Theft, Time, and Luxury
Fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away.
Part 1 - Theft
Gillian Welch’s 2001 song “Everything Is Free Now” is about how artists are expected to labor for free. Toward the end of the song, she sings, “I don't need to run around/
I'll just stay at home/And sing a little love song/My love and myself/If there's something that you want to hear/You can sing it yourself.” Meanwhile, the repeated chorus goes, “They figured it out/That we're gonna do it anyway/Even if it doesn't pay.”
Several weeks ago my therapy homework was to do something only for myself. I had some difficulty in finding something that I wasn’t inviting someone else into, planning to give away, anticipating showing off, or that felt “worth it” with no pay-off but the process itself. Even our language about process is full of terms like “pay-off.”
(I drew this, inspired by the botanical drawings of May Theilgaard Watts)
In 2024, Everything Is Very Much Not Free Now. Creative work is real work, and I want artists to have economic security. But it drives me crazy that things that used to be free are increasingly paywalled. Not only that, but the mechanisms by which artists get paid have been seized and are increasingly exploited by corporate tech.
The hyper-monetization of creative thought actually discourages artists from “doing it anyway.” Charging for access (separate from ownership) subtly enforces the idea that where there’s talent, there follows cash. From which one could be nudged toward the false conclusion that where there isn’t cash, there isn’t talent.
Oh, you haven’t gone organically viral? Just make more content. Oh, your work takes time? Try pay-tier access. (I get weekly emails and metric-trackers harassing me to charge you to read these very words. “Cause I’m worth it!”) Oh, people do like your work, but you still can’t afford groceries? Have you tried a merch shop? Still no? Oh well, I guess you’re just not good at art.
It’s almost as if tech behemoths and sweatshop overlords and cobalt mine slavers are defining what counts as worthy creativity. What they hawk as creativity is more like celebrity. Of course some celebrities are talented, but what algorithms do is conglomerate the cash cows until somehow we all celebrate the same five things and we think it constitutes creativity. I would mind less that some people enjoy the Marvel mega-franchise and Taylor Swift if liking them didn’t feed their outsized representation in their industries. Those creators can afford to be artistically lazy because they don’t have to compete…which is exactly the problem that capitalism claims to prevent.
Art subverts economics. It doesn’t have a market value, and its worth doesn’t fluctuate with other metrics of wealth. You can break art down into hours of labor and cost of materials if you want to, but it’s unrelated to the value of the artwork. You can’t commodify the essence of art, and if you somehow did, no one could afford it. I want quality art to be valued as priceless, and free to access. The nearly disappeared word for this is “public.”
Taylor Swift and the Marvel movies have a lot of genuine fans (my kids are huge Marvel-heads!), but their monopolizing popularity and correlating profitability means that they’re copied and remade ad infinitum while original projects don’t get as much or any funding. Time is money under capitalism, so if you can’t rely on your art to bring home the bacon, there isn’t much opportunity to make art because you have to spend time getting bacon elsewhere.
Nor are Swift and Marvel, my favorite whipping boys, popular primarily because of their quality. What they are is great equalizers: some concoction of easy-access appeal mixed with a quality that asks nothing from their consumers. And I don’t mean that in a nice way, like the idea of “public.” You do not have to know anything or do anything or be anything or have any thoughts to take in their content. Likewise, there is nothing to take away from them that enhances ones existence. They inspire one to obtain riches, not to be an artist oneself. (If you disagree, that’s fine, there is no shortage of shiny plastic to fill in these blanks and make the same points.)
Are you dumb if you like Taylor Swift or Marvel or Mattel or the Kardashians, or, or, or? Making the like of those things your personality might make you dumber, but no, simply liking what you like is not dumb. What we’re forgetting is that a big part of us liking dumb stuff is that executives make a profit off convincing us of it. The more we tell them with our dollars that we don’t care about thoughtful or challenging art, the more they are incentivized to green-light projects that don’t require talent. And if it doesn’t require talent, they don’t have to pay talented people to make it.
