Supporting the Arts During a Cultural Identity Crisis
*I wrote this short essay below on the state of our modern culture and its current treatment of the arts for my official artist Instagram and Facebook pages earlier this afternoon:
If the majority of a creator’s time is spent managing community perception and engagement, marketing and promotion, strategizing rollout, chopping work up into easily digestible pieces of content, prioritizing breadth of attention over depth to build an audience, etc. then at best they are acting as more of an influencer, entertainer, or entrepreneur than a true craftsperson or artist. And these are the kinds of people the world now alludes to most when we reference the word artist. But a true artist is a seer, storyteller, and master of nuance more than these reductive modern descriptors imply, in my honest opinion.
We have somehow found ourselves in one of the most absurd times in human history, where the roles being assigned to people and the actual work being done under those roles aren’t even close to lining up in essence. And I blame it on a culture that promotes and celebrates the manufactured veneer of success more than it does the embodied mastery of skills and knowledge that results in real long-term progress.
Art is one of those things that loses its connective, universal purpose the more capitalized on it becomes. We’ve been born into a system where learning to participate in the game of commerce has been made necessary to a degree in order to maintain sustainable creative livings. But that’s just it - the degree to which the minimum standard has become for a true artist to have a liveable and impactful career in our society is abysmally unattainable and divided from reality for most people that aspire to do so in this modern age.
Rampant capitalist systems and growing cultural apathy is destroying the arts, even when it’s the very thing that will save humanity from itself in the future. Artists living out and expressing their truths inspire. They remind people that they too might have a deeper creative calling over their lives and that they can also strive towards that inner calling if they so choose. They remind us of what’s possible beyond the edges of our ordinary consciousness. Without this hope, there is nothing to live for spiritually speaking.
I’m reminded of Cassandra’s curse in moments like these. A prophetess in Greek mythology who was given the gift of foresight, but with the condition that no one would ever believe her if she told them of her premonitions. Artists of all kinds have been warning the masses subtly and overtly for years about the coming of a very difficult and tumultuous time if our society and its systems don’t begin to reflect value back to the people who have the power to change how we fundamentally see ourselves, our core beliefs, and our cultural ethos.
If you know an artist, support them. They are not taking from you, nor do they have any special privileges in society in any way. That’s the myth our culture would love to have you believe. If anything, I know far more artists who are giving their gifts freely in the face of backlash and exploitation, enduring financial loss left and right, and still doing the work their souls call them to with determination - because it’s who they are inherently, and even more so because they courageously believe in the power of their craft to bring about a better world for everyone given time.
