I have a working hypothesis that all of the best (or, at least, most famous) artists in history actually worked this way: they first became a "machine" with well-honed skills, and preferences slowly beaten into shape over decades of experience, into which high concepts could be fed and art would emerge—and then fed in the best of their current culture at the time. Shakespeare, for example, or Bach.

If you take an average journeyman artist and try to "plug and chug" culture, you get, well, pop. But if you take a master, you get classics. (And I do mean to imply the converse: if you give a master an input that isn't popular culture, the result likely won't be a classic—in the way that Star Wars or Dark Side of the Moon is classic. Instead, people will refer to it as a "masterpiece", like Lolita or, lately, Inception.)

The main difference between the two types, is that masterpieces just sit there and accrue attention, while classics actually melt back into the culture that spawned them, inviting parody and pastiche to such a point that it could be said they have invented a genre (ahem, Lord of the Rings.) It is the latter that will "stick" to culture hundreds of years hence, while the former will be relegated to scholars and textbooks.

Bach didn't write pop music that was the product of the current culture. He wrote in a style that was considered archaic and byzantine; a dead style even in his time. Baroque music was dead and classical music was on the rise. He was always well respected, but never popular in his lifetime (or generations after).

I also object to your claim that Lord of the Rings invented its genre. I don't know who considers Inception a masterpiece in the same way Lolita is. And so on. I'd complain more about all the wrong things you wrote, but I wonder if there's a point. It just bothers me when people try to get all intellectual about things of which they clearly have no knowledge.

Baroque vs. classical music: That is at best a very simplistic view of the situation: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_music#Transition_to_the... . Also, note that counterpoint remained alive and well, though it certainly did not have the importance it had in the Baroque period, through the Romanticism and the 20th century. The chorale (second movement) from Vierne's second symphony, Shostakovich's cycle of 24 preludes and fugues, and the canon section from the first section of his 7th symphony come to mind.

Furthermore, my impression (though I cannot find a citation to back this up) was that many if not most of Bach's compositions were produced by taking elements of popular culture and trying to produce from them something people would find meaningful on the next Sunday. Consider the Passion Chorale, which Bach used in (among other things) the Christmas Cantata and the St. Matthew Passion. The tune was originally composed 50 or 100 years earlier by Hans Leo Hassler for a song whose title was something like "my heart is beguiled by a pretty maid"; the most common words ("O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden") are from a German translation by Paul Gerhardt of a mediaeval Latin hymn.

All of this is not to deny or even to downplay Bach's genius. He simply, as derefr says, took popular inputs and did amazing, wonderful things.

To refer to chorale melodies as "popular music" is really a stretch. For instance, Wikipedia tells us that "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" was in use as a chorale by 1656. You'd be really stretching to call this and other chorales a "popular input". I've never read or heard anything to indicate that church melodies were significantly popular in the 1700s.

Popular music was stuff like song, opera, maybe some easy instrumental stuff (though I can't remember when music publishing took off). Bach wrote few songs, no opera, and his instrumental output was very difficult and went largely unpublished.

Also, I don't know what the 'Christmas Cantata' is. Google wasn't any help in clarifying it. Bach wrote about two billion settings of that chorale, so that's not much help.

>It just bothers me when people try to get all intellectual about things of which they clearly have no knowledge.

Wow, that's rather harsh. While his examples might not have been the best representation of his point, he did bring up an interesting idea.

your last sentence may come off as rude

Inception isn't a classic. Or a masterpiece. It's a slapdash confluence of popular trends within the community of filmmakers:

* Dealing with unreality, with hinted-at promise of imagining fantastical worlds, but really providing an excuse for more car chases, explosions, and gunfire than is plausible within our current legal framework (The Matrix)

* Multiple levels of unreality and ambiguous ending (Vanilla Sky)

* Leonardo DiCaprio isn't sure what's real anymore, and is haunted by visions of his crazy dead wife (Shutter Island)

* Statement about filmmaking itself (perhaps every auteur film in the past ten years)

Yeah, it's a tough line to walk between being a pure artist and a pure mercenary. The most rewarding use of one's time is to find a balance, like Sivers suggests.

I think many artists (perhaps to their financial detriment) value the process/journey as much as the destination. I know that personally, the motivation I have to finish a project peters out when I've solved the fun technical challenges.

I don't know this artist, but his name seems strangely appropriate for his approach to art.

Is it any different from a programmer that creates a product to fill a niche?

It's probably different for different kinds of art, but one of the biggest things I like about art/music/literature/etc. is that I'm getting someone else's reaction to things, vision of how things are, opinions on things should be, etc. So it starts feeling fake and misleading if I realize it's not actually their reactions or vision at all, but was, in the extreme case, something carefully concocted out of market research and focus-group testing. Even if I was the focus group, so it was perfectly targeted, I don't actually want art/music that extracts my own vision/ideas/etc. and reflects them back at me! I want to see someone else's take on things.

I feel it's fairly hard to get particularly innovative and deep stuff that way as well. The optimization-based approach to making art can only really optimize surface-level, but rarely gets you a totally new vision, which needs more of a strong creator's imagination behind it. For example, supermarket-romance book publishers using focus groups and metrics could never have invented cyberpunk.