Thoughts on art and artists
In the market system, art is often a commodity like any other. Art, as a skill, expression of an idea, attempt to move others, or simply a means to create beauty for its own sake, is in constant friction with commercial values.
On the one hand, art happens all the time outside of the market system. It is often not sold. Millions take part in creating tapestry or in knitting for gift-giving, in painting or making music as a hobby, in acting in local drama productions where payment will be minimal or totally absent, and so on. Thus, art seems almost a central characteristic of the human animal, even when money is not involved.
Likely, much art created by homo sapiens has been lost, which is understandable given it was created with natural substances that could decompose without trace. However, art from about forty to sixty thousand years ago has been found, such as Venus figurines worn as necklaces; Lion Man, the first figurine with animal features; the Borneo cave paintings depicting cattle, cupules (or cup-like indentations in rocks) which anthropologists have suggested may have served in a game or been used like musical instruments; and beautiful ostrich eggshell engravings, to name just a few of many other key discoveries. Humans from the earliest days possessed aesthetic sensibility, and may have worked to produce items that were intrinsically beautiful, or which possessed magical or other symbolic value. These were made by humans who lived in freedom, before the rise of states, exchange, and private property, and whose creative talents were developed in tandem with the development of tools and language.
Today, much art serves the needs of power and commerce. Students in art and design today will typically not be spending their lives beautifying our world, but rather living as workers to develop the design of packaging, posters, graphics, signage, fashion, animation, makeup, interiors, textiles, websites, and industrial goods, among other applications. Art today is therefore a prized skill that millions study for the purpose of serving industry. One could imagine many of these in use in even a classless society, but this also means that today’s art expresses the ideas, needs, and values of the rich. Our entire culture is based on appealing to the spending habits of the working class, or of the elite, to realise profits for the owning class. Most of what you see, touch, and use in your human world has been designed with money in mind. To that extent, our culture is creatively shaped by the needs of money itself. This is not simply a world designed according to techno-industrial development, rather it is a world designed by the needs of impersonal profit-making. We, flesh and blood humans of passion, emotion, aesthetic sense, and inspiration, live in a world in which art is distorted to serve the coldness of buying and selling.
Art is the expression of life, and you as a blue- or white-collar worker as well have been designed by our culture to live a particular one serving the unique needs of the owners. You have been moulded like so much plastic, thanks in fact to your neuroplasticity, into shapes that will feel excited by all the rubbish that the capitalist class sees fit to sell you. You have been designed as a worker who can fit into a corporate culture for five days of the week; you have been forged to consume commodities rather than live a true, authentic life of freedom and creativity. Despite such programming, it is in your nature to seek out and enjoy beautiful music, colourful paintings in the museum, and objects whose sleek, tainted, smooth, and sexy designs you covet. Meaning has been reduced to consumption. Not just that, but the artists involved have themselves been turned into machines whose creative spirits serve the capitalists in the attractive display of their goods.
In pop music, just as an example, the need to sell often leads to crass conventionality for no other reason but the hope of selling. Thus, after the first hits of Merseybeat, a hundred bands from around the world reproduced the identical style, especially with major labels courting anybody who could sound like the Beatles or Gerry and the Pacemakers. The same was true with almost any popular musical style: the rock’n’roll blues revivalists, folk-rock, psychedelia, hard rock, singer-songwriter, prog, metal, punk, dance, post-rock, and the list goes on. Many of these styles involved incredibly talented musicians, but they also inspired a generation of mediocre copyists. This was all due to a culture based on monetary values which distorted musical talent as it distorts everything to its image.
The music papers and radio stations also distorted talent by endlessly hyping one bad band after another as the greatest, latest, thing. Musicians are often evaluated by both the media and consumers according to how much they sell or to meaningless features of their personalities or lifestyles. While some famous bands were indisputably great, many famous acts remain indisputably have-beens. But even within the world of music, styles are themselves commodified, with fans devoted to classical competing with rock enthusiasts, who must then compete with followers of jazz, and so on. The reality is that all styles contain both a minority of the brilliant and a majority of the less inspired or inspiring. Many of the musicians were themselves aware of this, sampling the best of every genre even while the media were busy putting them into a box.
Conformity replaces individuality, artists who simply want to create what their heart dictates, although most artists who make no money probably don’t care about the marketplace and just continue according to their creative desire. It is often argued that capitalist competition was required to inspire the greats, however the reality is more likely the opposite, that many great artists failed to see the light of day, that competition generated commonness as much in art as in all commodities, that excessive resources were spent promoting rubbish, but that even the character of the art, for instance endless love songs about how much you want or need someone, was determined by what was viewed as sellable, as opposed to having reinforced originality and brilliance. Standards remain poor, everything produced is just ‘good enough’ for the masses.
Art in the service of commerce exists primarily to take your cash. It is impossible to even imagine what our world could look like without this distortion of our aesthetic sense serving the needs of the rich. Our cities serve the appearance and necessity of power, although they remain exciting places in which to live. There is just as much likelihood that a democratic society would have created futuristic cities far ahead of today’s capabilities that are limited by cost, than that it would have decentralised our living spaces so that we reside much closer to the living world. When the needs of human beings and the natural world come first, art will express freedom, community, nature, the universe, and those existential concerns that remain after the endless problems of a money society have been resolved.
Freed from today’s slavery in which we are required to serve the master class for most of our lives, perhaps more time will be spent in creativity. Perhaps even work will become more creative. Organisation will become more creative. How people may live together to establish the greatest joy will become a central creative venture. Art, in such a world, would not be expressed only in the artefacts or designs produced by artists, although those would also presumably continue to be valued, but art may be redefined as the creative life itself, as William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and many others have speculated.
In such a world, art will hold hands with science, and everyone’s life will be a form of art.
DR. WHO