Nate started a thread about how the most succesful short film creator in the world earns about 80k a year (not including taxes, private health insurance costs, no 401k matching) and that his fame level is so low we've never heard of him
Don't want to hijack that one but it got me thinking that perhaps short films are the least respected form of art?
Most people groan at the thought of watching a short film, it's like asking someone to come to your piano recital or something.
A regular painter, in this day an age, can make millions of dollars.
Even with an NFT if you're not selling physical art, a banksy nft sold for $340k
It would take that short film dude 4 years to earn that, and if you're more realistic about it and factor in costs of living for 4 years, it doesn't add up - he would actually have to make short films for like 7 or 8 years and live extremely frugally to save that kind of money that one NFT of a painting sold for.
People really respect painters and they go to museums to see their paintings.
Singers have shows on TV and people gather round to listen to them and think of it as something fun that puts them in a good mood.
Literature writers get rich and famous (e.g. jk rowling)
Feature film makers get rich and famous
Architects get rich and famous
Broadway gets rich and famous (e.g. Hamilton)
IDK much about scultpure but there was a rabbit from 1986 worth 91 million, there's probably a contemporary scultpure making $ somewhere
Standup comedians get paid 10 million by netflix for a single performance
Even a FIVE MINUTE set for a comedian can be a guest on the tonight show or something and produce good money and fame
When was the last time the tonight show had a guest spot for a five minute short film? How many people would flip the channel!!
It seems like every single form of art except for short film produces fame and fortune.
Short films are part of the oscars and you could argue there's some fame there but nobody i know watches them IRL and i make short films, even i don't seek out the oscar nominated short films each year to watch them all. i can't name a single director that won a short film oscar in the past 5 years
Seems like the rule is.. short films are not something people really care for.
And then there are the few odd exceptions here or there that break the rule
You didn't so much hijack my last thread as preempt my next one, lol.
After so many years of thinking about this stuff, I have what I'd call a medium grasp of what's going on. It would honestly take an actual book to spell out what I see, but on topic here, people don't get paid for being artists. It's a statement that's 1% false, but we'd commonly say things that were 45% false as bold and confident truths. (talking about humans in general).
If I had to boil it down as short as possible, like a tagline for the eschaton, "People get paid for having money"
It's not so cut and dry as all that, but if you really took a wide look at what's happened, that crazy sentence is more broadly true than any political bullet point you've ever screamed at a social media post in your life.
How much is a Nate North Painting worth? It's worth nothing. In fact it's worth less than nothing, since I invest time making it, uploading it, tagging it, and then have to do further work to get 0c. I won't post images here, you guys know my work, and while it's nothing special, it's more than competitive with some works that have sold for more than my lifetime income.
But how much is a Grimes painting worth?
It's worth 6 million dollars, required her to write "this on sale now, enter the void" and took 20 minutes.
She did less work, at lower quality, than I typically do in a night. I'm not bragging, Grimes is just a very average visual artist, dime a dozen really.
So why does she get paid my lifetime income for a single night of midrange work?
It's because people aren't buying the paintings, they are buying a visible association with a popular person. In the digital age, reach is determined by money, and a person cannot become popular without advertising, which in over 99% of cases comes from money. Once Grimes married Elon Musk, she was in a social circle of billionaires. That association is what is being purchased. The image of having the brilliant social refinement to like the "right" people.
I have a friend out in Vegas, who is wealthy, and he knows the Art Basel organizers, and began telling me stories about their galleries. People had gotten excited about one of the innumerable factions, I won't say which because it isn't relevant, but they found a person from that group, had them spray paint a rock yellow, and he was paid 40k for it. Another time, a different ideological faction was in vouge, and one of them was selected to be paid 85k for the exhibit "dust no. 1" which was some dust they had swept up, encased in a glass box. I don't want to take the trouble to get the actual photo off of my phone, but it looks like this, but with dust at the bottom. They are not paying for the art they want, it's a pretext to be seen handing money to the right people, as a method of social climbing. I think they often fool themselves, staring enraptured at a million dollar black dot on a white canvas, and explaining to another socialite how they think the dot represents apartheid. Idiots.
