Death seems to be moving slowly; it does not seem like it had planned to burst into the room and follow with a quick escape. Instead, it is almost as if death had knocked prior to entering the room.
Zachary M. S. Waarala
Daily Arts Writer
B-Side
If you see the transparent child in a nightgown in the upstairs hallway, it isn’t fun anymore. Because you don’t have to believe, you just know.
The aspect that differentiates film ghosts from the supernatural phenomena that we recall around campfires and during thunderstorm blackouts is this: The ghosts in movies need no explanation. They can be make-believe because film itself is an escape from reality.
I quickly learned that the thing with trying to get people to buy your art is that your vision doesn’t mean much to them.
Collins reiterates art as quintessential to human behavior: “What we feel drives what we do. Art is evocative that way, it stimulates particular emotions, which stimulate particular behavioral outcomes.” In this way, business cannot be without the arts. How humans exchange and transact with one another is so closely related to not just culture, but to how we feel, which largely comes from artistic influences.
While it’s true that labels might have more money to promote artists and send them on tour, artists are still fully capable of marketing themselves, and even booking their own tours. Social media has completely revolutionized the way we communicate with each other and has changed the way we advertise as well. It’s now easier than ever to reach billions of people that are connected online for free or close to it.
Li said, “I was trying to speak to this idea that for most groups of people, no matter how much money you have, you still can’t buy your way into influence. Because money has entered the bloodstream of our society so much, it seems to be the only way to get the universal things that people want: to be desired, to be attractive, to be respected, to have dignity. What this book says is that money can’t buy everything, but there is a reason why we think it can.”
While the artists themselves are vital to fueling the art machine, arts administrators are the machine’s main source of power. Arts administrators provide the ammunition so the three important gears listed above can move easily side by side.
And in recent years, as winners become more and more inconsequential, it appears as though they realized the futility in investing even the bare minimum of time and money in convincing the public to fall in love with a new “top” model, dancer, rapper or singer every year.
