Free Content is Cool, but Artists Are Dying of Exposure
It's freezing out here, someone throw me a nice warm money blanket
Aw-rite guvnor? Got a quid? You ain’t got a quid? Fair enough, got a like? One little like, go on guvnor, it’s freezin’ out ‘ere, bloody cramped in this bin, have an ‘eart, click the ‘eart, costs you nothin’ guvnor, go on…
Should artists be paid?
Wait, I have another way of saying that.
Should artists be fed? Should they be housed? Should they even be tolerated? Messing up the world with their wasp-sting questions and chain-clanking melodies and finger-biting beauty. Breaking through our comfortable thoughts with their smash-the-desks dance, their trepanning into the sap of deep wisdom. Should they be fed for showing us new ways of being? No, of course not! Stamp the rats out!
Artists? They’re a nuisance. Starve them! It’s traditional. Let’s make every one of you meat for the sausage machine. Flip burgers. Make cold calls. Turn “pain points” into profit. Be too exhausted at the end of the day to create. Arts BAD, STEM GOOD, because we don’t want you THINKING. Language is power, so let’s reserve it for Oxbridge, the Ivy League. Want to make art? Inherit wealth. Art for the privileged, grind for the oiks.
Or— here’s a way out. Make content. Skim the surface. Create mind-shredding videos. Sedative for the masses, chopping attention into five-second slices until no one can get to the end of a paragraph, let alone a book. Because we don’t, repeat don’t, want you buggers thinking. You might have questions. You might start asking, Is this it? Is this what I was born for?
Who’d buy our shit then? Both the products and the bullcrap? No, bugger artists. We’ll steal their art, feed it to our algos, slick it and sausage-meat it into a shit-ton of AVERAGE that smothers every quirky “piece of art.”
Should artists be paid? You know my answer. I am one. But even if I weren’t, I would say the same.
Because art makes us human. Art is the seed of all civilisation. The minute we started painting bison on caves, you couldn’t stop us. The cradle of invention is an artist’s imagination. And art is medicine. In art, we heal the cuts and bruises of our broken childhoods, and cook up new ways of being human.
Strip away the arts and we’ve nothing worth saving. If we love what they do, those who’ve mastered their art form, then yes, we should pay them. Sure, lines of code are writing poems now, but without heart or history. A simulacrum of feeling; dead at the core. And this we reward with a monthly subscription to Anthropic’s Claude?
What about those who invent our new future? Who tunnel deep into the human heart, shine a torch on the wall and show us the writing? Or gather our hearts around crackling fires, for stories that make them thump, and tears fall? And what about those who write words fresh as toothpaste to rub on our brains, make us alive to the world again?
T.S. Eliot was a banker. Philip Larkin a librarian. Kafka, a very miserable clerk.
Me: poet, programmer, waitress, temptress, mother, single mother, phone answerer, bean counter, therapist, novelist, tutor and lecturer. But jobs are over (barring freelance).
For seventeen months, I’ve been writing for free. I broke a bit during two-posts-a-week, where I tried to stay free on the Friday and paid on a Tuesday. Quality matters, these posts takes hours, and I have a novel to write. And writing for free is … well, I’m a veteran, not a novice. The real connections that I make here give me chills. Growth is a blessing. But sustenance matters. Writing for exposure is a long, slow death when it doesn’t pay the bills.
So it’s time to put a little more of me behind gently closed doors. Imagine the Great Hall of a castle where we can shelter from the outside storm. You can enter for the price of a coffee a month. It’s warm. There’s a roaring fire in the hearth from wind-felled oaks. I’ve been on a very long quest, and returned with some keys, some powerful stories, and spells: words that can lift you into a lighter realm.
The internet’s a marvellous invention. Cannot fault it. Yes the porn, the scams, the clickbait, but the connection! The access! The potentially global audience! Sure, the AI overlords stealing from the artists, but
Me! Talking to you! Right here in real time.
But if we artists can’t afford to keep generating new ones, away from our AI overlords, you’ll be locked in a loop of regurgitated spew. Is that what you want?
Or would you rather have a brand new view?
If you’re new here or just want to read for free, there’s still plenty for you (see below). And I’ll still send free subscribers a juicy free post at the beginning of every month at the very minimum. You are loved!
Are you a writer? Would you like to write a book with my guidance and a cohort of other people over 12 months. There’s still time to register your interest for Write the Damn Book!
Coming in June for paid subscribers: our new Writing Challenge, the Seven Deadly Sins.
Over to You
As ever, I value your comments. Let me know what you think.
Isn’t this the most poetic begging bowl?
Is there any piece of single-artist-produced art (novel, poem, painting, song, etc) that has been life-changing for you, or that you keep returning to?
I modelled my cockney intro on Dick Van Dyke’s Bert from Mary Poppins. Let’s talk about this marvellous bloody joy-generator who is 99 years old. Do you love Dick Van Dyke? Do you love Mary Poppins?
If you voted Option 3, above, expand.
You want more freebies? Catch up on these popular posts:
More freebies are linked from this page.
👏🏻
I’m reminded of those awful adverts during Covid about ballet dancers retraining to be nurses 🤯while we all craved art and creativity from our homes.
My son is a musician and mix engineer and I’ve always encouraged him because I did what I ‘ought’ initially and was very miserable.
Thanks for being here.
I’ve found in recent months that I was losing paid subscribers given money is becoming tighter all round…so I’ve set all my posts as free for the first seven days, with only paid subscribers being able to rummage in the archive. But given the archive contains a couple of years worth of writing (and a generous dollop of instructions for things to make using cloth and plant dyes) I think that’s reasonable. It means folks who are skint can at least read stories when they’re fresh…and saves me from seeing a stream of “unsubscribing cos broke” emails. About 10% of my readers do still support me though, for which I am very grateful.