Where Do I Sell Out?

[angela_n_hunt]

*jumps on soap box*

Over at coppervale's blog, he posts a very important link and essay on the nature of Selling Out.

He's far more polite and measured than I am on the subject. I'm not lukewarm on the concept of receiving money for my art.

As I said in reply over there:

This made my blood boil.

Gods forbid we should feed our families with our art! Gods forbid we should actually be recompensed for our labor and our artistic intelligence! Gods forbid we should have the damned temerity or arrogance to believe that we deserve to be remunerated for our contributions!

GAH!

Oh no. We should struggle and labor in obscurity because then our art is "pure!"

Bite me, you Bastard Art Elite Intelligentsia Jerkoffs.

I live and pray for the day that I can "sell out". So I can actually spend my days doing what actually matters to me, rather than pushing paper and answering phones. Having a dayjob doesn't make my damn Art pure or higher or anything. It just makes it art.

*stabbystabbystabbystabbitystab*

:edit:

The Haters and Impatient Ones can go and soak their heads. You and I have more important things to do.

:end edit:


Those are the salient points I wanted to call out here.

I could rant for days, truth to tell. This is one of the things that pisses me off like the proverbial bull seeing the red cape. Very few things can provoke me to angry tears, faster. No one ever says an accountant should work for free. No one *ever* suggests that I should prepare their taxes for a thank you.

Yet, over and over again, people think it perfectly reasonable that I should shoot or write for nothing or for a pittance, even if the work is commissioned.

Guess what? Michaelangelo and DaVinci got *paid*. Shakespeare got *paid*. Mucha got *paid*. Charles Dickens got *paid*. Orson Wells got *paid*. Avedon got *paid*. Annie Liebowitz gets *paid*.

So here's my challenge to the World. If you see some art that you love or that moved you or made your day a better day? Pay for it, damn it. Even if it's a dollar. Without art, the World is a horrible, gray place. It doesn't sing, it doesn't dress itself in color, it doesn't mark itself down for the ages. We can't help but make it in the throes of love or the depths of despair. It is often our voice or vision of hope when we feel we have none or our record of the horrors that we have witnessed.

It has value.

Pay for it.

*jumps off soap box*

Comments

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the rich 'art for art's sake' crowd. Always fun to watch. They really _dont' get it_.

[angela-n-hunt.livejournal.com]

They really don't.

*sigh*

I'm off to make art at them, to flip them off.

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

Kelly and I made "art" yesterday.

Schwarzwalder kirschtorte.

It was good, and well-appreciated.

[angela-n-hunt.livejournal.com]

Right on.

I just keep forgetting that ultimately, for me at least, art is an act of defiance.

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

That's where we differ. At least in my cooking, art is a gift that I choose to give. If I get paid for it too, well, that just severely sucks, now doesn't it.

It took me a loooong time to work that one out. One interesting clue that I completely missed for the longest time was that I cook much better/more interesting food for an appreciative audience. For myself, I'll often just knock out something simple and quick. For others, I'll do quite a bit.

My other "art"...photography, painting, drawing, etc. was always a gift I gave myself. The only person who really had to love it was me. Nobody else.

Defiance? Hell, hon, I've been running my own businesses for 20+ years now. If that isn't defiance, I don't know what is.

[angela-n-hunt.livejournal.com]

And you make my point for me. Your businesses are your moneymaker. It's all about defiance.

[argentla.livejournal.com]

I worked for six and a half years for a company that paid me well under the market rate for my title and responsibility, creating comic book projects. When they fired me, they stripped me of any credit in all but one of the published books, some of which I created and shepherded from beginning to end. I was left with nothing to show for any of it, and my former boss lists himself as the creator (which makes me very angry; I signed over rights to the company, which to me is very different than him personally claiming authorship, particularly since it's a publicly traded company).

Anybody who doesn't support my right to own and profit by my own work can bite my shiny metal ass.

[angela-n-hunt.livejournal.com]

Amen!

This happened to me too, in working with an indie filmmaker "auteur". I got paid nothing and he took credit for everything. I don't even have reels of the seven films I worked on, though most days I'm glad of that.

[stacymckenna.livejournal.com]

My understanding of the phrase "sell out" has always meant compromising your art for the sake of the paycheck. There is a huge difference between being paid for your work (like selling your prints) and "selling out" a piece of work that will be severely modified before being marketed on a grand scale (comic books turned into films are a big one recently).

I totally don't understand anyone's objecting to selling your artwork. I know many artists willing to work by salary or commission creating "art on order", which in my mind always qualifies more on the craft end than personally driven art (though there are occasional inspirations, I understand). I know many artists who would refuse to "sell out" when it comes to those piece most personally meaningful to them.

[angela-n-hunt.livejournal.com]

The accusation in question was very specific.

I have plenty of art that I won't sell. Personal art pieces. But ask me to paint/write/make you a print/copy for a reasonable fee and my happy ass will be painting/writing/printing as soon as you make a deposit.

That doesn't make me a sell out. That makes me a responsible parent and adult.

[stacymckenna.livejournal.com]

Working commissions and selling out are entirely different categories.

[angela-n-hunt.livejournal.com]

There are people out there who would insist that taking a commission is the very definition of selling out. That's the bullshit that's being flung right now. Or, in the case I'm pointing to here, the decision to do the paying work first before the personal work was being pointed to as selling out.

Which, again, is bullshit.

[op-lattethunder.livejournal.com]

[angela-n-hunt.livejournal.com]

HA!

I love you.

selling: in, out, shake it all about

[(Anonymous)]

I *love* how you physicalize language. It's not just that I can see you, with a nasty blood-guttered dirk, going stabbystabbystabbystabbitystab; I can see the sweat fly as you roar, feel the gust of breath as you say GAH!, hear the thumping with each repetition of the word "paid" ... wow! Makes me wave my fists and cheer.

I used to be a self-infatuated poet manquee, when the world was young and I still thought ivory towers had good answers. I don't know why I thought writing as a starving intellectual was more valuable than writing for decent money. Much later, I was a tech writer, which could easily be considered selling out. It turned out to be a sort of advanced apprenticeship for me, and the highly specific craft taught me a degree of control I couldn't have imagined.

Those pseudo intellectuals are smothered by their own judgments, and then wonder why life seems so airless, why they always feel blue. I guess I speak from experience. Humbling thought!