Netflix and Hulu and every other streaming service make money off mindlessness. They are producing a whole lot of shite (I couldn’t make it past 10 minutes of the Netflix-produced All The Light We Cannot See, despite its impressive cast and presumably decent story) and cutting shows that people love but don’t have a mega-viewership (Our Flag Means Death, the Midnight Gospel, Over the Garden Wall, I’m sure things are jumping to your mind as you read this). It’s tragic to lose something you love because it’s not profitable enough for an executive. It’s criminal be charged for lies.
Sound like a conspiracy? It is! Because if we were to get the idea that quality art was available apart from billionaire-owned-platforms, and if many people began to see the exploitation that is necessary to make us comatose consumers of ads for products we do not need, we might stop giving them all our time and money.
As passionate as I am about this, I’m not inflating my position. This week, a Meta executive announced that they’ll be updating Instagram, and eventually Facebook, to be free of hard thoughts. For immediate release: Social media to eliminate discussion of social issues. “Users who still want to have content ‘likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large’ recommended to them can choose to turn off this limitation within their account settings” (source).
If this meant that political candidates couldn’t pay to promote themselves, that would be good ethics. But what it is going to mean, if history of social media is any indication, is that talking about genocide and corruption will get you shadow-banned. Beat reporting about the entire subject of this blog post will be drowned out by the algorithm and decided for you by buttons you didn’t push (read the wording of the quote above carefully), because not only is it not profitable, it actually threatens profit.
How is the algorithm going to determine what constitutes social issues? Everything is a social issue! Real art is political because life is political. Food is political because the labor that goes into making it is political. Sports are political because incentivizing humans to concuss themselves for fame is a social issue. Being a woman is political. Etc. Etc. You can’t hide social issues from people who live them….
This will not end well for Meta (did they learn nothing from Twitter/X?). You can only increase the cost of goods and services while decreasing their value for so long before you have a strike, and then a riot on your hands. Part of the definition of fascism is “subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race.” Meta’s announcement, while disturbing, also highlights that their suppression of “social topics” on Instagram means that grassroots dissent is making itself felt in high places. We’ve threatened their profit margins.
Now that everything is not free, if you want to see art, you’re gonna have to make it yourself.
Part 2 - Time
In this present age, we mostly access the creative work of other people through the internet. Of course there are many exceptions, but for myself it’s fair to say that even when I get to experience creativity apart from a screen, I hear about it through a screen first.
I have seen a handful of applications for Artificial Intelligence (AI) that I think are genuinely added value to humans. But where I see AI used the most is on screens that I use as a tool to “do things easier” or somehow boil down a massive amount of content into what the computer brain thinks I want. That is not how creativity works. Creativity isn’t something handed to you by a computer program, it’s a process your brain goes through to solve a problem. When I allow corporate bots to shape my access to art, I lose the delineation between appreciation and consumption.
As dire as this situation feels to me, it’s not just me aging out of the pace of technological advancement. I don’t think that everything was better the way it used to be. I don’t think the internet is the culprit in all of this. The culprit, which has indeed developed in tandem with my internet usage, is the privatization-for-profit (aka exploitation) of what was formerly free. It’s then compounded by the incessant messaging that exploiters are doing us a favor because we have the opportunity, for only $9.99 a month, to profiteer too! I’m mad that I’m being lied to. I’m mad that I’m being told the economy is great by the approximately 27 world executives for whom the economy is great, because they stole it. It’s only partially a coincidence that they also have poor taste in art.
The good news is that artists don’t need money to dissent or detect bullshit.
Even in creative realms such as fashion or film where the result of a creative process is a product, artists can differentiate between projects that were designed with love by their creator(s) versus projects designed to appeal to an audience(‘s pocket). Art made out of love is sometimes a commercial success, but products created to sell en masse rarely elicit adoration. Taylor Swift might seem like an exception to this, but I’m not done harping on her yet.
