I used to think if I pursued art, it would be like spitting in the ocean. Who would care? Who would hear me? I told my 25 year old self, if you attach yourself to brands and big business, play not by the rules of making money, but in acknowledgment of them, you can get a word in edgewise. If you make, art you’ll be like that hippy dancing in the crowd at a Phish concert with her eyes closed. You’ll be in your own art universe. And starving. It seemed to me: make your contribution quantifiable, make it count, make it consumable, make it tangible.

That was then. You could knit your oven mitts and peddle them at the county bazaar. Now everyone’s selling to one another.

‘Buy me’

‘No buy me’

‘Buy me!’

It’s another form of taking turns talking. It seems pointless. All this clever stealth marketing is zapping creativity from the creative population. Everybody has an agenda.

How can anybody even see?

I went onto a Paris hipster site tonight someone sent me to learn more about the FIAC art fair going on here this weekend. On the site, famous Paris personalities listed their favorite spots here. Of course an actress listed a regular movie theater that will be debuting her movie and another woman talked about a store that carried her clothes. Give me a break.
When I hosted a panel of marketers at a conference last year, I carefully planned out questions that would probe the evolution of online marketing but my guests got up there and one by one plugged their brands, products, and websites. One guy hijacked the whole thing by standing up in the middle of the thing to click through a powerpoint of his companies services! On stage! Something I explicitly told him not to do. It was the Jerry Springer of Marketing Panels. Each one, especially the young guns, got up to outshout the other.
Sometimes what used to excite me about the entrepreneurial spirit of the creative class is starting to look like the spit of a thousand jaded and corporate-ized cool kids sinking into the ocean. They are turning into the monsters they were running from.
No matter what you do for $$$, if you commit yourself to art, your art, as few people as there might be who see it, you can rest assured that you are actually saying something that is not related to a consumable, profitable, interchangeable, extinguishable, questionable, suspicious, depleting thing. It’s something actual. Something human. something flawed and living. Something that means something, even if it means something to 5 people or 2 or just you.

I’m not being idealistic. We have to make money. We have to produce food and machinery and fashion and ipods and shoes and beverages and hand soap. I just think we need to do both. The French seem to still be able to do both but that ability is diminishing, the production of free time that we think we’ve been creating seems to be actually the production of more work time. If you want to discuss this, I’ve formed a Girl on the street group on Facebook. Look up “Chauncey Zalkin” and ask to join.

Related posts:

1. No Child
2. Crawling Back to Civilization, Reluctantly