http://news.slashdot.org/story...
Here they talk about the volunteers contributing their time and money to make the sets:
http://thescene.com/watch/wire...
Just watched the first episode -- impressive and made by volunteers. Subsequent episodes are being made with some Kickstarter funding.
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
Here is a good explanation, based in part on research done by the Federal Reserve, on how creativity flourished best when people earn enough that money is off the table as a worry (that means about US$75K+ in the USA) and people have autonomy in their work, increasing mastery facing a challenge, and a sense of purpose.
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Frankly, I think very few artists are motivated by money. This is even more true if you broaden a definition of art to include so much of what people do as hobby crafts or fan fiction or local folk song writing or creative cooking and so on.
Money plays a role in the life of an artist in Western society of course because, in an exchange-emphasizing economy, we all need to get money somehow to pay for food and lodgings and material and so on -- including paying for our kids. And to put a lot of time into some craft, you need to find a way to support yourself that leaves time for learning and doing it. Especially for anyone with a family, if it is not your day job, your time to put into it is otherwise going to be severely limited. Some people still make it work by dedication and generally sacrificing other relationships and responsibilities, including by pushing them onto siblings or the state.
See for example, "The Murdering of My Years":
http://books.google.com/books/...
"Looking back on their lives, people often ask themselves "Where did the years go?" "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet provides a wide ranges of provocative answers to that question. Edited in the style of a documentary, "The Murdering of My Years is a compendium of stories by activists and artists about how they manage to get by in America. They talk about the jobs they've had (as cabbies, organizers, waitresses, clerks, drivers taking scabs to secret scab trainings, telemarketers, etc.), how they were initially politicized, the nature of their art, and how they feel about working (or resistance to working) in a political context. The stories range from the absurd to the heartbreaking, from the exciting and strange to the depressingly banal. The book examines the pain, disillusionment, and fundamental hopelessness that afflict many workers. It also tells stories or triumph, joy, and subversion in the workplace."
As is made clear in that book and others, the "starving artist" concept is mostly a myth. If you're starving, making art is generally the last thing on your mind. However, it's true that people who are obsessed with an idea or a technique may well end up starving because they prioritize their art over making money. But the actual suffering process rarely lends much to the art's production -- even if previous suffering might inform some future art in terms of shaping an artist's sympathies (as it might for anyone in any profession).
I think it more likely the urge to create generally comes from within and is sustained by intrinsic motivation of love of the craft and the product. If people just want money, there are more reliable ways to get it than trying to appeal to a fickle art audience. No doubt some few people do make become artists to get rich, but when you consider the millions of people who like to do arts and crafts and write and so on from an early age, that's got to be a very small percentage.
But in our society might every artist dream of becoming rich through art and then being able to do it full time, and afford to raise a family? Yes, I could believe that is a common dream. But I doubt it would be a common dream in a world with a basic income. And I doubt it is as common dream in Western Europe with more support for the arts and a batter social safety net ("Harry Potter" was written by the author on the UK dole) than in the USA (where J. K. Rowling probably would have been forced into flipping burgers or something like that while receiving welfare in order to ensure she was contributing to society and some big employer's bottom line).
We've got a severely broken system in many ways for anyone who wants to be do independent creative stuff full-time (including research) -- especially if they want to have a family too. For example, as John Taylor Gatto wrote:
http://johntaylorgatto.wordpre...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
My feeling as a guess is that 80%-90% of artistic types people hear about and see as "successes" could afford to pursue that lifestyle because their parents were wealthy, or their spouse is a well paid professional, or they made a pile of money themselves somehow unrelated to their art ten years ago and are living off of it. My guess is that there is probably a million dollar investment (including opportunity costs for learning a craft) behind almost every professional artist making US$40K a year average, or about a 4% ROI ignoring psychic income. But investing that million dollars well in financial instruments would yield that return without the need to sell anything....
For reference:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
"The recent study was conducted using the 2.1 million artists in the US, comprising 1.4% of the total workforce. The NEA "analyzed 11 distinct artist occupations: actors, announcers, architects, dancers and choreographers, designers, fine artists, art directors and animators, musicians, other entertainers, photographers, producers and directors, and writers and authors." They collected data from 2005-2009, and what they found paint's the artist's dream as a surprisingly cozy reality. The median salary for artists is $43,000, compared to the $39,000 averaged labor force as a whole. (Professionals, however, average $54,000.) Within the subdivisions of artists, architects come out the wealthiest--averaging around $63,000--while 'other entertainers' bring up the rear with $25,000."
