Factory farms where everyone is being fattened up in cages on a slurry of hate and memes.

Do they have a choice? By hosting an instance, they open themselves up to liability if someone posts child porn. What else could they do?

As a hard materialist, I don’t see art as separate from materialism. What art does is materially express immaterial things - a good piece of art isn’t just an image or description of events, it’s an idea or concept that has been made into a material form.

Art isn’t just a description of the world. The point of art is to change it.

Art hadn’t been properly commodified yet because the technology for mass produced art didn’t exist. They still needed artisans and artists, so they had to fund the arts if they wanted to see any created. They didn’t appreciate art more, per se, but they saw it as fundamentally different from other widgets.

This is no longer the case. With the advent of photography, film, digital information, and of course the internet we now see profitable “art” without any need to fund it with philanthropy. Aside from one-off public works projects they can fund by stealing public funds, they can only imagine art through the lens of profitability and have no understanding of the amount of free time and energy that has gone into creating so much of the art that exists today.

There is no Medicis in 2023. Instead you get Marvel.

Love to “defederate” Nazis

:)