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depends on what you understand "art" to mean. also on what you understand "capitalism" to be. in any kind of strict sense, no matter the popularity of a given artist, the production of artworks has no relation to capitalist forms of organization at all. not even in andy warhol's factory.
but there's a segment of industrial design that's produces quite lovely prototypes of mass production purposes. is that art? why not? a well-designed tent can be a lovely environment and its contemplation fill you with all kinds of suitably lofty sentiments if that's what you've been told that experiencing an environment called "art" is supposed to do.
anyway, this is an obvious question since duchamp was moved by the repressive tolerance corporation art history division from a guy who signed a urinal at a parisian show in 1919 to some fold in the zeitgeist. while that happened, duchamp was playing chess. mostly.
you know, it really doesn't matter what an "artist" does so much as it matters what the officially sanctioned "taste creators" of the repressive tolerance corporation art critics division say about what they do. and alot of the time the "artists" that you read about are quite dead by the time the repressive tolerance corportion, cataloguing of everything division gets hold of them. quite dead and buried and so they don't have to get paid and aren't around to tell the academic types that what they're saying is one-dimensional.
but i digress.
i think people make work because they want to. they make work in situations that are shaped and/or limited by resources. the making of stuff is quite different from the selling of stuff is also different but less from the structuring of demand for stuff.
because the reality is that people like to like what they're told they like to like and they like to freely like it in the way they're told they like liking it.
why left to their own devices people have trouble distinguishing a child's work from a conceptual art piece.
and they think that they could make such pieces even though they never have and likely never will because, usually, when they try they figure out that they can't. but it's always easier to think you could and not do anything to dissuade yourself. that way you can also imagine that there's no particular skill or effort or anything else that informs making stuff, that it's all disposable, all a commodity that entertains you or doesn't because all that really matters is the entertainment of the Consumer because they have the Cash and so they rule the Scene even though they are quite obedient in their relations to the Scene and only pick up on the fact that there is one because someone told them it was there and while they're there they're typically too afraid of fucking up somehow to venture an actual engagement with the work they're experiencing but after the fact, when the imaginary social pressure's off, it's all child's play anyone could do it.
except they don't.
and you don't either.
but i digress.
capitalism as a mode of production is characterized by the subordination of all relations to monetary relations. seems to me that the op is a neat little encapsulation of that subordination.
there's a way in which the question is real simple.
you could say that making "art" environments and capitalism have nothing to do with each other except that the people making the environments grow up in the same space of social reproduction as the folk who do not make those environments, so are working with similar dispositions even if one of the effects of working in a focused way on a craft for a long time is to transform aspects of those dispositions into something else. maybe.
the question seems to me, really, why isn't it important to the overall capitalist order in the united states in particular that art be supported?
the united states spends alot of money on weapons systems. maybe that's the kind of art we really like, the kind that kills people in great number and looks shiny in parades. o and representational painting. and linear narrative. and repetitive song structures that work in 4. 1 2 3 4, like you're marching. hi ho.
why is it so difficult for artists to actually make a living?
it's in the main because capitalism in its united states form is dominated by people who see in art environments a mode of critique and they don't like it. they can't control it and the people who make that stuff are malcontents and every last one of them would quit their day job if they could and why should they be allowed to do that unless they can produce something that Entertains the Sovereign Consumer in which case they're ok. like a pet. a monkey maybe.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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