Stealing something involves an intent to deprive someone of something, and what are you depriving me of

A liberal would argue that you are being deprived of the profit you could make by selling those products, hence anyone using the "make things appear out of thin air" button is indeed stealing from you. There is an irreconcilable difference here in that liberals do not believe in the labor theory of value and thus they believe that value can be created out of thin air.

I don't like the grant idea. It can be easily used as a scam. Also who decides what is art and what is worth a grant? You've yet again commodified art.

The ideal way to collectivize art is to remove the incentive for a wage. If people have free time and the means to express themselves then many will be creating art. Then it's up to them or the community to display it.

I feel the Soviet system was the fairest. You make art. You get judged by a local or national commitee of artists, if your art is worth it, you get inducted into the local or national Art Institute. You get paid a wage to be producing art every so often.

In a moneyless society, art couldn't be produced as a commodity at all, while in a society with money, artists will produce and sell art privately. The lack of copyright protection in a monied society will put incredible strain on the finances of independent artists.

The government could certainly give grants to artists (on the basis of some democratic mechanism hopefully), but I am having trouble imagining exactly how this system will mesh with different countries. In countries that retain copyright protection, artists will be placed at a disadvantage.

Perhaps if a major country starts ignoring copyright it could force other countries to also eliminate copyright or have their intellectual industries be decimated. It certainly would cause quite the kerfuffle. But then again, any major country going socialist will also send shockwaves through the global markets.

The last part is kinda preaching to the choir, but whatevs

I would think art will, to some extent, organically cease to be a commodity along with others things, provided we reach the stage of Fully Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism (TM). But dry humor about naming aside, this seems like something that you can't very well "force" while still transitioning to communism and that will mostly cease to be an issue with little interference once you have transitioned to communism.

I could see being reformist on copyright abuse, like putting most of the copyright power in the hands of small individuals instead of big conglomerates who can sit on stuff for decades. I could see government initiatives to support the arts and this is also going to be a somewhat expected extension of state power and influence, because of how propaganda (the normal kind everybody does, not the inherently ick connotation) is linked to the arts.

That said, I would argue there is a certain amount of cultural bias in this train of thought, that tends to think of art as an entity separate from everything else, that is primarily for entertainment. But art can be heavily tied to culture. For example, the Hawaiian hula is not just them trying to have cool vibes, but actually telling stories and preserving their culture through the dance. That's going to require a certain amount of agreement on what gestures mean, what they represent. It's not going to be just remixing what somebody else made for funsies, but super important to their way of life. So I would say less important than viewing art as something in need of copyright abolishment, is viewing art as something in need of re-linking separations between art and propaganda, art and culture, where necessary, in order to get past the capitalist mode of thinking that sees it purely as an isolated object to be exploited for profit. Sometimes I run into this mentality, and some of you have probably seen this in the extremes too, where people are like, "This video game / movie / etc. is pushing [buzzword for views I don't like]" or some other variation on viewing propaganda as a heavy weight around the neck of art. It's kind of strange because messaging is there, whether you want it to be or not. It's more a question of how obvious it is and to whom, or how consciously done it is on the part of its creator(s).

I guess what I'm trying to get at here is, any conception of collectivizing art needs to acknowledge the utility of art outside of abstract profit making and how that relates to what it means for a society to collectivize the processes of making it and sharing it. Art as profit cannot be properly countered by, for example, saying it's soul because then the realities of its ties to practical cultural maintenance and propaganda gets buried underneath viewing it as nothing more than vibes, feelings, things that can never be measured or quantified. But though art sometimes gets at things that are difficult to communicate through other means, it constructs that messaging through set frameworks. If you know the framework, you can understand the messaging. Sort of like a language, or ancillary to one. Something like that. I'm not married to the exact terminology here. But I think it's important we understand art within the context of a non-dictatorship-of-capital society, if we are to make it something different than what it is under a dictatorship of capital.

I feel like your argument falls apart entirely as it is focused on digital art, music, and other such assets. But fails to address physical art in any meaningful way.

How will this government grant system work? How can one reasonably ascertain the labour hours put into a piece of art? Is a piece of art even worth the labour hours put into it? Does “bad” art receive the same stipend as “good” art?

Also what do you mean by “the creation of artificial scarcity”? If you create a piece of physical art, it is automatically scarce seeing as how there is only one statue, painting, set piece, etc, in the world, as that piece of art is unique. That will likewise affect the appeal or price of a piece given its scarcity. How do you share this piece of art? Do you create a reproduction? Alright then, but that’s a reproduction, not an original. A piece of physical art is the definition of a naturally scare resource. Artificial scarcity doesn’t work here because there’s only one of the resource.

Also how do you collectivize someone’s painting that they want to sell privately? How do you collectivize a portrait that someone commissioned? Do you just seize every piece of art ever created? That feels incredibly draconian and infeasible.

Lastly, the Mike example is incredibly shallow. Bicycles are in no way equivalent to the concept of art. And boiling the creation of art down to “pressing a button and presto” is extremely demeaning and insulting. Also artists are not depriving anyone by not sharing their art. If you want to create your own, then you are perfectly welcome to spend years if not decades honing skills and developing a style to create unique representation of your soul through.

How are artists preventing others from also becoming artists? No one is depriving you of the ability to make your own art. Just because they spent the time honing their craft doesn’t give you the right to demand “their bicycles”, just because “they can make more”. That’s incredibly stupid.

The creation of art isn’t some AI generated text box. You’ve simplified this down to a degree where it’s not even applicable.