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

For the Birds

 “ Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, so are we.” - Roger Tory Peterson

It seems too good to be true. The binoculars are of excellent quality, and available at my politically correct outdoor gear cooperative at a very amazing price. I need a lightweight pair for birdwatching, so I’m delighted to find them.

Off I go, out into the world with my new powerful eyes, only to be reminded once again that although I have a better tool than ever for seeing them, my beautiful bird friends are vanishing before my eyes. 

My friend Saturn, a birdwatcher since the 1960s, tells of seeing much greater flocks of birds than now. She talks about driving through clouds of bugs, car windshields covered with bugs every year, day after day. These days you hardly ever see a bug hit the windshield. The bug eating birds must have far less food now. 

Where are the birds?

When the frogs hatched every year, she saw thousands hopping in the grass. They were so numerous that it was difficult to avoid stepping on them, with dozens of flattened baby frog bodies lying dried on every driveway in the neighborhood. Decades before her time, there are reports of massive bird flocks blacking out the sky in daytime for days, as they migrated over.


She says every kind of bird she used to see, now is either seen in smaller flocks, fewer numbers, or has just gone missing altogether.

I too, have noticed a dramatic change in bird numbers in my area. Some have moved north, to adjust to the warming climate. We do have a few new species who are appearing for the first time, moving up here from the south.


But even along the trails and in the parks where I have walked daily now for twelve years, observing the local birds, the effect is striking. Where I might have at first seen twenty of a given species, I saw only ten several years ago, and now I’m lucky to see two or three. Or any at all. I have even noticed that formerly extremely common invasive birds species like starlings and house sparrows are crashing. It is frightening and disheartening.

Scientists blame pesticides, habitat loss, window design, and house cats for the bird apocalypse. I would also add to this list, another suspect, the radiation from our WIFI and phone cell towers. Just since cell phone use became ubiquitous, I have noticed about a fifty percent diminished bird population in the city and countryside where I walk. This is year over year, same place and times of day and times of year.

These sources of radiation are about to increase greatly if we allow yet a new frequency type to blanket our environment, five G.  Perhaps the birds’ food, the insects, are crashing too, but nobody much notices or cares. We do already know these frequencies mess with the brains of birds and bugs, and maybe, probably, our cells and brains too.

We need not move to this five G thing at all. We can go the route of fiber optic cable instead. Who cares if the movie loads in a half second or several? Self driving cars are foolish and dangerous. The only other use of this proposed massive blanket of five G radiation is to, at last, secure for governments and corporations, a net of real time surveillance over everyone. We sure don’t need that!

How very ironic that the industrial machine that brings such beautiful tools as my new binoculars is also the cause implementing the demise of the very birds I seek to watch and appreciate with them! 

How very ironic that the rise of invasive and noisy artificial birds, the drones, coincides with the disappearance of the real birds! The way we are going, it will not be a silent spring, but a century, and not silent, but filled with the roar and constant buzzing of deadly machinery. 

How very poignant, and how sad.


I wonder if we can move to a sustainable and non toxic planetary infrastructure before it is too late?

“If had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.” -Charles Lindbergh 







Flowing with the Waves

“Time is an illusion, timing is an art.” -Stefan Emunds

Timing is everything, as they say. In tantra it is. The waves of the world, the waves of the universe, are in harmony with the beats of the heart, the frequencies of the brain, the impulse of the soul. Or not. If they are out of alignment, we suffer. If they are aligned, everything flows effortlessly.


“You better know when to ride the waves, and when to dive deep” -Sunheart, “Wild Wind”

There is a time to ride the waves. You find yourself perfectly positioned with your surfboard at just the right moment when the big one comes rolling up. 

But when that great wave comes and you are in the place where it will break over you and crush you into the pulverized shells at the bottom of the beach, this is not the moment to mount the surfboard, lest you, and it, be splintered into pieces. That would be the time to dive deep, right into the heart of the wave, to go right through the wave, and let it pass harmlessly on by.

There are ourstorical moments for each great turning in our cultural evolution. Like a time of ripeness, when the fruit falls into the hand without pulling. The same for each tiny turning in the flow of the day, or the seasons of ones’ life. Everything is in spin. You must learn to watch and flow.

