Money for Art

Art for Money

I don’t mind getting money for my art. I don’t mind if someone wants to give you money for your art. But I think this idea of ownership of ideas has gotten way out of hand. If you spend a long time working on something and you make a beautiful creation, great. Someone else was working on something else, and got money for that; it is a time trade. But the business of art is way too full of hype and glamour.

Whether it is acting, music performing, so called fine art, writing, or any other artist activity, it is the same problem today. People stand on the shoulders of the cultural ones who came before, they create the thing in a similar enough way that it fits a category, but different enough that it tickles the novelty part of the brain of the consumer of the art, and so becomes the latest in an endless string of the creations in the story of our culture. The point is that without what came before, and without the contextual category of all the rest, the art would not have much value.

Then the gatekeepers arise. The book publisher. The record company. The gallery. Before these, before the Church, which performed this role before, there was function and tradition. We made things because we needed them, and we made them beautiful because it felt good. The function guided the understanding of its beauty, the function and the beauty of the design interacted, and the results evolved.

Some designs stayed the same for thousands of years. This would amaze the modern mind. We are used to a new style, a new tweak, every cycle, or we get bored!

But what amazes me is the staying power of another aspect of our culture, the seemingly hard wired desire to make kings and celebrities. Art is all around us now. Almost everyone can make it. The tools are available to us all now, and more importantly, the means to share our art, our music, our ideas and thoughts. We no longer require book publishers, music companies, even galleries. And there are, at least in theory, as many great creative geniuses alive and creating today, as all together in the history of the world before this generation. 

Yet the vestiges of the gatekeepers persist in our tendency to look for superstars, great leaders, in effect. The inner patriarchy, in our mind.

We still want to teach children to grow up to be “famous,” the “greatest,” the president. The king, really. But there is only one spot for the so called best, The Winner, in a hierarchy. Do we compete for who is the best eater, the best breather, the best sleeper? So why not encourage everyone instead to just to do beautiful things and be themselves?

Which brings us back to money for art. Now that we are all potentially artists, can we all just share the beauty without constantly bringing in the notion of marketing, competition, and glamour? Originally, art was not for money, art was for function and beauty. 

We still have this stuck notion of art as a separate job. A priesthood, really. This is a function of the outdated specialist system, a cultural construct.  An artifact of the  mass production factory headspace, that we must bang out exact replicas for cheap distribution. Artists are to be workers who churn out intellectual property? 

An artist is not a production machine. This is fine for many well designed utilitarian items and needs, but not for art. It strikes me as very odd that someone who has in the past made art might expect it to just keep pouring out like tap water, as if it is a bad thing for them to show up in the studio and not know what to write or paint that day. Nothing, obviously! Go do something else, or do nothing!

This piece of writing can be as cheaply read and distributed for a million or ten people. My song, the same. My drawing for this essay, the same. At this point in our cultural development it is the sharing of our thoughts and creations, not the monetizing of them, that is key. In fact it is the very concept of shackling them to the money system that is inhibiting creativity. 

We can now crowd source good ideas. We can freely share our thoughts; we don’t need to sell them in a “marketplace of ideas”. I admit that sometimes really stupid jokes and even mean stuff goes viral. The interweb is immature, like the kid who tries to hijack the attention of all the kids in the class by doing gross show-offy antics. 

We are still growing up as a global culture. People are also finding one another and doing really cool collaborations with each other by the same mechanism. 

Everyone is an artist now, so instead of thinking just in monetary terms, we need to find new compensation. We need to find new ways of paying. We need to learn to pay attention. 

Right now there are monetary incentives for creating the most shocking grabbers of our attention. These will get old and boring. We need to find more refined and elegant ways to pay our attention.

“Whoever thinks an idea can be copywrited has already forgotten its Source.” 

-Shivalila