Agree with everything you say, but would like to comment on this: Capitalism and profit give the correct signals - what is it that the market demands. What do people truly feel they need?
Art is the big gap here. Few could argue successfully that the world is not a better place for the creations of JS Bach, Kafka, Keats, Van Gogh, yet these people did not make their fortune from their life's passion and work. Only after their death were they appreciated for what they did in their figurative basements.
Capitalism provides one set of signals, an overpoweringly large one at that, but it does not provide a complete picture of value to humanity.
> Art is the big gap here. Few could argue successfully that the world is not a better place for the creations of JS Bach, Kafka, Keats, Van Gogh, yet these people did not make their fortune from their life's passion and work. Only after their death were they appreciated for what they did in their figurative basements.
You're taking the exceptions (and actually Bach earnt quite well from music). Van Gogh was almost unique among his painting contemporaries, partly because his paintings were, by the standards of the time, weird (I suspect this applies to Kafka as well). And what vindicates him now is an ultimately capitalist consideration - his works are popular, people pay for copies of them. Nowadays there are capitalistic art speculators who will buy the work of underappreciated artists if they like it themselves - see the recent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8829277 - which would solve that problem.
As for Kafka, he had a famously... weird approach to his work. IIRC he wanted his works destroyed; it's only the capitalism of his descendants that means we're able to appreciate them.
Art isn't the only place where people can be ahead of their time. Xerox PARC had a lot of good ideas, for example, but were only appreciated after some folks reappropriated them.
Gov't incentives meanwhile often create unintended effects. For example, incentivizing investment in the arts leading to rich people creating their own private museums, often inaccessible to the public, and using them as convenient funnels for tax deductions while still enriching themselves.[1]
Ok I'll try. All these people you mention are long-dead white men you are 'supposed' to like because it gives you social status. If they didn't exist there would probably be others you should like to give you signal how cultivated you are. You are forced to partake in their creations in school because of some mistaken cargo cult thinking "successful people like these artists so if force every to read/listen to/look at their creations they will be successful too!"
Contemporary pop art, on the other hand, entertains huge masses of people, gives them pleasure and delight, and makes their days happier.
I think economic theory explains that case as well. Simply put, the value of "making art" was worth more to those artists than the value of whatever money they could have made doing other things. So of course, they weren't trying to satisfy some latent global need of art, they were just doing what they preferred.
Just as a farmer is not trying to satisfy the world's demand for food, monitoring which crop is most needed. All the farmer does is he prefers a certain amount of money over a certain amount of labour and grows crops that maximize that amount of money. The world signals their demand by price.
Art is the big gap here. Few could argue successfully that the world is not a better place for the creations of JS Bach, Kafka, Keats, Van Gogh, yet these people did not make their fortune from their life's passion and work. Only after their death were they appreciated for what they did in their figurative basements.
Capitalism provides one set of signals, an overpoweringly large one at that, but it does not provide a complete picture of value to humanity.