I'm an Irish artist, living in Ireland. I'm very far from a rich kid. Like most Irish artists, I make some of my living from my "artistic" work, and some from what others here might call "real work". Sometimes there's not a clear division between the two, and anyway the ratio of one to the other changes every year.
Because of the cost of living here, particularly in Dublin, there is no way that the Basic Income would provide me with anything like what most people here would consider a decent standard of living. (It would currently leave me with about €200 left over every month, after I pay just my rent. That's before any bills or groceries or anything.)
Plenty of people find a way to continue to make art that other people value, even if the cost of living continues to spiral ever upwards. This payment is simply a buffer to make making art a little easier, for a fraction of the many people who contribute to the social, cultural, and intellectual life of this country. For some it pays their rent or mortgage, for some it pays for childcare so they have time to work, for some it facilitates research or purchase of materials, for some it allows them a workspace outside their home.
It's not perfect, as no public arts funding is perfect but, to me, the kind of cheap cynicism displayed in this comment comes from a place of deep ignorance and bitterness.
Just to answer the question in this specific case: yes, a working class guy can decide he wants to pursue art (in quite a broad range of forms), and he can apply for the basic income once he can show that he is working as an artist. The artists who ultimately receive the payment will be chosen randomly once they meet the criteria to apply in the first place (which, again, is simply that you are working as an artist—exhibiting, publishing, performing, whatever "work" might mean in your case). There is a fixed number of people who can receive it in each round (I think it's 2500 people, cycling every three years), and those people are picked by lottery; if you receive it in one round, you cannot apply for the next. This, and in fact no arts funding in Ireland, has anything to do with certain universities or art degrees. This scheme is far from perfect, but these vaguely leading questions (so common to all commentary on public funding for the arts) are clearly irrelevant.
As for the second question ("would Daniel James work have been as good if he wasn't working in an ironworks"), well, life and art really are too varied to draw the kind of conclusions the following comment implies.
Maybe I'm missing some sarcasm here, but it would be worth asking what the consequences of this situation are for the people who actually make all the music/books/films you get to consume for a "comically small amount of money".
I think it's interesting that practically every time this point is made (and it is made so very often), the examples that are used to prove the point are objective and easy to measure. A 100m sprint time or a calculation of Pi is not the same as a work of art, because they can be measured objectively while art cannot. There is no equivalent in art-making to running a 100m sprint. The evaluation of a 100m sprint is not subjective, does not require judgement, does not depend on taste, context, history, and all the other many things the reputation and impact of a work of art depends on.
As ever, the standard defence of LLM and all gen AI tech rests on this reduction of complex subjectivity to something close to objectivity: the picture looks like other pictures, therefore it is a good picture. The sentence looks plausibly like other sentences, therefore it is a good sentence. That this argument is so pervasive tells me only that the audience for 'creative work' is already so inundated with depthless trash, that they can no longer tell the difference between painting and powerlifting.
It is not the artists who are primarily at risk here, but the audience for their work. Artists will continue to disappear for the same reason they always have: because their prospective audience does not understand them.
Why would anyone care what, say, Charles Babbage was trying to do, when he didn't actually do it in any sort of useful way? Surely this is largely how knowledge is produced—over time, with lots of false starts, and language and technique that is not yet adequate to the problem at hand.
> Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?
I think there is a very serious argument going on here. The nub of it is in this paragraph:
> I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pedagogical path to the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby interferes with one’s experience of the essential. I don’t believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from what’s wrong to what’s right. Artistic experience always consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of process.
Adorno is basically saying that the distortion of the experience of listening to music inevitably caused by dressing it up for mass broadcast results in a dilution of what is 'essential' in that music – roughly speaking, the capacity for revelation. The attempt to make the music more 'accessible', usually by cloaking it in cliché (what he calls here "the whole Salzburg phantasmagoria"), divests it of the potential to be revelatory. It actively lessens the chance of experiencing one of the "qualitative leaps" of understanding he's looking for in music—something beyond words, beyond discourse; an experience of the sublime, of something both absolutely beyond us and yet, afterwards, constitutive of us. Something that cannot be learned (no "pedagogical path"), but which can be known. It's obviously a high bar to set (almost insane, certainly irrational, to most people today) but it's worth engaging with, I think.
I think you're right that Adorno would despise most YouTube musicians. After all, there is hardly a better example of the fetishisation of technique, equipment, and process (not to mention the unquestioning habituation to cliché) than what you'll find on the average YouTuber's channel. (I say this as a regular watcher of many YouTube guitarists, some of whom I really like.) The idea, totally general on such channels, that you can follow existing patterns and paths to mastery (where the satisfaction comes from memetic reproduction of the already known) is obviously antithetical to the view of art and revelation outlined above.
Finally, I don't think there's anything conservative about Adorno's argument here. He is ultimately arguing against holding up what already exists (the Western classical tradition, in this case) as a fixed symbol of greatness, ready to bestow its gifts of historical authority and sophistication on anyone intelligent enough to encounter it. Adorno is saying the greatness of a work cannot be divorced from the nature of both its presentation and the audience's engagement with it. It is a sometimes subtle but I think fundamental difference of perspective to the conservative view of 'the canon'.
Because of the cost of living here, particularly in Dublin, there is no way that the Basic Income would provide me with anything like what most people here would consider a decent standard of living. (It would currently leave me with about €200 left over every month, after I pay just my rent. That's before any bills or groceries or anything.)
Plenty of people find a way to continue to make art that other people value, even if the cost of living continues to spiral ever upwards. This payment is simply a buffer to make making art a little easier, for a fraction of the many people who contribute to the social, cultural, and intellectual life of this country. For some it pays their rent or mortgage, for some it pays for childcare so they have time to work, for some it facilitates research or purchase of materials, for some it allows them a workspace outside their home.
It's not perfect, as no public arts funding is perfect but, to me, the kind of cheap cynicism displayed in this comment comes from a place of deep ignorance and bitterness.