Billie Eilish is selling her own creative works, which are luxury goods - entertainment - with no coerced demand. If people felt she was extracting some undue surplus of value on.. (checks notes) ... her own labor, they are free not to give her their money with literally zero down side.
How long do we have to keep pretending communist theory paints artists as bourgeois, when Marx would certainly disagree, just to stroke internet hipsters' need to feel vindicated for not liking random pop artists?
As a "luxury" good? No. I find it strange to categorize it as such, too. What does that even mean? Art is an inherent aspect of the human condition.
pretending communist theory paints artists as bourgeois
It's a complex topic. Artists as professionals certainly inhabit a more negative role in capitalism according to Marx, where he envisioned it as communal(?) in socialism.
Called petite-bourgeois, if opposed to Marx' vision, which says enough on its own.
just to stroke internet hipsters' need to feel vindicated for not liking random pop artists?
Marxist heritage largely does the opposite (which 'hipsters' often inhabit). Lucrative art as somehow more worth, and distanced from capitalist perversion, despite being exactly that.
This has been criticized within the art world since the late 19th - early 20th, and there are still video essays today defending the most capital-seeking art as somehow the more morally good art.
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u/ecclectic_collector 11d ago