The problem of the artist -- artist, as in, the conventionally understood term for those practicing the craft of writing novels, or plays, or learning musical instruments -- can be understood more clearly if the harmful effects of commercialization and branding, advertising and marketing open out to the observer and analyst. There is a conception of what an artists mentality is, generally, and the problem of the misuse of that conception results in an inability of our system to account for how the complex labor and intrinsically-driven principles of artistically imaginative people has been obscured, resulting in the fragmentation of understanding. The bohemian amateurism of a musician has been romanticized, even in sociological studies of the economy of people in artistic lines -- a musician is compensated for lack of steady monetary flow, they say, through payment in the form of fame, of social status, of free beers, or by the simple rarity of a profession in which one is in love with what they do -- the amateur, means, from the latin, to love. Similarly, the shifting of how we think about artists -- as in the sentiments of entrepreneurial value, innovative thought, invention -- have been used in a way that shifts the task of artists with aims of professional prestige to fit into a corporate-capitalist model. One may think of Steve Jobs own contrived pretension to artistry in this way -- the sleekness of technological design was always marketed as the work of techno-utopian sculptural genius. This is a deviation away from conceptions of the artists who saw themselves as aligned with labor -- 1940s era Depression songwriters like Woody Guthrie, or the British autodidacts of the Working Class. Corporatization further scrambles any link between the role of working class, the values of their solidarity, the haunting commentaries from the dissidents. As a result of the Brand and Consumerist culture, another problem emerges which splinters the working class further -- the division of engineer, and mechanic, from the musicians and painters. It is just another way we fight with each other.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 21:46:49 +0000
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