As an art+tech person, I highly encourage those of you with money to spare to make inroads into the art world and support those of us who perceive and express that which is new, strange, and beautiful about this world. Artists are always at the forefront of technological and social change. You owe more to them than you know.
When's the last time a full-time artist, in the classical sense of collectable canvases, made something that was a major contribution to human welfare?
With older artists it's easier to see - technology and art tended to overlap because it was a means to express ideas. But more recently? It seems that art-based philanthropy as a utilitarian endeavour would be difficult to justify.
It doesn't really work like that. This concept of individuals making major contributions is an artefact of the way stories about human history are written. Artists perceive the future and share what they see through aesthetic means. This gives everybody (who's looking) a way of seeing beyond their own experience into the unknown. Without art, we are all trapped in the present.
I don't have any external justification for this beyond the fact that many people that I know who do important work refer regularly to art to inspire and help them push their ideas.
It seems unlikely that artists have a unique future-perceiving faculty. There are some science fiction authors who are fairly decent, but if you're trying to sell classical art as a thing you need something more than some hand waving about us all, other than artists, being trapped in the present.
Maybe some people want things they've seen in startrek or in comics or sci-fi stories and the like, get inspired by great engineering feats that they see in their day to day - that kind of thing. But decent sci-fi has a fair bit of research behind it and most of the science-fiction related art would seem to be fairly well endorsed by those who enjoy it anyway. Not really a venture into the world of art and support artists kind of thing.
I find it very hard to believe that art in a 'involve yourself with art' and 'support the artists you owe more than you know' kind of sense has anything to do with inspiring people with regards to the future. I don't see the relationship between the sort of stuff that's generally passed off as art and anything to which one could aspire.
> the sort of stuff that's generally passed off as art
I'm not sure what you're referring to here, but it's surely not relevant. 99% of everything is shit. The only things that matter are the things that matter. That you don't know about them is not my concern.
Yes, science fiction serves a similar role. Fine art also informs science fiction. And vice versa. But they are different things that reveal different aspects of our culture, its evolution, and its direction. There is not only a single sense of 'seeing the future' that may be fulfilled by one or another discipline!
You sound like somebody who simply lacks an education in fine art. You would not be aware of the the influence of art if you were not immersed in, or if you hadn't studied in depth a culture that values, understands and makes use of it. I would argue further that cultures who do not value art in some form are impoverished, for they lack that particular perspective of highly sensitive people.
