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Good post, and thanks for the shout out.
I'm reminded of Churchill's famous quip. Yes, liberal capitalist democracy is the worst system for enabling people to self-actualise and achieve their full potential – except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
I'm also reminded of one of my favourite bon mots from Christopher Hitchens: "it's true that everyone has a book inside him, but in most cases, that's where it should stay." I'll occasionally encounter communists, socialists etc. bemoaning the fact that they don't have time/energy to create art under a capitalist system, and I can't help but think – maybe if you devoted the time you spend bemoaning this state of affairs to actually, you know, MAKING something, you'd have something to show for it. I can't imagine you'd spend a lot of time creating beautiful music or poetry even in the hypothetical post-revolutionary utopia you believe awaits you.
I saw a post on Instagram recently saying something to the effect of "it's so sad to think of all the great art we're missing out on because people have to work for a living". And my honest reaction was – probably not very much? For the best writers, musicians, artists etc. of the twentieth century, creating art was a compulsion, something they couldn't stop themselves from doing even if they wanted to, and yes, many of them worked full-time jobs and wrote/composed/painted in their spare time until they got something going. If that doesn't describe you, I'd hazard a guess that any art you would hypothetically create probably just isn't very good.
And of course there were people in the comments complaining about being told to paint/write/compose in their spare time, insisting that there's no way they can be expected to produce anything of value when they're exhausted after a long day in work. Again, I can't help but think – skill issue? If, after an eight-hour shift, you can't summon the willpower to pursue your creative ambition, it's hard for me to imagine that this creative ambition would be of interest to anyone besides yourself. It rather sounds like your creative ambition isn't something you need to do (an all-consuming passion) but something you want to do (a hobby). Not saying that the best artists are those for whom art is an all-consuming passion, but the correlation is greater than zero.
I'm also find the entitlement on display kind of contemptible. The Medicis didn't hand out patronages to just anyone, but rather to artists who had already demonstrated technical skill and artistic achievement. The implicit demand that the public purse should subsidise the livelihoods of "artists" who by their own admission have never created anything of value (and may never do so) really rankles.
And on top of that, the people making these demands are privileged to live in an era in which it's never been cheaper, faster or more accessible for people to pursue their artistic passions. I'd be willing to concede that, say, sixty years ago, we were denied a non-negligible amount of legitimately interesting artwork owing to the fact that it was prohibitively expensive to make a movie or record an album. Nowadays, you can write a novel on your phone on the way to work. You can record an album on your laptop in your bedroom. Critically acclaimed award-winning films have been filmed on smartphones and edited on consumer laptops. Two of the top-grossing films of this week were directed by Zoomers who made names for themselves uploading content they produced themselves to YouTube. The barriers to entry have never been lower. Stop making excuses for why you can't make something, and MAKE SOMETHING.
I think this is far too triumphalist. Many great artists did it at least in part for the money, and as any amateur dramatics society could tell you, motivation to produce art has very little correlation to the quality of that art. Look at Anthony Trollope, Dickens, Shakespeare! They wrote by the word, or for commission, as did many many others.
Look, I can only speak for myself. When the working day is over, I'm zonked. My work is research and development, and it genuinely uses up all my brainpower. Boo hoo, I'm so special, yadda yadda, but it's true. I wrote several novels back when I had the time and now when the work day ends I just want to crawl home and watch something unchallenging. I know you wrote a novel lately and that's lovely, but others aren't the same.
All of which has to sit alongside the fact that writing is something that one does, hopefully, learn. The extent to which it's teachable is over-rated because people like to dream, but lots of good authors needed some mentoring and some experience to write their really good stuff. And that takes time, and energy, and space.
TL;DR: "If you'd like to try and make beautiful things like you did at university, but you're too tired because your job sucks out all your energy and creativity, then I guess it must suck to suck, loser" seems neither necessary nor fair.
EDIT: Lower heat, what you are observing is a filter that basically removes anyone who doesn't have sufficient time and energy left over to run a side hustle along their main job. Deciding that almost all the stuff that gets filtered out would have been crap seems very much to be a just-world bias. It's equally possible that lots of people who would have made great things or even just pleasant things are getting filtered out, and that it's not economically possible to do much about that now, and that this is sad.
I think part of the definition of art is that it's not done for money or status, but rather it's genuine self-expression. Art is often media, though not always, but most media is not art, it's entertainment, which is media made for money or clout. You speak of many great entertainers. Some of them were also artists, some of them were not. For example, did Shakespeare write his poetry for pay? I don't think so, so maybe it's art. But his plays are not. But they remain popular because he was a skilled entertainer. Speaking of narcissism, it's a symptom to morph entertainment consumption into art appreciation. Most people might not be able to enjoy art, because all they can enjoy is entertainment. But that's okay.
Some art is improved by money or outside interaction, some is made worse. Art for Art’s sake isn’t a popular take with the postmodernists. To say Art must not be done for any concern of money or status rules out stuff like the Sistine Chapel, The Last Supper, and Guernica. Where does that leave stuff like Andy Warhol or literally every architect for all time. We can go on for a while. You can certainly define Art that way, but we are squarely in a Wittgensteinian argument concerning a non-central usage of Art.
It's a subtle definition in that it's not that it can't be funded or become popular, but that whatever component of a work is done for money or status is not art, it's just labor. Many works are a combination of labor and art. The ones you mention might be half art, half labor, a Marvel movie might be all labor, but the purist art is done with complete disregard for money or status. Sometimes it still becomes popular, but that's improbable and it's suspicious when it happens.
