Why Art Shouldn’t be Bought or Sold

Our existential mission and capitalism’s degradation of artists

Thanks to the prevalence now of cameras and microphones, we’re used to seeing hapless folks demean themselves. So much of life these days is broadcast for the world to see, that at any given moment the foolishness of someone somewhere is bound to go on public record. Bloopers and memes keep us amused.

But there’s a special kind of degradation when artists compete in gameshows for a grand prize, as in “Ink Master,” “Face Off,” or “Portrait Artist of the Year.” That’s when our shallowness is unmistakable, because in these cases the imperatives of capitalism so transparently override those of artistic creativity. It’s as though the purpose of producing art were to earn a profit or even to please a panel of judges.

A Clash of Values

You could see in “Face Off,” for example, how the young makeup artists cling to their artistic mores even as those values clash with their participation in the TV show’s social Darwinian format. The artists would sometimes help each other, sacrificing their advantage by giving advice on how their competitors could improve their work. Yet the entertainment value of the competition thrives on the participants’ cutthroat tactics and on the winners’ selfish abandonment of the losers.

“Ink Master” plays up those expectations, as the tattoo artists sometimes form teams within teams and belittle each other, talking trash and mocking each other’s mistakes to maximize the drama. In part this rougher tone of the show reflects the fact that tattoo culture is perceived as being lower class. But the tattoo-artist competitors often look like they’re playing to a script, exaggerating conflicts for the audience’s amusement.

Beyond these shows, the clash between creative and business values has come to a head in the gig economy in which freelancers prostitute themselves for a pittance.

In its Google summary, Fiverr, for example, says its “mission is to change how the world works together. Fiverr connects businesses with freelancers offering digital services in 300+ categories.” That sounds harmless enough, especially since such a platform enables millions of lower-level creators to at least receive some feedback and profit from their work, whereas before the internet they wouldn’t have had any financial inventive to pursue their artistic inspirations.

Companies like Fiverr give freelancers a chance to get their work out there as part of the modern proliferation of information. If you squint hard enough, capitalism itself looks democratic in that the market takes power away from the aristocracy and provides everyone the opportunity to start their own business or to decide where they want to apply to work.

Belittling Artists in the Pyramid Scheme of Showbusiness

Whatever advantages such postindustrial economies may have, though, there’s a clear downside, which is that everything becomes commodified, and nothing is sacred anymore. At least, that’s the impression you have when you watch artists struggling and hustling in these digital slums and cyber-gladiator rings. On the surface, at least, we’re seeing more and more art being produced. But in so far as the medium is the message, the subtextual lesson is that art is thereby devalued.

A deluge in the quantity of art on TV and on social media can’t make up for the reduction of this art’s value because of how art is inevitably packaged for capitalistic consumption. There can be little respect for the artistic process or purpose in a show that needs to maximize its ratings in competition with less challenging fare. Art is degraded when it’s presented as the outcome of a series of zeroes and ones on an internet platform that boasts that its freelancers will toil like dancing, gibbering monkeys on a street corner.

Suppose someone who calls himself a connoisseur holds a televised competition and invites painters from across the land to showcase their talents. But the price for admission is that the judge insists on berating each of the contestants, on slapping the artists’ face and spitting on their work. Nevertheless, the show has high ratings, so the artists’ names are now known to millions of viewers, and someone wins a large cash prize at the end.

What would be the net effect of such a show? Would the benefits outweigh the humiliations, and would the point of art be lost in the sordid rigmarole of showbusiness? Could the show’s producer justly be considered an art lover?

Compare this with the controversy of “American Idol” when Simon Cowell, the infamous mean judge of music, would routinely spoil the average contestants’ dreams, telling them the dire truth about their prospects in the music business rather than sugar-coating their chances. You might say that Cowell was doing them a favour because not everyone has the talent to be a great artist, and some of the contestants were obviously fooling themselves.

But again, the subtext speaks for itself: the point of “American Idol” was to separate the millions of nobodies from the precious few who were born to be popstars. The end justified the means, as thousands of deluded singers had to be embarrassed so that the few stars could shine on the big stage. This was an escapade in “multilevel marketing,” which is a euphemism for a pyramid scheme.

And this is the essence, too, of how the gig and creator economies are justified in corporate propaganda. You emphasize the miraculous big winners and ignore the plight of the many artists who are duped into humiliating themselves and into struggling to earn a living doing what they love. Even as the losers are presented as deserving to lose because they’re deluded, as in the case of the horrendous singers on “American Idol” who are able only to caterwaul, there would be no winners without the losers.

