Oh Christ. "ART IS DYING!" How many times have I heard that? No. No it's not. In any medium there's always going to be a huge market of processed garbage sold to the masses who aren't necessarily dumb but are looking for gluttonous comfort food. And that market buoys the smaller market for legitimate art. That's just how it goes.
Entire mediums rise and fall. The theatre is a museum. No one considers ballet a respectful form for telling story. Movies are losing sales. Where is the writing today? Television. There's always to be story. The art forms don't die, but they shift what mediums they're present in. But is killing art because the foundational principles of art are no longer being taught. It's one thing to say "there's always more garbage than good", that is true, but the garbage is getting worse. There has never been an artistic low point in history, with such a lack of craft, as there has been in the last 100 years.
More importantly, you're operating under the notion that "**** sells" and that the "independent stuff" is legitimate and better. The proportion of good and bad is higher towards the good in the mainstream than not. I read more independent comics than mainstream superheroes, but I actively try new things continuously, and Vertigo puts out just as much crap as Marvel and DC, proportionately. The independent market can have talent, but to paint a picture that blockbusters are gluttonous comfort food while the independent artists make great stuff is so naive, it's disheartening. Most independent works are just as self-indulgent, gluttonous comfort food. It's just what comforts the audience is "intellectual", which means you can talk about it in a cafe with friends. It's comfort "food for thought".
With a notable few exceptions, every writer I know is passionate about their craft and reverent of their influences. They might not have influences I personally like, but they're passionate about pursuing their art and becoming better at it. Every musician I know (except a single get-rich-quick ATL moneymoneyhos rapper) listens to music religiously, from a huge variety of sources and is passionate about making the best music they can. In my experience, the problem isn't the artists, who are slogging through their craft meticulously with little to no recognition. It's the self-professed critics who have taken a course or read a book in theory and constantly lecture on the right and wrong way to make art.
You're confusing passion for ability. Everyone
wants to be an artist, but they don't know a damn thing. They don't even know the basics. They
can't do it. Every time I see an agent or reader or producer asked, "of 100 submissions, how many would you recommend to be put into production?" They respond, every time,
every time (and I've seen this be the case for over 10 years) "One. Maybe two. With caveats. If they change certain things."
People don't know how to make it. I went to art college, they never even taught us basic colour theory. I see modern architecture with my dad, and we shake our heads as they don't even understand basic principles of material forms. I read stories and the writer has no comprehension of genre or humanity. Musicians are at least taught the principles. You sit down with a writer, and try to talk about structure, and every term needs to be defined because there's no foundational lexicon of principles. But any musician can read sheet music and when they talk of octaves and crescendoes they know what that means.
It's not about the "right" or "wrong" way to
do it, it's about
what it is that you're even doing. People don't know the form, let alone the best ways to actually do it. I often rail against critics precisely because they too, have no understanding of the mechanics of art, so how can they possibly know what's working and not?
And the thing is, even if you learn your forms basics, if you understand the art that you're doing,
it's still really, really, really hard. I don't begrudge that people fail, or that **** gets made. I do begrudge the attitude that the biggest stumbling block of the artist is navigating the eddies of the industry to publication. That so long as you're passionate and have an idea, and have integrity, you're an "artist". You need to know what you're doing. People don't. They stumble around in the dark. It's disheartening because they have all that passion and they're wasting it on self-reflection; who their influences are, the history of their medium. But these are superficialities. And often, they may have terminology, but no comprehension of it. It's not even up for debate. It's just true. They don't know what they're doing, and they're not even being taught the basic foundations from which to learn from. This was not the case fifty years ago.
And a writer telling a story is solely interested in that story. An editor is concerned with merchandising, character viability, cross-product canon, the whims of his corporate overlords and any number of factors that aren't directly related to the story. If a writer (or an editor on a stand-alone story) makes a mistake, it's a misstep made in service of the story. If an editor at a big company sets regulations, it could be for any number of reasons.
You have a hopelessly idealistic notion of why choices are made. Writers continually make mistakes in the pursuit of selling, not telling, their story. They give it a happy ending because they think that sells. They put in a cliche thinking its a convention. They open with a flashforward to hook the office worker in the agency that's reading their screenplay because they know they'll give up after 10-20 pages. They make their characters young and white to attract a certain star. They leave an open-ending so that there can be a sequel. They concentrate more on the "logline", the single-sentence pitch rather than the screenplay, because that'll get their foot in the door. Sometimes, it's the reverse. They intentionally make it dark, because that's "art". They focus on suffering and existential pangs of doubt, to impress people with their academic knowledge. They intentionally put in symbolic imagery to attract the attention of critics to champion their work. Every choice is made to make certain that it sells... to a different crowd. Today, the art film is as cliched as the Hollywood blockbuster. And the tragedy is, they do it because it often works.
An artist, left alone to work by themselves, will be no more likely to create a masterpiece, than an artist who, so long as they slavishly adhere to corporate fiat, would. Because in both cases, the person (or persons) making the decisions don't understand the craft.
My point is, if Millar had written the Ultimates as for-hire work, it would have been The Ultimates with different names attached to the characters. There's nothing intrinsically Marvel to it. It could just as easily have been DC's answer to Squadron Supreme or Millar's answer to The Boys. He was given license to cut through the typical tangle of editorial bull**** that most writers at a big company have to navigate.
Except, that when he did that, it was rubbish.
Look, I don't disagree: the art industry is
terrifying. The people who are in charge are whimsical tyrants who make arbitrary decisions for despicable reasons. I know that the reason an actress moves to directing and producing is because, most likely, she refused to have sex with a mogul. I know that other actors will sign up to a film, then actively change the screenplay so they look more awesome. I know that films are destroyed by new executives coming in and actively sabotaging whatever their predecessor had in production, no matter its quality. I know that the comics industry is managed terribly with no one given any lead time to produce works of quality, editorialized to fit mandated continuity and crossover franchises. It's no wonder we get ****.
But, and here's the sad truth, Zombi: it's also true that writers love being editorialized. It means they make no decisions, have no responsibility, and still get made. I recently read a roundtable discussion of Hollywood blockbuster writers who basically just admitted that. You have writers who are so arrogant and egotistical they cannot accept any criticism from anyone, not even themselves, and they become the same whimsical tyrants. You have 'networks' who are more about selling themselves, cultivating a brand identity of their own, than actually working. You have the artists that hate their audience and actively use their art form to insult as a form of proving how smart they are. You have people who think it's easy, and just hack it out and glut up the market with their terrible works. You have playwrights and stand up comedians who, believing they're so talented, the audience is lucky to be present at their performance, and so they proceed to lecture the audience with whatever pseudo-academic literature they were reading at the time they wrote their work. Artists, endlessly, trying to show off how smart and creative they are without even remotely thinking what it would be like to be an audience member.
If all the problems in the industry were from just the producers, or the critics, or the teachers, it would not be a problem. As is the case today, the artist would distribute their own work. But no. The problem lies also in the artists themselves, who refuse to learn. Your personal experience may differ, but just buy nothing but self-published e-books for a year, and tell me the problem is the publishers.
The only area where we disagree is proportion. You think the vast majority of failure is due to corporate interference. I can tell you, it's not. It's probably fifty-fifty.
I just assumed you wouldn't waste a multiple paragraph manifesto on an argument everyone would agree with.
