Art?

Who get's to call themselves an artist, and why?

Photo by Henrik Dønnestad on Unsplash

Most people if asked will deny that they have any creativity. There’s a kind of given response in which we are expected to say we aren’t creative or we aren’t an artist. This is particularly true if we do not see ourselves as professionals. Capitalism has made it so that the only possible answer to what you define yourself as is tied to how you earn money or, more specifically, what you produce. Art, as a concept seems as ephemeral as claiming you’re an enlightened being, somehow floating above the ether from everyone else.

Universities haven’t helped with this, and I can understand why so many people roll their eyes at the idea of Art. Anyone who has tried to realize art in any sense comes up against a blatant wall of class obstructions. Interestingly, I think in some ways art may be one of the few areas in which class is openly acknowledged in American society. The general disdain in popular media, news, and the vox populi is that artists are detached from common issues. Not to mention, go into any art gallery, any performance art center, or so on, and it becomes painfully obvious that there is a touch of elitism that stinks of the bourgeois class.

But, this exists even among “pop” art.

Take, for example, any time someone who is creative and has a following and then decides to offer an opinion about pretty much anything. The common retort is that they should stick to what they are good at. Politics don’t belong in music, sports, painting, film, etc.

And to a certain extent I can understand this, not that art should be apolitical (and I would argue, how can anything be apolitical anyway? Even if you choose to ignore material reality, this is still a choice, and one informed by a very particular ideology). But there is a kind of incredulous anger at people who make things for a living. Art, at least in capitalism, has the appearance of a protected and insular class. The disdain that people feel towards this might be misguided (as in the disdain for art as a useless endeavor) but it comes from something that I think is very real.

Everyone is creative, and yet this is often suppressed. It isn’t “practical” and in America “practical” is just a euphemism for productivity (and productivity means “you work for me” to quote the poet Ryan Ekes) If something isn’t making money, it isn’t useful. There’s a kind of religiosity to this as well, certainly tied to protestant ideas of meaning. There is something inherently sinful about doing something without an ultimate meaning, a goal, or again more to the point, without some kind of exchange value. While Art has been a commodity since the advent of capitalism and has certainly become a form of money laundering in more recent times, there’s no denying that the concept of people making things for each other goes against the grain of capital.

There’s a kind of universal unconscious envy that lies there. Who wouldn’t want to be creative? (And, let’s not forget that in many ways, capitalism is a system of shaping desires. Desire is fine, so long as that desire can be shaped into an object, one which can contain those desires, and more importantly, one which can be bought). Who doesn’t harbor the desire to have a sense of both freedom and a sense of narrative control? When you make something, you are in a sense participating in the unfolding of life. And to be clear, anything you make is creative in this sense. The idea that art has to function a certain way, or look, or sound a certain way, is part of this issue of making commodities out of art. What that drive truly is is one of collaboration, even if the thing being made is done in isolation. 

When that drive is funneled into the creation of commodities, you end up with a very subtle idea that there’s a limit to who can be creative. Art, by being forged into a commodity has to follow the rule of all commodities in capitalism, that of scarcity. If art is abundant, then art would lose its monetary value. This is, in some sense, the argument for intellectual property, we have to make art scarce, less it becomes something that is exchanged freely.

But what if Art instead of this mythical being, this ultimate fetishized commodity, became something we exchanged not for monetary value, but rather because being creative and making things is as natural as breathing air? What if the excitement of thinking of a new idea, or sound, or visual, was something we shared freely? When you strip art of its exchange value what you do is return it to its humanity, it becomes a form of communication and more importantly a form of play.

Play is something that terrifies capital. At least unregulated play, play which is not dependent of the purchasing of play. It would be easy to assume capitalism loves play, there are at any given time, thousands of movies, games, TV shows, records, and so on which are available for purchase. But this is a particular kind of play, one in which exchange is always happening. Play is fine, so long as that play is individualized and purchasable. So long as that play is another form of our desire being channeled into goods.

Even more than that, what becomes a danger to capital is the reclamation of time. If you make things, if you share with others, if you live your life in such a way as to not be beholden to the notion of time, you might begin to think your time truly belongs to you, that it is not a limited resource, that everything belongs to us, and it’s not for sale.