The deep dive is no less of a going with the flow. Ponder the salmon who seems to leap easily up the waterfall. How can this happen? How can this small creature seemingly defy gravity and the enormous power of the rushing stream and go the opposite way?

Because of the spin. As the water crashes downward onto the steps of the waterfall, it must move, it must go somewhere. Currents of counterspin are created, whirling eddies that the salmon taps into for upward thrust, enabling them to fly up into the air.


Everything is always in motion, fast or slow. There is always choice. And never only two choices. The possibilities fan out before you endlessly opening, rushing sometimes so fast through the narrows that you hardly appreciate the options. But there is a thing, a no thing, really, a still point that is no point, from which you can see your way.

Here I digress, for the universe has no lines, and no points, really. Our mathematics, based on points and lines therefore starts out on the wrong foot, and misleads our thinking from its very first assumptions. The point to which I refer is an imaginary not a physical point, but a mental point of view.


It is the still point that is in the center of meditation. It is the ever receding stillness as you go deeper and deeper into quiet behind the quiet behind the quiet place. The cause that gave rise to the cause that gave rise to the cause, on back toward the beginning that never was.

But you need not be deep in meditation, for it is available at every moment, at every decision point, before even, every thought. The empty center of no where is everywhere all the time, and never not, even if you forgot.

“When you obey the rules, the rules obey you” 

-Ernest Agyemang Yeboah




Wonder

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” Socrates

All good things begin with a wonder.

It is one of the most important jobs in the world, wondering. You have to be kind of relaxed and open to do it. Every moment is full of possibilities, but often we see only one or two. Fear is a state of heart and mind like blinders on a horse, it keeps you from seeing anything but the one thing just in front of you. Then the only possibility seems to be to go on, or, not. This kind of thinking short circuits your higher mind.

“We are perishing for lack of wonder, not for lack of wonders” -G.K. Chesterton 

There are many cues on offer that tend to drive one into fear every day. The news for example, which is merely an efficiently collected pile of the day’s most shocking things, in which the vast majority of normal goodnesses are ignored and discarded. I’m not saying don’t keep up with your world, just keep your perspective. 

Then there is the actual structure of your media and social communication. If everyone around you is upset, or angry, or stressed out, it is harder to hold in your heart a center of peace and love. We are creatures who are designed by evolution to be attuned to our social environment. And if your main outlet for these cues and your social knowledge is a curated online social media feed microtargeted to you by corporate algorithms, who is choosing for you how you are being pushed to feel? 

Who is in charge? Who is your social influencer? 

There are more than only two choices, to be online, or not. The inter web offers millions of doors you can open. The outer world also.

Wonder can only arise when you get out of fear and remove the blinders. There is always a third way. And a fourth. And a fifth, and so on out to infinity. The constricted mind can’t handle this. In a more authoritarian cultural past, curiosity was considered a sin. Adherence was paramount. Straying meant banishment, isolation from the tribe meant certain doom. Obey, or die! Old cultural habits are deep grooves, like ruts, like the deep lines carved into the now dried muddy road, or into your brain; easy to fall into, easy to get stuck in. A population kept in a constant state of hurry and worry is ripe for authoritarian control.

“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.” Gerry Spence

Try it now. Meditate with eyes closed for a short while, until you are relaxed. Breathe, feel your body...

Then maybe open your eyes and walk around, or you can even wander in virtual space. Be curious about something; maybe open one of those other millions of doors on the inter web. Google a phrase from a song you like, a silly question, an imaginary place you would like to see. Find something new. Someplace where you have never wandered. It can be a rich and veritable palace of wonders. 

“Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.”- Kurt Vonnegut 

 

Wonder is a small still voice that whispers. The sound of wonder is a child’s voice. Wonder bubbles up from the quiet moments. Wonder is the original spark of all new ideas that have made your life better. Wonder lifts you out of either/or into what if? The new golden age begins with signs and wonders, pattern breakers that uplift you, rather than cause you to contract in fear.

“Think and wonder, wonder and think.” -Dr. Seuss

I wonder if we can all begin to appreciate more of the wonders all around us.