Some of the best and most innovative art I've seen was developed wholly by public funding.

I can't imagine how it is in the USA, where art lives and dies by how marketable it is.

It occurs to me that the (newer) experimental art I have seen from America was developed by wealthy people with loads of free time; the era of wandering jazz and blues musicians having long since passed.

> the era of wandering jazz and blues musicians having long since passed.

That era wasn’t government funded either. What’s your point?

It's over. It was done by wandering poor people and there's no longer a strong market demand for it.

you are not paying attention if you think that the US has some kind of dearth of musicians and artists. the internet has made it easier than ever to create a profile and cultivate an audience.

How many of those artists are earning a living at it, and are not engaging in that production in their leisure time as relatively wealthy people?

Moreover, if I haven't heard of it, then the signal isn't stronger than the noise. It's not particularly _interesting_.

none of the artists i know have made a living at it, and yet it has stopped precisely none of them. they are not wealthy people. do poor nations lack artists? this entire line of thinking is completely divorced from reality. just because the municipal government doesn't pay for as many murals or whatever does not mean artists cease to work.

>none of the artists i know have made a living at it, and yet it has stopped precisely none of them

Which is a big, bold underscore on the argument that copyright should be abolished. Almost no artists make a living from their work, rendering it a failure at its supposed goal. All it is doing is providing artificial capital for a handful of fat cat media companies and the handful of parasitic artists privileged to be a part of that scene. The vast majority of artists will never get a break, and will have to work to subsidize their art. And what does society get out of the copyright game? Less creative freedom to remix and a select few people get richer.

UBI would do more to encourage art.

They are wealthy enough to have the leisure time to produce art with instruments of non-trivial expense.

Moreover, they aren't going to be producing art which requires a full time effort if they cannot feedthemselves doing so.

this may surprise you, but art precedes bureaucratic patronage networks, and continues to flourish in their absence