The War with my art is not the act of creating it or performing it, but the mere notion that I will abandon the circus the world provides to face it alone in servitude.
The world rewards you for creating and the reward prevents you from going back to the source of your creativity. A time when all the prestige where nowhere to be found, a time where you did it for the sake of creating something someone would read or find entertaining, to trying to fulfill what the market says, creating for an algorithm being social media or financial returns.
I love to make art, writing has saved my life, and writing has given me the opportunity to be seen, but I hate to make my art for the purpose of commercialization. It pains me that the main struggle I have with my creativity is not if I am able to create or not, but why am I creating a work that is not to liberate or shine a light but to extort.
It’s a struggle to understand the reasoning behind packaging your life experience for $25.00 on Amazon and other fine retailers and limiting yourself to that narrative of you. To go on the road and be a salesman for cooperation with your life experience, consistently trying people to buy your art rather than change their behaviors.
For brevity’s sake, when your art and creativity focus on the commercial value it brings, you begin to question if it’s even art in the first place.
Steven Davies from Cornell University's book titled “The Definition of Art” explained’ It is to be understood “There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art” but according to dictionary.cambridge.org “Art is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”
I do not intend to dissuade you from producing commercial art, but should everyone's creativity be judged by the success of a few who choose to pursue a singular path in the vast field of art? Why does it become a validating tool for the creation of art, and what will the finished product be worth?
No, denying that visual art such as paintings and large print photographs are valued by what the buyer is willing to pay for, or the perceived value of the artist who produces the art. Publishing and the movie industry have gatekeepers, agents, and producers who decide what is valuable in the market.
Many parents diligently kill their children’s creativity for fear of them growing up in a cutthroat and abusive industry. We see many artists die by suicide and a growing mental health crisis, forgetting a major contributor to this struggle is the pressure to create commercial art. The second work must be better than the first, we demand genius from every creative expression, and fans of Game of Thrones were unsatisfied with the ending and wrote a petition.
Artist facing these pressures tend to abuse drugs and alcohol, and the pressure to keep up the life they have established to create security for their family from the preying eyes of their audience sometimes lead to domestic abuse, and divorce, among many other menaces they fall into.
We fault the artist for creating something that sparks our imagination, we crucify them for entertaining us, we criticize them for challenging stereotypes and the status quo, and we make life miserable for them because we love the art they created.
Imagine doing something nice for someone and being rewarded with hate, and anger and dismiss forever for making a mistake everybody makes just because they choose to share their creativity with you. We immortalize artists and make it almost impossible for them to live normal lives.
It’s an inert feeling of otherness, we want to show our dissonance and resolve, we paid for their art so we can have a say in their lives.
There is a counterargument that the commercialization of art and widespread distribution of art makes it accessible and creates exposure for the marginalized artist. I do not disagree with this sentiment but at what cost to the marginalized artist when there is a lack of transparency and tokenization of the art, they produce using their work to further someone else agenda?
In the grand scheme of things, commercialization upholds a certain type of power, it helps to further marginalize those who don’t fit into the framework.