on the internet but it cannot be fully realized from the comfort of a screen. You will have to go outside, be near other humans, smell the glue and the wine and the turpentine of real art; what better excuse is there? Oh and one more thing, since this is HN: stupid AI art isn't art at all, for the reasons above and more.
SEE
ART
Going to a gallery and smelling glue and wine and turpentine is a fine thing to do but it’s not like it is The Worthwhile Thing To Do. Reading magazine articles and thinking about them is a fine thing to do sometimes too.
I don’t think loving art is easy at all. I still haven’t completely learnt how to do it
A classical philosopher once told me that many ultra-wealthy people have ancient papyrus scrolls hidden away in their collections -- full of ancient Greek and Roman knowledge currently unknown to the outside world.
Keep the value up by keeping it secret. Or at least keep your bragging rights with fellow ultra-rich apex parasites.
Sounds like the kind of thing children tell each other in the playground.
If you're ever in Kyoto, be sure to check out the Miho Museum to see what one billionaire family's private collection of works from antiquity looks like. I don't recall any papyri, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit if they have things tucked away that aren't ever on display.
https://www.miho.jp/en/
If I heard someone brag about depriving the public of historical documents, I'd see them as nothing more than slime. Even the Vatican Secret Archive is finally getting digitized https://digi.vatlib.it/
Wouldn’t the value be a lot higher if it wasn’t secret? Or is it the risk confiscation/opprobrium?
Example of something valuable with secret contents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Shaolin
That's importantly different, unless the existence and authenticity of the scrolls is public and only the contents are secret (which is not what I understood the commenter to be suggesting).