When you’re a broke-ass-art-person, there’s about million podcasts and blogs and online courses encouraging you to create podcasts and blogs and online courses to help monetize your creative process by sharing it with other artists who, in turn, will create more podcasts and blogs and online courses.
For me, this puts the “meta” in “metastasis” as this sort of thinking has been like a tumor in my creative career. So, Ima gonna take this here buck knife, put back that bottle of what-the-fuck-else-I’m-gonna-do, and cut the goddamn thing outta me.
As a career-long writer, I’ve been down this diverting wormhole more than a few times. Every time my industry was “disrupted” or I self-disrupted, I would start selling tours of the rag and bone shop of my expertise. I wrote ebooks, made podcasts, consulted. It worked, until it didn’t, and I’ve come to the personal conclusion that this kind of shit has derailed more than a few of us art peoploids.
Remember when we produced writing and art of substance instead of content? That’s what I’m talking about
I arrived at this crossroads last week after two incidents: First, I received eight emails from an artist hawking an online “creative entrepreneur” marketing class. After the second email — in an hour — I concluded that the spammer in question was a shitty a marketer and artist.
The second incident was of my own making: I pitched a couple of night classes to the local adult school because I figured I’d burnish my pseudo-professorial pose with some actual teaching. I focused on material that aligned with my own interests — something about Art House cinema, weird media, and then I threw in a ringer, the comparatively banal Podcasting for Non-Techies, a podcast class I’d taught before — a fine how-to that fits in a lunch hour but not a problem the Internet hasn’t already solved for you with thousands of different, cheaper tutorials. Guess which one the adult school booked?
Listen, I’m happy to help, but if everyone wants to do what me and apparently everyone else is also doing, I better double down on the art to remain competitive, let alone sane.
I know this isn’t a popular opinion but if I was seeking popularity I’d be more famous by now and not ranting into the void of the Internet. But seeing as you’re here, and I’m here, I’ll presume we’re part of the same band of outsiders. We’re a Bande à part like the Godard film, or Tarantino’s production company, which spelled it A-P-A-R-T because, you know, the 90s.
But what about the skill set we’ve developed? The bullshit corporate skills acquired in newsrooms and boardrooms (and probably men’s rooms)? What of these skills that weaponized my nascent talent until I became an overqualified but underwhelmed part of the very systems I once sought to destroy or at least avoid?
Like any Frankenstein monster, I suppose I’ll turn on my creators and destroy the systems that created me. I’ll be the art-guy equivalent of Liam Neeson: “I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a fucking nightmare for people like you…”
Of course, this a difficult position to monetize, to invoke the parlance. But I’m gonna strike that jargon from my vocabulary — so what if it’s the secret password to a meal ticket. Maybe I’ll just lose some goddamn weight. And most that, my friends, we’ll probably just be baggage — full of mixed metaphors.
I’m done shaming the starving artist, the romantics, the ones we tell that they just have to get their work out there and pray they get the right algorithmic alchemy going so the gates to the middle class open wide. Really, at this point, for me the only reason to keep the aspidistra flying is for target practice.
And you know who wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying, right? Orwell! Will we ever listen to him? Maybe if he had a podcast and blog and online course, we’d pay attention but I dare say we can learn more — and teach more — through art.
2 replies on “Keep the Aspidistra Dying: I’m an Artist Not a Creative Entrepreneur”
In the 19th century, didn’t writers and artists gather in cafes to drink absinthe and actually talk about each other’s art? Maybe in the digital age we should support each other’s actual work, and not spend our time talking about the marketing of the work but not the work itself.
There are so many ironies here on so many levels. You were one of the most innovative artists and writers that I knew in the early 90s. I like your idea about creating community vs. creating art. The same day I read this, I got an email from City Lights asking me to contribute to a go-fund-me project so they could publish this writer. SoCo Arts & Media books were not allowed in City Lights because they were not with a "real" publisher – and they are finally catching on 16 years later. I can’t imagine what is next for you – it sounds like you are figuring that out too. What ever it is though, 16 years from now others will be just getting it.