you said:
'i'm sorry, i missed the part where we assumed that widening the
audience is an automatic improvement. can anybody provide any examples
of art (or music, say, to keep it relatively ontopic) scenes that became
more vital and creative once the general public started paying
attention?'
from this i can cull 2 questions:
1) 'is widening the audience an automatic improvement?'
to that i must answer: no. it's not automatic.
2) 'does it ever happen that scenes become more vital once the audience
is widened?'
to that i have no answer. does it ever happen? i don't know, i'd be
tempted to say yes, but as i have no proof, i decided to turn your
question inside out:
'does it ever happen that scenes become less vital when the audience
size stalls or is decreasing?'
to that i answer: yes. i think it's an obvious one.
but let's turn the whole problem around once again:
'nobody should be starving.'
i also formulate the postulate that 'creativity doesn't need to
starve'. you agree with that.
how is creativity paid? typically, through record sales & gigs.
how do you achieve record sales & gigs? through an audience.
how do you make an audience in the first place? through media coverage
in the largest sense. this includes mailing lists, web sites, word of
mouth, mtv, magazines, newspapers, scribbles on a wall, need i add more?
what are the benefits of media coverage, thus widening of audience, thus
payment? more people know about you mean they're likely to be
interested in looking into your music, i.e. buying it, i.e. providing
you with an income so you may make more music. perhaps it may bring you
offers to play gigs, which is also income. perhaps if you have money to
pay the rent, you won't need to spend most of your daytime on another
job. maybe with time you'll manage to spew out more interesting,
thought-out music. you may be able to share ideas with other musicians,
who also manage to receive an income from similar means. perhaps you'll
even be so lucky as to find a way to start your own label to release
albums by other artists who didn't yet get any attention?
is this likely to help the scene? well, looks like it to me.
is this an automatic improvement? still, no.
how can we help making it a more likely (but still not automatic,
although that'd be a pipe dream) improvement? i think it depends on how
the coverage is done. coverage which allows more than one genre, one
artist, one style, one thing, is usually opening its doors to artistic
creativity. coverage which is limited, on the other hand, well, you
know how it ends up being.
as for the argument on jaded magazine execs, that's another point
entirely, but essentially i'm saying that magazines which favor
advertising will eventually favor a more short-term approach to music
coverage, dismissing creativity as 'difficult' & using methods to
produce something which should please to the lowest common denominator.
the method is quite simple: rendering music bland so that you can barely
notice it happening. pop composers know about the method & use it to
great success. but that was simply a divergence on the original point.
in other words: all i did was to expand on your original question. i
honestly don't see what you don't like in my reasoning, especially if
you agree with the fact that creative artists shouldn't be starving.
the reason why they are is because no one knows about them. i can see
(but i still can't understand) that a majority of people might be
interested in one standardized genre of music -- that's one thing. but
the commercial press certainly isn't helping the situation, especially
when their goal is solely to sell more issues so that their advertisers
can sell more of their products, to the detriment of actual musical
research, which is what their goal should be. as representants of
music, they must show the public a good picture of what music is.
that's all.
--
david