However, that is probably biased by what is a "professional" as opposed to endless struggling artists who do it on the side while being waitresses or cab drivers. To take that figure seriously, you have to believe that only 1% of the US workforce is artistic or creative. What about all the people who do artistic things in their spare time while working some other job or going to school or being a stay-at-home parent? What about people who blog or make Android apps? Or people who play jazz at a local coffee shop on weekends? How can we believe that only 1% of the working population would want to do such things and the other 99% of working adults have zero interest in writing, dancing, drawing, singing, and so on? If true, that seems like a sad indictment of Western "civilization".
By the way, with "the big crunch" in academia since the 1970s (see David Goodstein), including the push towards part-time adjunct work, even many academics usually need to work second jobs; see for example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...
"LAS VEGAS -- ON the first day of the fall semester, I left campus from an afternoon of teaching anxious college freshmen and headed to my second job, serving at a chain restaurant off Las Vegas Boulevard. The switch from my professional attire to a white dress shirt, black apron and tie reflected the separation I attempt to maintain between my two jobs. Naturally, sitting at the first table in my section was one of my new students, dining with her parents.
This scene is a cliche of the struggling teacher, and it surfaces repeatedly in pop culture -- think of Walter White in "Breaking Bad," washing the wheels of a student's sports car after a full day teaching high school chemistry. Bumping into a student at the gym can be awkward, but exposing the reality that I, with my master's degree, not only have another job, but must have one, risks destroying the facade of success I present to my students as one of their university mentors. ...
My adjunct-teaching colleagues have large course loads and, mostly, graduate-level educations, but live just above the poverty line. ...
But not all my restaurant co-workers are college dropouts, and none are failures. Many have bachelor's degrees; others have real estate licenses, freelancing projects or extraordinary musical and artistic abilities. Others are nontraditional students, having entered the work force before attending college and making the wise decision not to "find themselves" and come out with $40,000 in debt, at 4.6 percent interest. Most of them are parents who have bought homes, raised children and made financial investments off their modest incomes. They are some of the kindest, hardest-working people I know, and after three years alongside them, I find it difficult to tell my students to avoid being like them. ..."
In a society as materially wealthy as the USA it just does not have to be this way. It is like the waterboarding and torture the USA does based on ideology and sadism -- it is just stupid and counterproductive for the overall health of the society. The USA is not a stronger nation because it makes its independent creative people suffer (often literally because until Obamacare health insurance was unaffordable for most independent self-employed people). It is overall weaker for such policies IMHO, despite what tenured mainstream economists with PhDs funded by parents and the government have to say in praise of suffering (or mainstream economist wannabees).
Consider:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"The right likes to think that every Leftist "hates" the "rich". I suppose there are those on the Left who hate the rich, but if they do, their anger is misplaced. It's the "wannabe's" you have to watch out for. ...
Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for the most part - who "have what it takes" to "make it". They believe that the difference between those who "make it" and those who don't is being "capable, intelligent and hardworking". Things like "having rich parents", "getting just plain lucky" or "being a crook" don't factor into the equation anywhere. No, American society is a natural hierarchy where the most capable are "rich beyond their wildest dreams", and the non-rich are chumps that just don't measure up.
Only they are capable - some of them actually are - and they're not rich. Clearly, something is broken, preventing these wannabes who "have what it takes" from reaching materialist heaven. Now here's where it gets interesting. Since they "have what it takes", there must be somebody else to blame. This from the people who accuse the poor of "blaming everybody but themselves". The dittoheads do the very same thing. ...
But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage. ..."
So, IMHO here we have a deeply broken system for a 21st century that claims to prize creativity and innovation. And, with increasing automation, the pressures are only going to get worse for artists who find those side jobs drying up as AI, robots, and other automation take them over, or who find their professional spouse who is, say, a radiologist, suddenly out of a job.
Still, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote many books as a stay-at-home Mom. It is possible. And as she wrote, sometimes someone's freedom is purchased at the price of someone else's unfreedom. My wife have trade off such roles back and forth over time as we take paying jobs while the other works more on projects of personal interest and homeschools. But one can see such tradeoffs as well when, say, a parent keeps working at some job they don't like much so their kid can go to art school, buying their kid a ticket to the professional artist lottery.
Of course, for all that, I write this on a laptop made by the contributions of many people working regular jobs, connected to a network constructed and operate by people with regular jobs, having eaten food produced and transported by people with regular jobs, and so on. There are ways to defend the current economic system as something that has produced material wealth and abundance for many (for all its flaws). But defending the system on the grounds of the virtue of prolonged needless suffering imposed on others does not seem to me to be a persuasive justification for it.