> I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.
Wait until they coopt the word "art" to include AI-generated slop. I dread the future discussion tarpits about whether AI creations can be considered art.
It happens quite often, yes. They are concept artists and designers but they share their own stuff. And just now I opened up Discord and skimmed through some art, pixel art and drawings channels in the many servers I'm in and saw a lot of art that I doubt anyone is trying to sell. People just love to share their creations.
Yes if you are friends with and deeply networked with professional artists and designers, you'll see a lot more hobby art. Most people are not friends with even one (never mind several) professional artists though.
This scenario is irrelevant to my main thesis anyway, which is that people principally do not develop artistry to the levels required for strangers to care about it without doing so as a professional pursuit.
That you get to see the exhaust and byproducts of such a professional pursuit isn't a point against it.
Via Instagram, while they're showing off pictures of their kids and their hobbies... yes? Do you show only your coworkers, what, system diagrams of work things making the between work times still also about work?
Different places have different cultures, apparently your coworkers aren't to know anything about you beyond what's necessary for them to work with you, but across the whole world, not everywhere is like that, and it seems unnecessary to state that you don't live in such a place in that way.
Most independent artists will disagree with this statement. They do it for passion, to communicate, to tell stories, to fulfill their own urges. Some works incidentally hit a sweet spot and become commercial successes, but that's not their purpose. On the other hand, the 'art' you see being marketed around you is made specifically to be marketed and sold, with little personal connection to the artist, and often against their own preferences. That's "content".
Is that what they tell you when you’re standing in the gallery with a checkbook? Or in the boardroom with a signature?
No, you almost never see art that wasn’t meant to be sold. Public art pieces are commissioned (sold), art in galleries were created by professional artists (even if commercially unsuccessful) 99.99999% of the time.
Surely if this wasn’t true, you could point to a few specific examples of art — or even broad categories of art — that weren’t made to be sold and that you have personally seen?
I think you're just interpreting the meaning of "made to be sold" very literally. Of course artists want to make a living and have their art be appreciated, so they expect pieces to be sold; but that is not the main motivation behind making the art, where commercial "art" - advertising, mainstream cinema, pop music, most art galleries, anime, 80% of what you see in arts and crafts fairs, pieces in IKEA - is created with profit as the main motive.
Going back to the origin of this, stating that Ghibli style videos generated with SORA (which the OP initially called "content") are equivalent to Studio Ghibli movies because they are both "art made to be sold" would be wild. A film like Spirited Away took over 1 million hours of work, if making money was the main goal it would have never happened.
> Of course artists want to make a living and have their art be appreciated, so they expect pieces to be sold
"they want their to be appreciated, so they expect pieces to be sold" is a clever trick but one is not related to the other. One could want their art to be appreciated and never sell it, but virtually no one would see this art for a variety of reasons including the fact that marketability increases visibility and that there is very, very little amateur art that is worth looking at, much less promoting to a larger audience.
It seems you agree that in fact art (that anyone sees) is overwhelmingly made to be sold.
I didn't say anything about their "main motivation" and neither you nor I (nor even the artist, frankly) could say much about what someone's main motivation is.
What we can say is that nearly all of the art anyone sees was in fact made to be sold, which is the specific claim that I made.
I don't think any supposes it does. They're arguing that the word choice implies something about the speaker's value system and the place that art or human culture has in it.