Love, whether it comes from the artist or the fan, always gives more than it takes. You can compensate someone for the affect of their art on your life, but the purpose of genuine art can never be to generate profit. An artist is not a brand, and it always pains me when artists stop innovating in order to maintain revenue. Taylor Swift loves money more than art, and she’s made that quite clear. It makes the product she is selling utterly uninteresting to me. If a person loves something for what it does for them instead of for what it is, it’s noticeable. To give Taylor a small break, almost every celebrity is guilty of this. If making challenging art (or statements) threatens the likelihood that they’ll be paid or promoted, suddenly everyone is “just an artist!” unaware of social issues. Don’t celebrate that kind of faux artist. They do not care about you at all. They’re love is for their money, and not art.
Let’s take this a step further and say that love + time = respect. If I don’t take the time to respect someone’s art, my love is just consumerism. Likewise, appropriation is a lack of respect. Calling AI generated images “art” is also a lack of respect.
You may not think of yourself as a creative, but every human has creative power. Therefore, you have the skill to learn to appreciate the spirit in which what you consume was made. It takes practice, but I can think of hardly anything more important than training ourselves to love beauty and flexing the agency to define that. This kind of seeing has absolute power to revolutionize our being and our society.
Making art, and seeing like an artist, is in direct opposition to the concept of optimization, Silicon Valley’s ultimate fetish. Art takes time.
I am in awe of artwork that speaks to The Now with precision. AI makes me forget that when an artist releases something incredibly timely, it’s probably not off-the-cuff. Saying or showing one single thing that resonates deeply with people requires a grasp of so much that is beyond that condensed moment. Speaking to The Now with wisdom and creativity is made possible by a lifetime of experience (remember love + time = respect). For every artist’s project that makes it to the eyes of the public, there are a hundred the artist is still taking their time with.
Meanwhile, AI can comb more facts than we can, but it did not experience or feel any of them. It can conglomerate and even appropriate, but it can’t create or appreciate. It can not love, it didn’t put in the time, and that’s why the things it thinks I’ll like feel hollow.
Art that impresses artists is often not the most popular writing/painting/music/cinema because in order to create something that is not a regurgitation of a present trend, an artist is either steeped in the past or projecting the future in a way that is not immediately traceable to pop culture. Something that is of its time (pop-culture) is like a sugar rush: high impact, but low depth and quick fade.
Timeless work might make fewer references to the time in which it was made and therefore be less popular upon release, but carries a depth that gives it longevity. Creating on that level takes time, and in time, tends to have a more universal appeal than pop-culture because you don’t have to have been in that time to access its depth.
In my own creative process, I’ve come to respect the inner voice that says that I need to take more time on something. Not just time spent working on a project, but sometimes time to let it idle in the back of my mind. I’ll get a sense that there is a key component to something I’m making that I don’t yet have.
When I get that feeling, I no longer think, “I don’t have the key so I’m not the person to tell this story.” I’ve shifted to, “I don’t understand the key yet, but I’ll know it when I find it.” That process can take years, but the keys do exist. The time that goes into developing myself into a person ready to make the art that I want to make is what gives my work value. The value isn’t in likability, popularity, or profitability.
I value my own learning past the lifespan of Instagram, even though I mourn the warp of a platform that was once public art. I’m an infant in the timeline of my Leonard Cohen fandom, but he seems to have said something akin to: “there are some things we can’t defeat, but in drawing near, we can transcend them.” Artists can do that. I can’t rescue you, but I think I can illuminate the path.
Part 3 - Luxury
I waited for the key to Luxury for four years.
There’s a story in the Bible that was bugging me four years ago. In this story, Jesus is having dinner at his friend’s house, and a woman comes in and pours incredibly expensive perfume on Jesus. This incident is recounted in all four of the primary gospel accounts, so it made a big impression on Jesus’s friends. The perfume that the woman poured out was worth approximately a year’s salary and everyone in the room recognized its monetary value immediately.
More than once, I’ve tried to imagine a modern equivalent. There is no perfume worth that much today. Even pouring a very rare wine out on the ground as a symbolic offering lacks the drama of everyone present at the dinner party with Jesus (many of them blue-collar laborers and/or unhoused) instantly recognizing the monetary value of the gift.
