According to you, then, the constructor deserves nothing for building houses and offices and superstructures. He shouldn't get anything for acquiring the raw material, labour, etc as well: he should produce it all out of his ass.
Ditto automobile manufacturers, farmers, electricians, ad infinitum.
If you're gonna chuck art in the free category, you might as well chuck everything else.
I'm not disagreeing with you, not entirely, but because our society is fundamentally financial, you'd have to strip society down to realize that ideal.
Yeah, but those synths and mixer tables ease the process considerably, don't they? Let's ask a sculptor to make a long-lasting sculpture out of dry, fine-grained sand or ask him to mould a block of cast iron into shape using no heat; let's ask a painter to paint using his mouth and a singer to sing with a gag while we're at it. Would you rather eat with your hands or your feet? You can chuck gobs in your mouth with your feet, but isn't picking stuff up with your hands easier?
Again, I'm not completely disagreeing with you--Stephen King wrote his best books on a typewriter--but if the artist has the skill, the right tools--better tools--can only aid his art.
What of it? Yes, I do agree that most of the stuff the fashion industry keeps doing is crap, but that's perhaps because I can't see the art in it. My preferences do not, however make that industry useless--if it were so, hundreds of thousands of people wouldn't be busy making new clothes and styles. They definately see something in it that I do not.
So according to you art is leisure while "work" is not? I don't know about you, but for an artist, art is work as much as anything else is. And what's wrong with art as work? What's wrong with labeling something you like doing as "job"? Is it fundamentally wrong to have a job you like? Is it wrong to get paid for a job that isn't cripplingly boring and is, in fact, the best way you can spend your time?
This is what I'm against: why shouldn't the guy make music for eight hours? Instead of working for two hours and making music for the rest, what's wrong with making music for those two hours as well?
And if, as I said, we're to continue the financial society (which, like it or not, as Pink Floyd sang, is the root of all evil today), what's wrong with earning money for doing your "job" just like any other job, even if it's no job but a heck of a fun ride?
And because people seem to need to state this: all of it is, of course, my opinion.