At 2/14/13 01:35 AM, Stereocrisis wrote:
Musicians, actors, and sports stars are legitimately in it for themselves. They have no shame in plugging whatever thing it is that will make them the most money, and if it means selling out beliefs, what is a belief really? An idea based on some limited level morale he or she has once followed, and since realized that reality is paper dollars. It's a you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours world we live in. Who in their right mind wouldn't sell out?
I think you have a slight misconception on what "selling out" actually means. People don't use it in the context of someone betraying their beliefs for money, the term is applied whenever an artist merely makes money directly from their vision; it's meant to imply that simply using your vision as a catalyst for producing money immediately compromises the vision itself and thus challenges the substantiality of the content because by selling copies of it or the content itself it means you don't hold it in a respect of being precious as you gave it away in trade, therefore if the author doesn't value it as being priceless then why should the audience value it at all?
It's fucking retarded because the preferred alternative is that the author give it away to their audience for free, which by the same logic they apply to the concept of selling the content for money, giving it away for free shows that the author doesn't value it at a price but rather values it as nothing; nothing that's worth protecting or preserving or even owning. To be an author who maintains this position is a half step up from calling their content generic, because anyone can have it and anyone can use it and because of that it's nothing special.
The irony of it all is that the logic is based around the premise that the author is selfish because the audience is entitled to experience the content just as well as the author is despite them never contributing to the content's creation. People who maintain this frame of logic also maintain the mentality that content that is merely found, not created or conceived, thus it's selfish to not give it to whoever asks for a slice even if it means the author inadvertently becomes deprived of their cut by the end of it.
By their own logic the author can never maintain the status of being an artist because they view the content they make as being inherently public domain rather than as a catalyst of self expression, yet they call people who give their content away for free 'real artists' because they serve the audience's self serving bias.
It's not a frame of logic that should be given affirmation with "You'd do it too and so would I", it should be rejected in it's entirety because it's fucking retarded.
