The thing is almost no celebrity artist that has reached this level of wealth has done so exclusively through their art. Once you have amassed even a moderately large sum of money through being an artist you almost always end up paying someone to manage your money and to multiply it through investments. Invariably when you have become this wealthy you end up becoming a capitalist even if it’s done by someone else or by some investment firm in your name. And more often than not these artists also launch their own brands and various companies selling this or that knowing that they can use their fame for marketing their products. The top 1% of the 1% of artists are no longer just workers, their class interests clearly lie elsewhere.
This applies to all professions where those at the very top make enormous amounts of money compared with the vast majority of the rest in that field. Other examples of this include athletes - if you’re European you will know how absurdly wealthy some soccer players can get (and US comrades can probably give examples from the sports that are popular over there) - and yes even streamers/youtubers exhibit this phenomenon where the small number who make it to the very top of the industry inevitably start to develop bourgeois class interests and never just sit on their money but begin to use it to found companies, buy investment assets, and put it into various stock market funds that are designed to deliver guaranteed returns.
And this happens regardless of your ideological convictions when you first start out. It is unavoidable, else you will not stay wealthy for very long.
The thing is almost no celebrity artist that has reached this level of wealth has done so exclusively through their art.
Maybe not the the level of billionaire, but this is why MF DOOM is still an incredible artist. He was a poor nobody in it for the game, not money. Any money he had just sweetened the deal, but the focus was always the music. Better then the vast majority of “celebrity” artists.
The thing is almost no celebrity artist that has reached this level of wealth has done so exclusively through their art. Once you have amassed even a moderately large sum of money through being an artist you almost always end up paying someone to manage your money and to multiply it through investments. Invariably when you have become this wealthy you end up becoming a capitalist even if it’s done by someone else or by some investment firm in your name. And more often than not these artists also launch their own brands and various companies selling this or that knowing that they can use their fame for marketing their products. The top 1% of the 1% of artists are no longer just workers, their class interests clearly lie elsewhere.
This applies to all professions where those at the very top make enormous amounts of money compared with the vast majority of the rest in that field. Other examples of this include athletes - if you’re European you will know how absurdly wealthy some soccer players can get (and US comrades can probably give examples from the sports that are popular over there) - and yes even streamers/youtubers exhibit this phenomenon where the small number who make it to the very top of the industry inevitably start to develop bourgeois class interests and never just sit on their money but begin to use it to found companies, buy investment assets, and put it into various stock market funds that are designed to deliver guaranteed returns.
And this happens regardless of your ideological convictions when you first start out. It is unavoidable, else you will not stay wealthy for very long.
Maybe not the the level of billionaire, but this is why MF DOOM is still an incredible artist. He was a poor nobody in it for the game, not money. Any money he had just sweetened the deal, but the focus was always the music. Better then the vast majority of “celebrity” artists.