You need millions of people paying attention for the winners at the end to seem superhuman. That’s why the advertisers pay for the show, because of the prospect of selling their goods to a large audience. The audience is generated by the primal thrill of watching a symbolic competition that stands in for something like war or the prehistoric hunting of wild game. And the audience flocks to their TVs the vicarious thrill of seeing their neighbours compete.

Artistic Creativity: A Renewable Human Resource

Why, though, do so many of our neighbours want to be popstars? Why do they sing, paint, write, sculpt, or dance? Why do artists degrade themselves on TV shows and in the gig economy? Why can we count on there being a thousand struggling artists for every highly successful one?

Capitalism’s social Darwinian cover story is that artists are just like the rest of us: selfish, greedy, and looking for any opportunity to dominate and to live like an aristocrat. That’s what we all supposedly want, and that’s why we don’t feel guilty when we see so many wannabe artists struggling to get by. We give them a thumbs up on social media, we donate a few dollars a month to their Patreon page, like handing out charity to a homeless person, and we don’t vote to reform the tech monopolies that capitalize on the Ponzi frauds. Secretly, we presume that losers deserve to lose because they’re competing based on greed. Pride goes before the fall, and all of that.

That’s one side of the story. The other side comes from the artists. Perhaps some artists are ruthless and greedy since those vices can afflict anyone. But there was art long before there was capitalism and even civilization. Art was once part of the religious or existential quest to explore our inner worlds and to find meaning in the outer one. Art was essential to the advent of culture which made us behaviourally modern people. People are anomalous animals, animals that learn how to thrive in an exclusive niche for intelligent and enlightened creators. We created an artificial world that began to supplant nature, a humanized world made of symbols and driven by visionary ideals.

Artists were once shamans venturing into the psychedelic depths on entheogens, painting their exploits on cave walls. Artists were prophets and philosophers, their canvases being the minds of the initiates who longed for the fulfilment of the ideals that these visionaries alone saw. Art was part of the celebration of our liberation from ignorance and from the animal life cycle. And art was the stubborn stamping of our visions into nature’s indifferent raw materials, even as the artists appreciated the fragility and tragic futility of those aesthetic explorations. Artists saw the need for human creativity even as they recognized the madness of freeing ourselves with those creations.

Art as the Canary in the Coalmine

Therefore, to speak of art as being based on petty greed is grotesque. The reason the arts endure even as the self-destructive neoliberal culture debases them is that artistic creativity is a renewable human resource. Art is a vocation, a calling, not just a job. Ask writers, visual artists, and musicians why they do what they do even if hardly anyone is paying them for it. Chances are, they won’t say it’s because they expect to strike it rich; rather, it’s because that’s what they love to do. They produce art because that’s where their talents lie, and art gives their life purpose and dignity.

Artists create beauty and powerful, novel messages to confirm that they weren’t wholly swindled throughout their life. They came, they saw, and even if they didn’t conquer, they recognized that the natural world was unfinished in its indifferent, mindless amorality. Artists complete what was naturally broken, and they beautify what was monstrous.

That’s why the pyramid schemes work in this case: the fraudsters can exploit this renewable resource. They can bank on artists’ willingness to create art even under degrading conditions. That’s to say that the art market rests on non-capitalistic values, which means that neoliberalism as an all-encompassing value system is false. We’re not all greedy materialists. Evidently, some of us are artistic idealists, and we’ve been that way for tens of thousands of years.

Likely, artists will endure, but the commodification of art and the degradation of artists still have a corrosive impact on the nonartistic public. Many civilians in the existential mission, as it were, no longer appreciate art for what it really is or used to be.

We see deluded singers on “American Idol,” and we think all musicians are vacuous and deranged. We see freelancers selling their wares for scraps in the gig economy, and we assume that most art must be practically worthless because that’s the verdict of the marketplace. We see most artists struggling and only a few stars rising, so we surmise that society really does conform to the pyramid structure: most of us are slaves and are meant to be ruled, and only the elect few can live like gods.

In short, we come away from the art world with the neoliberal, social Darwinian impression that protects capitalism as its myth. Art is supposed to challenge injustice and all manners of predatory or parasitic monstrosity, by way of speaking to our highest self. We had our fill of struggling in the wild when we degraded ourselves for millions of years in the Stone Age as slaves to our genetic instincts. That was before we realized we could attempt to create a new world, a divine kingdom governed by ideals rather than by amoral cycles and pointless ecological balancing acts.

The point of art is to instill an existential awakening, to sustain personhood so we don’t sink back into bestial animality. When we buy and sell art, we’re liable to equate poems, movies, and songs with Big Macs, handguns, and life insurance policies, with the shoddy and exploitative merchandise that’s also on the market. When we think of art as a commodity rather than as a priceless bastion of sacred personhood, we forget our existential mission and we invite ourselves to be treated, too, like disposable items.