This definition isn't non-central, if you don't use it, I don't get how b2b saas isn't art.
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As good a definition as any, but it’s not mine and I don’t make that distinction. Indeed, I think the increasing tendency to force a distinction between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment / media’, rather than between ‘high-status/cultured art’ and ‘popular art’ has been leading people astray. My sympathies have always been with the jobbing writer and I’ve never had much use for self-expression except as a tool. I just want to make nice things that people like.
Self expression seems core to art, but if you just want to make nice things for high status people which makes you famous, you just want a corporate job with some vanity attached, honestly. Where's the self expression, the truth, the beauty, etc? It's just a commodity no different from a b2b saas.
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Well, that's the thing under discussion, isn't it? It's one thing for an artist who once exhibited genuine talent and made things of value to complain that they don't have the energy to create after a full shift. I can understand that, and even sympathise.
What gets my back up is when people who by their own admission have never created anything of value and have never displayed any evidence of artistic talent of any kind demanding that the state subsidise their livelihoods in spite of this.
They were beautiful to me. I got shortlisted for a reasonably prestigious prize once, but most of the rest weren’t objectively great. I would really, really like the chance to try and do better someday, but even beyond that, I think that making things is good for its own sake. Maybe my stuff would have improved if I'd had more time to spend on it, maybe it would improve if I could go back to it after a decade in industry.
I don't suggest that we should fund just anyone who asks off the taxes of those who do tiresome, creativity-sucking work. But I do kind of think it's a shame we can't. Lots of the creativity of the 70s came out of super-cheap housing in cities and a dole system that didn't ask too many questions, and I think that the end of that was inevitable and morally just but also killed much of British art, comedy and entrepreneurship (the kind of entrepreneurship that makes genuinely interesting, far-out things rather than just chasing VC funding by jumping on the nearest bandwagon). The system that replaced it, where you only get Arts funding if you're young, black, gay and Marxist doesn't seem like an improvement. The idea that you can tell the Great Artists because they'll crawl over broken glass or because they show amazing talent right out of the box seems similarly suspect.
Some people genuinely never try at all, and maintain the dream that they could have been great by carefully never actually producing anything. Maybe that’s who you’re talking about. But I don't think many/most of the lamenters are like that. Many more like making things but find it hard, and need a bit of space/mentorship - how many people voluntarily pay their hard-earned money for writing courses? Ideally I'd like for them/us to be able to try, and it saddens me that isn't possible.
Maybe you're talking past each other. The other commenter is talking about singularly spectacular artists, whereas what you mention here cultivates "scenes" and creative group endeavors.
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I apologise, when I was talking about people who've never made anything beautiful or significant, I wasn't including you in that category. By virtue of actually finishing multiple novels you wrote I'd put you head and shoulders above the coulda-woulda-shouldas announcing that they would write something amazing if it wasn't for capitalism, maaaaan.
I admit there's a shade of stolen valour resentment to my line of thinking. I've been recording music as a hobby since I was fifteen years old, I've invested tens of thousands of hours (and a comparable amount of euros) into it, I've directed and edited music videos, I've played gigs, I've booked gigs, I've been through all the logistical and interpersonal headaches that come with organising bands. I did all this while completing my education and holding down full-time jobs. In spite of this, I don't "identify as" a musician. My Instagram handle is just my name and the year I was born. And it does really grate when I meet someone and their Instagram handle is "[forename][surname]music" and who habitually describes themselves as a musician despite the fact that they've never written (much less recorded) a song, never booked a gig, never been in a band and so on. Not that any such person has ever told me that they'd love to write music ("again") but they're just too busy, but if they did, that would annoy me even more.
I've been no slouch in the creative writing department either, having written five novels/novellas since I was twelve (needless to say, the most recent one is the only one I will stand over), getting a handful of short stories published, winning a couple of awards. "[forename][surname]writer" isn't as common as "[forename][surname]music", but common enough that it still grates.
Yeah, I see that. FWIW I wouldn't trust a instagram handle of 'writer' or 'musician'. As far as I'm concerned writing and making music is a verb, not a noun, and getting some stories published and playing proper gigs is genuinely impressive.
Realistically, my stuff wasn't that good. I only finished one novel, and that was a fan thing, so unpublishable. It was the most popular one in its niche, at least, but that's not a high bar. I have about half of a bunch of others (rewritten many times) but I have an issue with endings for some reason. I know where I'm starting from, and there's always a moment or a few moments that I really want to get to, but once I get the characters into the state where I want them to be then things kind of fizzle. You know that saying about how drinking a margherita on the beach is an Instagram photo not a retirement plan? It's kind of like that, but for plot. (Any advice appreciated).
I must have written maybe 400,000 words over the decade or so I spent writing seriously, which was late school to university to early postgrad before the pressure really kicked in, and I didn't get so far, but I can't help feeling that was a skill issue and I could have got something good. I wouldn't fund me, but I wish somebody could.
100%. I'm constantly reminded of TLP's admonition to describe oneself without using the word "am". It's a surprisingly difficult habit to break, but I think it's really useful in all spheres of one's self-conception. Instead of saying "I'm a musician" you ought to say "I released an album last year"; by the same token, instead of saying "I think I'm a pretty nice guy" you should enumerate nice things you've done recently.
(This can be taken arbitrarily far. "I think I'm pretty good in bed." "Oh yeah? Name three women you've made come.")
Unless you're Alan Wake.
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