> If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face
You also lose control of your distribution and are completely commoditised. Hence why the median full-time content creator makes $20,000/year, and I don’t think that includes production costs [1].
And apparently the SAG average is $40000, without accounting for costs like union dues nor the bargaining advantage that comes with union membership.
When you look at non-union actors that drops to about $25000, and often has many costs to maintain due to the lack of protections that would come with union membership.
Seems like youtubers and the like have a darn good deal considering it includes a far higher volume of low activity/effort/quality "actors" coupled with the independence and higher rate of higher scale earnings.
Hollywood is way more top heavy , regardless of if secondary business ventures are excluded from both sides, as that likely makes yt even more fair in that more yt creators have secondary streams like merch and services than Hollywood actors do, where only the biggest names can earn much of anything by thier "brand" alone.
I have to ask, did you even try to do a comparison or did you just google internet creator average income and the presume it was a pittance compared to that of the average of all working (and non working?) actors?
(Ed: ugh just reread that and dont like _how_ it's written, but since the correct sentiments and points are there and rewriting would be an undertaking, I'm just gonna leave it. Sorry for any headaches the prose causes.)
And the content is garbage. Even if one would disagree, we are comparing with the American cinematic canon, by most measures the greatest body of artistic accomplishment humanity has ever produced. I cannot believe people even have the nerve to question the comparable value.
I mean, if you're looking at averages here, then of course the average content produced for YouTube is worse than the average Hollywood-produced movie.
But at the top end, I don't think there's a direct comparison - stuff gets made for YouTube that wouldn't get made as a movie and doesn't make sense as a movie, but it's no less valuable IMO. There is a lot less of it, and that industry has existed for less time.
Just look 3Blue1Brown's educational math videos, or Veritasium's science videos, or any of the other countless videos on various topics. Better at what they're trying to achieve than almost anything comparable that has existed before, IMO.
Even for things with more direct comparisons - take cooking YouTube vs cooking shows on TV. I believe cooking YouTube is much better in most ways.
None of your examples are even artistic expressions; they're informative content. The comparable counterparts would be television shows or documentaries, not Hollywood narrative films. Tiktok has a lot of artistic expression, but simply nowhere near the level of greatness found in the American cinematic canon, which contains by most measures the greatest artistic accomplishments of mankind.
> American cinematic canon, which contains by most measures the greatest artistic accomplishments of mankind.
I love how Americans are so high on their own exceptionalism that they come out with these kinds of statements without even realising how clueless it makes them look. Not even "some of the greatest artistic accomplishments of mankind.", but all of them, apparently.
I don't think it's valid to say that documentaries or tv shows are not artistic expressions. But yes, as I said, it is not a direct comparison to movies specifically.
The purpose of art has never been to entertain, even if art can be entertaining. The fact that so many people think such a decadent idea shows how debased our society has become by way of the profit motive.
This is an insane way to think about art. Of course art exists that entertains, and it is art. To say that art can't entertain is an absolutely drab way to look at things - it almost assumes that only negative emotions can be transferred through art.
Had any of the examples been Lessons of Darkness or Grizzly Man or Burden of Dreams, this conversation would have gone quite differently, but since none of those films were released on Youtube they were not even an option to begin with.
Genuinely American cinema always seemed like almost pure entertainment to me. There is not that much greatness or artistic accomplishment, but there seemed to be craft. I mean, there are shows that are more then that, but overall American production was rarely focused on great accomplishments beyond "make it fun and make good guys win".
Great craft cannot be delineated from great art, and neither can "genuinely American cinema" from American cinema. Was Kubrick a master of British cinema? Of course I can't really argue with your specific point, but one of the most groundbreaking things about American cinema was the sheer size of the incorporated components that made it possible. Hollywood pioneered moving Heaven and Earth for the silver screen, and it could never have happened without the brutal capitalism that only America does best. Likewise, Hollywood sold entertainment and the works of art were more often only a side effect. This has been the case for so much great art throughout human history that it's hardly an exception rather than a rule.
Kubric has great visuals and all that .. but he is not exactly engaging with ideas all that much. It is that thing about American cinematography - you see it and forget it.
Is it engaging and fun? Yep. Is the greatest artistic achievement? Not really, because they rarely even try.
Please enlighten me with some of these "idea" films you speak of. I'm not sure I am convinced that more "ideas" makes better movies. What has you so tickled? Tarkovsky? The French New Wave? German Expressionism?
I said that American cinema is not engaging with that and never engaged - with rare exceptions.
On top of head, I think that something like Shigurui or Berserk would be great examples of art that engages with ideas and complexity. So would be Umberto Eco and the Name of the Rose, more or less. Even original Witcher books have huge amount engagement with ideas despite being meant for entertainment. The movie "Come and See" managed to make war sound not fun which is something too.
American cinema is just not about that. It is not about complexity, it is about simplifying and streamlining. Which is fine, it is just odd that someone claims opposite.
The amount of drivel produced in any given era is mind-boggling. Very little of it survives even a century. Go ahead an read a non-annotated Don Quixote, and try to find all the references to the great authors of the day.
However, a lot of what we think as great art exists and survives because of gatekeepers: from rich men with enormous egos to critics mistaking their taste for objectivity to policy makers elevating some forms of art over others etc.
Most Rennaissance art is indistinguishable from TikTok. Go to a few museums and you will recognise the fads, the patterns, the techniques etc. A cross-dressing femboy doing a hundredth uwu on TikTok is no different from a Rennaisance painter doing a hundredth cherub flying over naked women in a forest.
This is not responsive to either the point I was making to the other commenter or to the response I made to the original commenter. It’s just arguing for arguing’s sake. (I recognize it, as a former lawyer. And it’s fine. But it’s just not what I spend my time on these days, so I’m not going to substantively respond, because it’s a tangential rabbit hole, and I’m too stinking hot to chase.)
That actually was responsive to the previous discussion. And we disagree so much on the idea that artistic merit or accomplishment or whatever you want to label it is indexed wholly or even in large part by amount of people who view it that there’s not much to say except just that: I disagree.
Which is not to say that I have some equally objective measure to offer you. I don’t. But then, I’m not the one who made claims about artistic accomplishment “by most measures” (whatever that even means). I simply provided an example of something that self-evidently certainly rivals “American cinema” as universally acknowledged to be profoundly artistically accomplished. Whatever the comment about dreck in every era actually proves, if you think the Renaissance was not the site of profound artistic accomplishment (hello, rediscovery of linear perspective; hello frescos; etc.) I don’t even know what to say.
[Edited to add: if artistic accomplishment is just eyeball quantity, then it will increase linearly with the increase in global population and interconnectedness as technology improves. Reducing something like artistic accomplishment to such a simple function of population size serves as the best possible reductio of that position.]
I mean… if you are comparing the last century of filmmaking versus whatever is on YouTube, sure. But if you are comparing the last few years of movies vs what’s available on YouTube, I’d much rather watch YouTube.
You also lose control of your distribution and are completely commoditised. Hence why the median full-time content creator makes $20,000/year, and I don’t think that includes production costs [1].
[1] https://www.epidemicsound.com/blog/the-future-of-the-creator...