i wish games/media in general cared about paying artists more because having character artists see making splash art for free-to-play games as the end game/"i made it"/steady source of income makes me so fucking sad
you can be so much more than the most boring form of digital art in existence but it's like the only gig that pays well because it makes millions off the back of extracting pennies from people with poor impulse control
the capitalistic need to make money is inherrently incompatible with every artist being successful. the artists that get successful from the market, at best, are people who got lucky. at worst theyre people who cynically manipulate the market and treat art as a factory job where they just put out not what inspires them creatively, but what makes them money. in no way does this model support the people at their earliest
theres a reason a document as archaic as the us constitution explicitly empowers congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", because even the us founders as flawed as they were recognized that the progress of art, that people making art in general, is an important enough attribute of a functional healthy society that the government should be involved in fostering it. The founders chosen solution to this--copyright laws--shows also how much these were successful wealthy landowners who approached thing from the mercantalistic/early capitalistic framework they found success under (they made their money from having slaves work their land, which they saw as exploiting their personal property; copyright makes art the artists' property)
i come from a family of artists. my grandfather made a living off of doing book covers on commission--not a lavish income, but a livable one. this was quite literally ONLY possible because of the help the government gave him and other white world war ii veterans. He got an FHA loan after the war and a house in the suburbs. He got a free, full ride to art school and became the first person in his family to attend any form of college. the sketchings of a welfare state and the relative power of unions at the time made an emergent middle class have enough money to get the sorts of paperback books for kids that he did the covers for.
in the world we live in today, wishing that people would give more money individually to artists doesn't make much sense outside of a place like furry that has an unusually high need for individual commissions. It wouldn't have made much sense at any point in the past, either. but we CAN support artists as a society. in the short to medium term it requires at the BARE MINIMUM new deal levels of effort--a revived WPA, a revived desire to spend the nations money on the arts that keep a society thriving, much like how the government additionally funds scientific research. But even this gives us a milquetoast social democratic state, and we have seen all across the West--from lesser examples like america to more ambitious attempts like england, france, and germany--that such states are not enduring. you get the short victory but in 40 years time all your hard fought gains are totally defanged.
you guessed it the solution is communism. thank you for coming to my ted talk
