Essay: "Why Pay for Art?"

Do you remember those stupid anti-piracy ads they used to run before movies? There was this one with a guy who supposedly painted sets, talking about how piracy personally hurt him. I remembered snickering: yeah, that’s what happens when a movie flops – they stop painting the sets.

The older I get, and the more I learn, the more I think that there isn’t really any good rationale for paying for art at all.

First of all, most artists don’t make any money. Period. Take authors. I don’t have the exact stats in front of me, but the general rule is that 1% of all books make up 99% of all the sales. And that’s just published books; it doesn’t include people who can’t get published. I imagine something similar holds true for music. Movies and video games are a bit different, because they are more capital-intensive. But the same general rule applies. A very small percentage of the art getting made gets the vast majority of the money spent on art.

So we should remember that if we stop paying for art, only a small percentage of artists will actually be affected, and those people are (generally speaking) doing very well. There are exceptions, but there really isn’t much of an artistic “middle class.”

It’s very different from, say, the legal profession. I am both a lawyer and an author. I am not really much better at lawyering than writing.  Possibly worse. And there is not actually that much more demand for legal work than for novels. Yet I get paid very little for writing, and very well indeed for lawyering. Why is that so?

It has to do with the nature of the business of writing. Let’s say that Alan Lenczner is the best litigator in Canada. However, there are only so many hours in a year. Once he has billed out as many hours as he reasonably can, at his highest possible hourly rate, he’s “done.” If there is still legal work left over, other lawyers get it by default (though at a lower hourly rate). In consequence, Alan Lenczer probably only makes about ten or twenty times as much money as I do.

On the other hand, there’s no limit to how many books Stephen King can sell. Not everyone can hire Alan Lecnzer as their lawyer, but Steve King can sell books to everyone. So he probably sells, not ten or twenty (or even fifty) but a million times as many books as I do.

Now let's look at some of the other people involved in art.  Publishers, studios, record companies, retailers, and so on. They usually get about 90% of purchase price of a work of art.  If we stopped paying for art, that would pretty much be that for them.  Should we care?

Some people argue that publishers or record companies discover and nurture artists. This is not true. Since (as discussed) publishers make all their money off “hits”, and since it is basically impossible to predict, in advance, what will be a “hit” and what won’t, publishers seek to acquire the rights to a lot of different works of art. They take a scattershot approach. And this means they can’t afford to invest too much in any one project unless it is a sure winner.

So what publishers pay as little money as possible up front, and tell their authors to do their own marketing. The fewer resources a publisher puts into each works, the more works it can acquire, and the better chance it has of getting a winner by sheer chance.

Some people also say that publishers create “big hits”, but I don’t see the evidence for that. YouTube videos don’t seem to need marketing. That double rainbow guy did not have a team of marketers to support him. A few people checked it out, then forwarded to others. It “went viral.” There is very little reason to think anything different is happening with traditional art. Did canny marketing really make Steve King a hit? He just blew up, that’s all, and after he did it was easier to maintain his position than get it in the first place. It’s an open question whether he could do it all over again. Remember, Steve King wrote books under a pseudonym for a while – and was unable to replicate his own success!

So what do we stand to lose if stop paying for art? Not much. For 99% of artists it would not make much difference. For the other 1%, they would certainly make less money, but they were only getting 10% of the price anyway. If they sold their work more directly, somehow, they could lower the price and keep their money.  Even if they gave it away, couldn’t they make a decent enough living in other ways? Merchandise or limited editions or speaking engagements?

Further, I don’t think too many great works of art were really done for the money; there are better ways to get rich (although who knows: Shakespeare and Dickens were pretty sharp businessmen).

Of course, some forms of art are more expensive. Like, for example, movies and video games. Many great games and movies cost millions and millions of dollars to make. They need to recoup their investment much more than albums and books do.

Still, with increases in technologies, it will continuously get cheaper and cheaper to make great films. Again, you can see this on Youtube or anywhere else. And although I don’t know as much about the movie industry, I expect there is as much fat to cut there as anywhere else.

In the end, I’m really not so sure if we really need to be paying for art. It will be around whether people get paid for it or not.  If the whole business slides into the sea, I’m not really going to be broken up about it.