being an artist online kinda sucks.
in the past, art was generally more collaborative. where i would write a song, someone else would handle promotion of it, printing the discs, actually selling the damn thing. now? i must do this all myself.
someone else would fund the work, keep me fed and happy while i could do this. now? i must do this myself. there’s no noble patron to fund the arts. the arts are funding themselves or being hopelessly exploited by a certain mouse.
two paths exist. poverty or commercial work. and commercial work is both soul sucking and difficult to land a place in regardless.
but i am not hopeless. i am weak. i am only so good at promotion, i have a tiny meager following. i can only do so much. we? what can we do?
consider it. imagine it. i want to sell a cd to someone who lives in, oh lets say, brazil. or someone from brazil wants to sell a cd to someone who lives in the united states. i have sold cds to americans. i live in range of USPS. i can do it rather inexpensively. what if the brazilian musician gave me the assets and a list of addresses and the relevant shipping costs and let me ship! what if i gave the same to her? now we both expand our reach. now we have expanded what we are capable of.
an art collective seems like a magical thing, but it is difficult to make work in practice. ambition can get the better of it and cause it to rip itself apart. but something informal, perhaps, a culture of reciprocity, perhaps that could work.
we need to promote eachothers work, we need to support eachother. we need to demonstrate how we can support and assist eachother. the choice presently is between being exploited or being ignored. but we can do better than that, if we do it together.
i don’t know exactly how it should function, but i know that i would love it if i went to the page of an artist, and i saw loud and clear there, how they could help me, and perhaps, how i could help them. that i could speak to them, and we could arrange something beautiful.
or that i could find an artist, and now that they could teach me some new technique or something that i want to learn, and perhaps i could do the same for someone else.
this already exists to an extent. i have commissioned visual artist for my album covers. and then i have promoted them in turn, alongside paying them for the work. this is reciprocity too.
though perhaps we are all burned. perhaps we fear that any graciousness we give out will be exploited by the cruel machine of the world, or that we will be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the Public.
i believe these can be mitigated. i want to see a better more collaborative world of art. i want to become a part of it.
this is a statement of intent. if i succeed in following through on anything related to this, i may make another post and link it here. who is to say!
keep creating. your work is valuable no matter what. i love you.