Art and Money

“ I love gifting people my work and having them let their heart decide how much to give.” Ankur Aras

Why do artists even want money?

Why are we artists and musicians and writers even trying to monetize our gifts? Do you really think you are the next Picasso, the next Beatles, the next president? Because only a very few can be greatest and best. 

This is the age of standing on shoulders. Nowadays, everyone can benefit from knowing the work of the great ones, then we take it all on from there, in every direction at once, apparently exponentially. Normal everyday state of mind greatness, not super celebrity greatness. The age of everyone is an artist.

Why do we not advise our young people, you have a gift of sexuality, how will you monetize that? Maybe they do hear that, now that I say it like that...sigh.

Why do we need to monetize everything nowadays, so suddenly and for the first time in history? 

I'm not sure it's even cool to sell your art anymore. It's about the gift. To understand why, we must pay attention, (our greatest power), to interest. Interest is of interest here. Small adjustments in big systems, amplified, have big effects. This is the impact of adding debt every time we bring money into being using the current money system. 

This is only stressful to the money system if it is deprived of its fuel, which is continual growth. Without new bets in the form of newly monetized products, (such as your art, or rain forests), enabling the previous debt to be paid off (by creating new debt), the pyramid game will collapse. But there remain very few pockets of not yet monetized resources to exploit in this finite fragile ecosystem Earth.  (See Eisenstein, Sacred Economics)

The good thing is, the money system is just a game, and just some tweaking is needed to reverse the negative effects. You need not throw your art, or your sexuality, or anything else into the fire of continual growth!

Some ways to fix the game are: free money negative interest, guaranteed basic income, backing money with the wealth of the commons, and the sharing and gift economy.

 

But the real revolution is our evolution, our evolving attitudes about why and for whom we create with our gifts. How we think about our relationship between ourselves and others. Also, how do we want our gifts to be received, and what harmful magical conceptions we may still harbor about money and our worthiness.