Miranda Campbell: ‘Culture Isn’t Free’

I know two people, both younger than me.

One is running from massive credit card debt, skipping from city to city, odd job to odd job and couch to couch, while his potential as an artist is wasted in ennui and his own non-materialistic creed that ‘Hey, the only thing I own is my body, and even that is temporary.’ Given artistic opportunity, he tends to flee from or ignore it until it goes away.

The other is a driven, talented technical writer who patiently laid plans and built foundations for a rewarding commercial career that more than pays her bills. It gives her the freedom to attend fiction writing conferences, symposiums, and classes where she can network with other professionals, hone her considerable writing skills, and celebrate that her recently-released fourth novel just broke under the coveted 3-digits in Amazon rank.

I stumble along between their orbits, mildly appalled at the first and slightly envious of the second. But I’ve lived in both of their worlds.

Jacobin Magazine hosts this bleak, powerful essay by Miranda Campbell, in which the tagline reads: ‘Expecting artists to work for free hands the reins of cultural production to ruling elites.’

In our post-Recession world, everyone but the top 1% are still reeling from the economic and social costs of tech and housing bubbles bursting – and we’re all waiting for the next big impact. Most people consider art a privilege; artists themselves are often publicly constrained to admit they offer a luxury, not a necessity.

(Even though every single creative one of us screams the opposite, inside, where the nice agents, buyers, clients, family members, and pyschologists can’t hear us. We know Art is Important. We instinctively know it’s what we’re meant to be doing, in between hunting mammoths and keeping the leopards at bay. All higher animals play. Some of them appear to make art. In many cases, art is all we’re really suited to do in life, and everything that is non-art is a compromise we make with our loved ones and budgets.)

There. Now I’ve let out the dirty secret. Here’s a few more in quotes from Campbell’s essay:

‘In a post-Napster era, artists of all stripes face the expectation that the fruits of their labor should circulate for free, both on and offline, and when revenues from creative work do trickle in, they rarely amount to a decent wage.’

‘…The public response [to complaining artists] is often to push back and discredit, to find fault in the story or suggest the individual is not a credible spokesperson for the problem he or she is articulating.’

In this essay, Campbell hopes to ‘…raise awareness about artist livelihoods and draw attention to the contemporary challenges of earning a living from creative work’, all the while grimly acknowledging that talk is cheap and rarely fixes anything. She cites other books and sources that are worth a sidetrip.

What did we artists really gain, after all, from Richard Florida’s ‘Creative Class’ books? We became commodities and symbols.

I have free art out there, in the form of fan fiction, stories on this blog, and my image display accounts. Am I one of Campbell’s traitors, or am I making an educated bet on free art as a marketing ploy for later? At the very least, I can honestly say I give away this art out of love for it and its viewers. Would I be furious to see people making money off it, down the line? Hell, yes. Do your own work, please.

On the ground, I’ve watched a lot of urban decay converted into overpriced lofts for hipster would-be artists and marketing people, since very few actual artists can afford them. (To afford a decent 2 bedroom apartment, the base salary in Phoenix AZ is around $17 per hour. That’s not much to a middle-class professional. It can be a luxurious pipe dream for underemployed artists.) I see tireless volunteers working themselves into the ground to mount festivals and exhibitions that are feted in public, and continually underfunded in state, city, and institutional budgets. I see creativity being harnessed as a weapon and a lure by commercial interests who may or may not safeguard its core values on the way to staggering wealth.

In the nearly 30 years I’ve been in Arizona, I’ve watched numerous incarnations of the central Phoenix art districts rise and fall and rise again. While I have friends and former co-workers who are reasonably successful in that area, I don’t show there. I’ve never even tried. Until now, my main Arizona client base for my book art sculptures, fiber wall hangings, mosaics, and jewelry has been in the better-heeled resort and Baby Boomer communities of Scottsdale, Sedona, or Chandler. Their denizens don’t go to central Phoenix to buy art. The people who do, can’t generally afford or are not interested in my art. That’s okay. Marketing means knowing your niches. My Arizona niches withered with the Recession, and haven’t really come back.

The internet made reaching tiny but loyal markets much easier, letting me embark on new art adventures eleven years ago. My career in book arts really began with me reaching out in an email to a famous and foundering gallery in San Francisco, and being answered a month later by the people who bought it.

With my next foray into online art sales through SaatchiArt.com, I hope to bypass more of those dysfunctional niches, and reach more buyers who share my instinctive reaction to certain artforms. My tribe? My benefactors? Who knows?

In the meantime, I read articles and essays like Campbell’s to help ground my expectations.