Jesus’ friends were shocked by the perfume pour. They immediately started gossiping about how the woman came by the money she spent on that perfume, and they openly calculated how many people they could have fed if only she’d donated the perfume and they could exchange it for cash. Jesus told them to leave the woman alone because he was worthy of that gift.
It’s such a theatrical scene and I’ve done some deep dives on various details of the story. Even so, I found myself stuck on the same question Judas asks: given the amount of time Jesus spent telling rich people to sell their stuff and feed the poor, how does pouring out a year’s salary worth of perfume make sense?
It doesn’t make sense. The key is in the story, but it took me years to unlock it. The woman didn’t use the perfume on herself. She didn’t anoint Jesus so that he’d give her something. She didn’t do it to atone for anything. She didn’t do it so that others would see and praise her. She did that insane thing because it was the best way she could think of to tell Jesus that she loved him.
Luxury is love.
Like with creativity, love is priceless. Which means it can be free and it can be outrageous. You certainly don’t need luxury to show love. Conversely, you can have a life filled with luxury items that have nothing to do with love.
Judas wasn’t wrong that it would have had a positive impact on many more people at the time if the perfume was donated and used to buy food to feed potentially thousands of people. On the other hand, the luxury of that gift was so astronomical that every writer in that room included it in their books, and we’re still talking about it.
Reading this Bible story repeatedly is not what brought me to an understanding of Jesus’s praise of luxury. You’ll never guess where I found the key. Before I tell you, I want to highlight that for me, letting this question idle in the back of my mind for so long, allowing myself the time to add at least four years of life experience, and then making this very-not-obvious-connection is something that would not be meaningful to me if a computer had spat it out 5 seconds after I asked, “what place does luxury have in a starving room?”
I found the key in the absolutely bonkers SS24 Maison Margiela by John Galliano fashion show (images below). There was an unmistakable internet gasp around this collection that was a recognition of an artistry we haven’t seen for some time in fashion.
The clothes are not, in my opinion, the most likable. In fact, what popped into my head when I watched the show was this passage from Henry Miller’s 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer:
"In the blue of an electric dawn the peanut shells look wan and crumpled; along the beach at Montparnasse the water lilies bend and break. [Where], when the tide is on the ebb and only a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the muck…The day is sneaking in like a leper...."
The novel wasn’t published in the US until 1961 due to censorship, a poetic footnote to finding the key to Christ-condoned luxury in merkins. Some of the models were literally stumbling around with dirty hankies as accessories. The scene has no immediate correlation to luxury, aside from knowing that these garments cost a great deal of money. But it has a spirit that we rarely see associated with luxury goods anymore because it was clearly made as art, not simply to sell clothing.
John Galliano has been making clothing-as-art for 30 (troubled) years, and his work for Dior from 1997-2011 was far more opulent and obviously luxurious than the syphilitic mermaids. To be honest, I’ve sometimes confused Galliano and his work with my stated favorite, the French designer Christian Lacroix. Lacroix also designed insanely intricate, researched, and luxurious clothing, unrecognizable as anything popular in the 21st century.
In 2009, Lacroix was run out of the fashion house baring his own name after they had to file bankruptcy. He funded his final collection with his own money. Aside from liking his aesthetic, Lacroix has a special place in my heart for caring nothing for the marketability of his craft. He put so much more into his work than he could ever get in return. He is an artist, not a business man. His clothing is not practical, or timeless, or affordable, or commercial, and it was never intended to be. He spared no expense in bringing his visions to fruition, and that’s what luxury is.
John Galliano reminds me of Christian Lacroix, who reminds me of Jesus’ friend’s lavishly expensive gift that he accepted for the love that it was.
In the years it took me to find that key, I’ve stopped worrying about whether different things in the Bible make sense. A lot of them don’t. But it still matters to me to have an idea of how to spend money in celebration when there are hungry people nearby, always.
Luxury as the prize for exploitation is disgusting. But love expressed as luxury can coexist with feeding the hungry. As Jesus told his confused friends, the poor are always with us. Love can fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away. Art is luxury when time is a commodity, so I’m going to keep it free and confound the rich.