The Age of Sharing

 The Age of Sharing

“I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.” -Georgia O’Keeffe

(from “How to Do What You Really Want While Saving the World at the Same Time”:)

Some guy claims that “The Artist Is Dead”. He wrote a book. It whines about how you used to be able to make a middle class living at being an artist, but now, because of the internet, (He calls it “Big Tech”) sadly, everything is free. (In truth, he means IF you were a white male fancied by the gatekeepers like the record companies and galleries and rich art collectors and fine arts endowment founders)

Hmmm. I’d say the artist is very much alive. More like, it is the death of the gatekeepers. Now, it is a direct relationship between an artist and the discoverer of the art. It is now, yes, a game of discovery, not selling. A million books a year are self published. There are billions of beautiful photos floating around on the cloud, with millions more added daily.

Kids are making zillions of little movies every minute. More self published songs bubble up on the interweb every day than you could listen to if you played them all day for hundreds of years.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.”- Dr. Seuss

Some just don’t bother to look for this stuff anymore, and allow the lowest common denominator to feed them cat videos or whatever. But the beauty, creative miracles, and free richness is here now, if you want to look for it.

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.”- Neil Gaiman 

“But are they good?” (Scream the unemployed gatekeepers.) “ Are they professional?!” Well if you mean, “not free,” then, no...

“Every artist was first an amateur.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

New curators will arise to help us sort through it all. Networks will arise to share this creative bounty. It is as if we have been through a long winter where the only flowers you ever saw were in some exotic orchid greenhouse and suddenly spring arrives and the fields and roadsides everywhere are thick with abundant carpets of velvet flowers blooming in every color.

Actually I like the lowly common dandelions. And cat videos. And Etsy crafts. This great blooming of art, from the most basic to the most highbrow, is to be celebrated. But it is time to mentally unhitch art from the cart we have been making it drag around, which is the stated need to make it pay us money.

This is the dawning age of everyone as artist. The age of the gatekeeper is over. You don’t need a degree in art. You might get one to help you understand it, but not to do it. Most of us do not get a degree in talking, or walking, or eating, or singing or lovemaking, though all of these things do require immersion in the culture to learn and do well. There is some technical mastery in involved, but this is no mystic priesthood.  Art is no different.

This is an age in which you can, for the first time since we lived in isolated tribes, just do it and share it with everyone. Only now the tribe is global. You have the whole world in which to look for and find the ones who like the things you do. This is not a problem!  This is awesome!

In the past, you needed to have money if you wanted to be an artist. You needed a patron. Customers, to buy your work. A job on the side at a university to train others that they needed to appreciate and buy your work. A network, a circle, a fan base, a mailing list, a go-fund-me, a spouse or relative to support you.

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”- Oscar Wilde

But now, you can just do it. Yes, the math does not support superstars anymore, especially if we are all artists now. If everyone is either an artist now, or about to realize that they are, there will soon be a one to one relationship of artist to art appreciators, formerly called “consumers.” You will not become a superstar. Nobody will. But do we need superstar eaters? Superstar sleepers? 

Everyone and anyone can and does take photographs all day now. Gradually we are getting better at it as we share. Yes, share. It is a word that means give it away free. Not sell.

You can now turn your photo into a Van Gough, a Picasso, or a Peter Max, in seconds, with an app. Another app composes your tune as you sing it, into a fully orchestrated song in the style of your choice. And what is the limit to how many stars there can be? The more deeply our telescopes peer out into the universe, the more stars we see. Every pinpoint magnifies into a whole galaxy or something.

The age of the superstar is over. It actually peaked decades ago. There is no shared mass media anymore, so no superstars, except for the star of the day, or hour, or... minute? And only among your cohort of shared interest in that subject.

“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”-Charles Cooley 

Art is just what we do. It is just who we all are, really. There are still some indigenous cultures left on Earth in which everyone sings. Pretty much all day, often together, in lovely intensely coordinated patterns and harmonies.

Give it up, gatekeepers, you time has passed and you are now historians.

“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”- Ernest Hemingway 

“The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint.”-Keith Haring