There are plenty of full-time writers outside of universities. Most of them are self-published genre writers. There's a solid core of six figure writers, and a smaller but non-trivial number of seven figure writers. They don't get awards, they don't teach (usually), but they earn a decent living.
What's happened over the last century or so is a huge shift towards the middle of the bell curve. Culture used to be gate-kept and handed down, which meant a much smaller number of talents could be become household names, with an income to match. Generally there was a concept of quality based on exceptional creative imagination and craft. That rubbed off onto genre work, so it was still an influence there.
Now it's become corporatised, so the only metric is income, which pushes everything away from risk and novelty towards lowest common denominator satisfaction for middle-of-the-bell-curve readers. Currently that means trope-heavy checkbox romance with plenty of explicit sex for women, and militaristic scifi for the relatively few men who still read, with a bit of overlap for formulaic thrillers and police procedurals.
This is possible in fiction, where the market for sexy romance seems insatiable.
But there are similar things happening in music and visual art. The audience for those is much smaller, and the barriers to entry much lower, so there's a perfect storm of mediocre people trying to sell their work on social media to a shrinking audience in a global free-for-all, while the scene is being eaten alive by generative AI. And a tiny, tiny number of global mega-artists get most of the attention, income, and marketing budgets.
The only subcultures are online, so they're much more diffuse and lack the lynchpin gatekeepers and networkers who curated and promoted the most interesting work.
Throwing funding at the arts is a band aid for this. It's a structural issue caused by a forced shift in values away from shared community towards compulsive individual hustle as a value in itself.
What's happened over the last century or so is a huge shift towards the middle of the bell curve. Culture used to be gate-kept and handed down, which meant a much smaller number of talents could be become household names, with an income to match. Generally there was a concept of quality based on exceptional creative imagination and craft. That rubbed off onto genre work, so it was still an influence there.
Now it's become corporatised, so the only metric is income, which pushes everything away from risk and novelty towards lowest common denominator satisfaction for middle-of-the-bell-curve readers. Currently that means trope-heavy checkbox romance with plenty of explicit sex for women, and militaristic scifi for the relatively few men who still read, with a bit of overlap for formulaic thrillers and police procedurals.
This is possible in fiction, where the market for sexy romance seems insatiable.
But there are similar things happening in music and visual art. The audience for those is much smaller, and the barriers to entry much lower, so there's a perfect storm of mediocre people trying to sell their work on social media to a shrinking audience in a global free-for-all, while the scene is being eaten alive by generative AI. And a tiny, tiny number of global mega-artists get most of the attention, income, and marketing budgets.
The only subcultures are online, so they're much more diffuse and lack the lynchpin gatekeepers and networkers who curated and promoted the most interesting work.
Throwing funding at the arts is a band aid for this. It's a structural issue caused by a forced shift in values away from shared community towards compulsive individual hustle as a value in itself.