The Artist, an addict. Shapes, colors, sounds, stimulation... Creation, creativity, imagination, fantasy, craft, etc. I should be doing other things with my life! I should be doing something useful. Bleh. What is the Artist, just a parasite. The Artist feeds on life and excretes a simulation of it. What is the Artist? An immature person, who sacrifices life for fanciful dreams, a coward who retreats from the world, hikkikomori, nerd, that is me, the Artist.
The Artist is a non-non-Artist. Well, how sad it is that some people are non-Artists, shouldn't everyone be able to see the beauty in life and express themselves creatively? That is why Art makes me sick! There should be no Artists and Non-Artists!
The fact that "art" is called "art" instead of just "there already" is a sign that we don't feel at home in our lives. Aesthetics, beauty, grace, decoration, adornment, these are things that we as humans always naturally encorporate into our existence - we can't help but do it! Yet in modern life, aesthetics is a "hobby", a segregated part of life. Leisure exists because Work exists. Art exists because Non-Art exists, see?
And I see that as a problem! Pleasure, play, necessity, need, desire, drive, want, love, hope, fantasy, reality, dreams, perceptions, memories, symbols, words, connections, all of it is life! The function of society is to take all of these things and put them in organized boxes. This does some good for us, after all we can't build bridges and planes and trains if we are all tripped out experiencing the ecstasy of existence all the time. We do need "Order", huh?
But the issue is the way this Order works. A balance between chaos and order, maybe, is what we need? Too much of Order or too much of Chaos is bad, huh? Well, that perspective itself is an Orderly one to have, so then we already have tipped the scales. I apologize, I will get to more material points soon, and stop with this philosophizing, I swear...
I've made hundreds of drawings, paintings. This is pretty normal, for visual artists we can be prolific, often because we practice every day and many of those practice pieces turn out great. Where can all of that art go?
Consider the square footage of walls in homes, compared to how much art is there in the world, well, there isn't enough room for it all! If I make a great piece of art on a 14"x17" , well what if I make a hundred of them? If everyone filled their walls with art, it is still not enough room. I have too much of my own art stacked in piles upon piles, taking up space in my house.
So, we can see the logistics here. Art is not sustainable. What can we do to make it more space efficient, make some coffee table books? Make a library of coffee table books? It's too much art!
Now the economics of it: if i want to sell three art pieces a month for a hundred dollars, maybe two or three hundred, how many people can fill their walls, at what point does everyone run out of room to put all this art up? Realistically, one human being will buy one or two art pieces from me, that is enough. So, i could price them higher to squeeze more value out of it, but in the end, the math just doesn't add up! I can't make a living doing this crap!
With music it is easier, huh. Put it on a CD, download it to a hard drive, or don't even store it at all, just play it live and charge some money for folks to listen. Alright, so with music we have less spatial limitations, great. Time limitations, though? How many albums can a person listen to in a month? What about if they just want to sit in silence all day, or they want to do something where they can't listen to music? The economics of this are definitely a bit better than being a stupid painter or making drawings to sell, but it still isn't great.
Anyway, with music, a lot of the time people have just a couple hundred albums, maybe a few dozen they listen to many times a year. Maybe several dozen artists they like, but yeah. For the most part, people will rather stream an album these days than buy a physical copy. In a way, that could maybe be better because the artist gets paid per listen, but in reality an artist has to have thousands upon thousands of loyal listeners to make much money. The logistics just don't work out. Music is crap, too, if what you want is to make a living. Fuck it.
The typical view of an "entrepreneur" is a person who makes a specific and intentional plan which will allow them to profitably fill a market demand. Creative Workers in most cases do not work this way: typically, they create things first, and only after they have created something do they (if they are lucky) find a market demand for it and decide to sell it.
Creative Labor is unpaid by default. Other types of labor depend on a contract between Employer and Employee - without this contract, no labor is done, no one is paid. Creative Work, on the other hand, is done freely all the time for entertainment or motivated by the passion of a craftsperson.
There has never been a time in human history in which Creative Workers received "fair pay". Whether it is novelists, poets, painters, engravers, journalists, illustrators, and so on, making a living from creative work is extremely rare and not the norm. Is this an injustice? Who is doing the injustice? When one artist becomes hugely popular and millions of people know them, does that take away from less popular or unknown artists?
We all likely believe here that people deserve to get paid for the time and work they put into things. With Creative Work, it becomes a tricky thing. Do Artists deserve to get paid simply for making Art? Who will pay them? What defines Art, and who judges the quality and the price? What if everyone decides to just become an artist and make a bunch of "bad" art?
The "real economy", if we can call it that, has to do with the production and distribution of "real" things that people "need", such as food and housing and so on. It is only by the functioning of this "real" economy that anyone can bother to spend money on art, leisure, entertainment, et cetera.
What should we think of in response to this? Well, it should seem strange. Money is used to buy bread and pay rent, but that same money is also used to buy a painting or a trendy piece of clothing. Isn't that absurd? If money is supposed to signify value, well then what is more valuable than food when you are hungry? A digital download of an album by some niche artist definitely won't keep your stomach full.
So, it is money that puts the artist in the position of "parasite" - the artist can only make money when people have spare cash, the artist relies on excess. It is this system that uses money to assign a number, a price, to everything. Well, clearly not everything can be defined by a number, a price tag!
Money is an absurdity. Life isn't a bunch of stuff that you can put a price on. This seems like such a naive perspective - we invented money to make things easier after all: sure, there are issues but for the most part it works. Does it really work, though? Now we have things like the stock market, we have debt and loans and interest and all that.
We have huge sectors of the economy like banking and payment processing where money is made by moving money around, money turns into more money magically, none of it makes sense if money is supposed to be a way to represent value and supposed to be something useful, to make our lives easier.