Essentially, when an extremely wealthy person's IQ drops below 60, they enter the "World of High Fashion" which is code for rich people handing each other astronomical sums of money for creative work such as "I think blue is trending this year, let's make something that no one has ever imagined before, a blue dress" And they revel in it, the nonsensical bullshit nature of their idiot world. Often creating clothing so incredibly bad that you can literally find better designs by penniless high school students that will be forced into minimum wage slavery.
See that, that's the artwork of a millionaire kid that works 20 hours a year high on coke. They took a jet to a limo to this show to a party while Steve Cutts was uploading videos to youtube in the hopes of his share of fractional pennies. I'm glad they did add up for him, but imagine the math. Imagine how many thousands of times as much effort a genius had to put in to succeed as this idiot from the right side of the ever increasing wealth divide did.
I met this girl from Europe that was designing clothes. Average stuff, but competent, even good, stuff that looks like this, in the pro design programs, not a sketch, I mean she made the actual production templates factories could use. Her family had no car. She had an uncle with a car from the late 80s, and he would come once a week to help them get groceries.
If you ask me, her type of design is drastically better and more useful, and she may never in her life get paid as much as the bar tab for the party celebrating the accomplishments of the designer above who put a model in a pool floatie.
I could literally give one example after another all day long, in every sphere of commerce. Unethical people quickly rise to the top, because everyone appreciates the profits a little bit of lax ethical thinking provides (I'm looking at you wells fargo, you subhuman psychopaths). That pools wealth with people who are self centered and sociopathic. Since art is a luxury, it's mostly people that have pooled wealth that can afford to buy it.
So TLDR selection of which artists get paid is made based on social posturing, rather than art quality.
Are short films the lowest paid form of art by effort? I would say that's likely the case. There was a day when it was appreciated, put simply, when it was rare. Tex Avery did ok, but then I can't seem to find a person from that era who didn't end up owning a vacation estate from working at the post office.
Another factor has nothing to do with art or anything we did. The economy (when measured correctly) is a tire fire. We have more money than ever before in the history of the world, and at the same moment most people are making an insanely low fraction of what they used to for the same effort. My friend's dad drove a truck back and forth down a single road, delivering loads of coal. He was a high school drop out with no skills. He put 3 kids through college, paid off a mortgage, had a happy marriage, and died of old age with no financial problems. College graduates working full time now will never afford a home. A gen Z that can run a particle accelerator will be living in a rented apartment owned by a toll booth worker from the boomer generation, or whoever inherited their wealth. We broke America with unchecked greed.
Direktorik is right of course, short films are a path sometimes, really the only path for one of us, to getting to make a feature that might be profitable some day. Even that concept is severely overblown in perception though. Mostly wishful thinking. I watched an episode of Star Trek last night, it was directed by Nimoy's son. I watched an episode of the Mandalorian last week, it was directed by Ron Howard's daughter. I watched a bad movie that made more than I'll ever make in my life, it starred Francis Ford Coppola's nephew. Anybody seeing a pattern here? Maybe 300 high profile directing jobs available per year, and a son or daughter born into extreme wealth every 20 minutes.
Did you really believe that they earned it? That years of work mattered to the only people that could allow any of us through the gate? Here's a person who worked so long and hard that they eventually got on national television. Recognize her? She's what 6 years old, building facial recognition with the American public when you were still trying to get your dad to buy you a toy for Christmas. Her family had 160 million dollars at the time, that's before she started earning 20 million dollars a year for showing up to a difficult job 3 months a year. I feel certain that there were other kids in her class that could have learned to act, but of course none of the kids from poor family ever got even a single opportunity. If they did, they got paid pennies on the dollar compared to when she did the same work. I don't hate Scarlett Johannsen, she seems nice, and she didn't cause any of this. But I do hate a system that unfairly oppresses anyone who didn't win some family tree lottery. We should be better than that as a society, and bluntly, we aren't.
It's on a steady curve, getting worse and worse, and they say AI will be the final nail in the coffin, shifting all remaining wealth to those that already posses it, regardless of why. So Pablo Escobar's family will own Norman Borlaug's family from the next generation forward, in all but name. Thanks free market!
The video below does a great job of walking you through the death spiral that's made all of us poor. Short film, long film, music video, does it even really matter, or are we just people without rich friends, and that's the end of the story for us?
Anyway, I hadn't posted an unhinged rant about anything in a while, and felt the time was right.
