America's Last True Artist: The Nepo Baby

For the last century, America has been the dominant exporter of art and entertainent across the globe. Its cultural influence can be felt it the genres of film, tv, music, fashion, writing, and more. At the same time, over the last fifty years, the country’s embrace of neoliberalism and “free market” economic policy has set its population on a path towards extreme wealth disparity, the disintegration of social safety nets, and the ascendancy of a corporate ruling class. So it’s really no surprise that, in our era of late-stage capitalism, more of the people creating America’s art come from a place of privilege.

Nepotism — the act of leveraging family wealth and connections to gain professional advantages — has been around for all of humankind. Nepotismo as a term, originated in Italy in the 14th century to describe the practice of popes appointing male relatives to important positions in the Roman Catholic Church. Nowadays, we use the pejorative term “nepo baby” to describe the snotty, privileged beneficiaries of nepotism. Nepo babies are everywhere, permeating the worlds of business, politics, academia, sports, and entertainment.

At first glance, the morality of nepotism can seem like a gray area. What parent wouldn’t want to give their kid a leg up in their professional life? But as we scale factors like money and influence and opportunity, the corruption of nepotism becomes more clear. And nowhere is it more obvious than in the world of American entertainment.

Celebrity nepo babies, whose success is often dependent on their level of fame, must deal with their nepotism out in the open, in the public sphere. While critics may label them as “industry plants” and condemn their abilities as artists, the entertainment industry (and the general public) seems to be more forgiving.

A recent example was the rise of Stella Lefty, who made a splash in the nepo baby discourse this summer after a single from her first EP went viral on TikTok and topped the country music charts. Lefty, whose billionaire father is the CEO of an AI health company and co-founder of Groupon, became the latest nepo-baby success story of the music world, joining the likes of Gracie Abrams, Yungblud, Miley Cyrus, Willow Smith, Enrique Iglesias, and even the queen of music herself, Taylor Swift.¹ Despite her obscenely wealthy upbringing, she found near-immediate success with country music fans.

The phenomenon is not just present in music either. In recent years, the film and TV industry has been overwhelmed by nepo babies. The chances of your favorite media including a nepo-baby actress, actor, writer or director has never seemed more likely.

Fans of these artists are often quick to defend them, claiming that talent and hard work were the key factors to their success. And while some artists acknowledge their privilege and advantages, many deflect or push back against it. They and their supporters often point to the “democratization” of making art on the internet, claiming that anybody, rich or poor, has the opportunity to go viral and achieve fame if their art is good enough. To them, within the “free market” attention economy, there’s no such thing as an “industry plant”.

Lefty’s manager, Adam Alpert, dismissed criticism of his client in Rolling Stone, “Industry plants don’t exist… You have to make great songs that people like, and all these artists that people call ‘industry plants’ are having success because they’ve done just that.”¹

According to these artists and their supporters, the success of the nepo baby was simply meritocracy at work. But these are inherently weak arguments, and they ignore the harsh aspects of our increasingly desperate economic realities. Sure, you might need talent and work ethic to find success, but it’s not everything.

How do we account for the resources, connections, and time that put these artists in a position to succeed in the first place? How do we measure someone’s rise to fame when they had a headstart built on multi-generational wealth and/or celebrity? How do we value an artist of privilege as opposed to all of the talented, hard-working people who came from nothing? And what about all of the people who, when faced with the choice of pursuing art or paying rent, were forced to give up on their artistic dreams altogether?

I think now is an important time to ask these questions. The wealth disparity in the U.S. has reached Gilded Age levels, and continues to worsen². Wages for low-to-medium income families stagnates or declines, while productivity and cost of living rises³. More than half of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck⁴.

Meanwhile, the cost of a fine arts education has ballooned for three decades. The media landscape has been monopolized into a handful of corporations and streaming platforms fighting for audience attention. The financial reality of touring as a live music act has become increasingly unrealistic. The rise of social media incentivizes art that strives for viral, mass-market appeal; while discouraging any art (or artist) that is deemed to risky for the algorithm.

The reality is that making a living as an artist, even as a “starving artist”, is becoming less and less feasible for the everyday American. The risk is simply too great, too out of reach.

As we continue down this path, I often wonder about the endgame. What happens when the majority of successful artists come from generational wealth? How will an elite class of artists create meaningful art for an increasingly impoverished audience? And maybe most importantly, how might we create more opportunities for those with limited resources to pursue and achieve success as artists?

Perhaps the clearest picture of this future is how entertainers are currently perceived in places like the Global South, where populations are even poorer and the wealth gap is even wider. Do international audiences view rich artists with disdain or admire them for their ability to attain wealth (aka accomplish the American dream)?

My concern is that audiences will not think about it at all.

Footnotes

1. Joseph Hudak, Rolling Stone. “It’s Not Just Yungblud. Stella Lefty Has Also Been Accused of Being an ‘Industry Plant’” ↩ ↩²

2. Yahoo Finance. “Super rich’s wealth concentration surpasses Gilded Age levels” ↩

3. Source “Productivity Pay Gap” ↩

4. NPR. “Paycheck-To-Paycheck Nation: Why Even Americans With Higher Income Struggle With Bills” ↩