The Artist’s Oppression - TAKE 1: The General Problem

“We have been oppressed as a group and we must overcome that oppression as a group.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

Let’s consider an unusual question: in what sense have artists, or creative individuals, been oppressed?  I’d like to consider this seriously—and mean no insult to groups that have been physically enslaved and exterminated.  

Because there is a truth here.  The artist experiences, in some sense, the “nobody-ness” that African Americans talk about—even if slighter and different in degree.  There certainly exists a high genetic or intransigent component in the creativity of a creative individual, and so they are known to suffer by an unchosen mechanism when they are cut off, either by their own doing or that of their environment, from their creative potential.  

This is frequently the case when creatives look out at the popular and economic world and find few places to fit in.  Let’s not pretend that there isn’t a real socio-economic difference between a person who finds fulfillment in business-sales, or on a personality basis, in carrying out dominant cultural trends and calculated social utility, versus an individual who cannot be said to live happily unless they are in some way challenging or exploring beyond what is formulaic, well-liked, and known.  

For it is more precisely this quality of character, rather than the mere fact that someone paints or writes or composes, that comprises what I mean by an artist.  This undergirds our intuition that many pop-artists are in some way less artists than they are popularity specialists.  A so-called “true artist” is expected to bring us in contact with the unclimbed height of the imagination and the forces of novel creation, and so the social order apprehends these individuals as generally best kept in a basement.  

Now of course there are exceptions, and there is the big exception, which is when one of these confusing oddballs strikes a shooting-star homerun, maybe once a decade, and produces a novel or film or painting so striking that it simultaneously delivers an inconceivably new experience, and is so seamlessly powerful that it moves the social order onto the new highway it has paved.  

And no one needs to be told that this lucky acceptance onto the stage happens only some of the time.  Oftentimes we hear of an artist or composer or poet who hit homeruns their whole life and died impoverished, often unknown, often by suicide.  

Something has to be made of this.  Something has to be grasped.  What do we take our artists to be?  The same old retiree who spends his idle hours enjoying Van Gogh, Thoreau, and Wilde frowns at the youth who chose to pursue the arts in lieu of a practical occupation.  He really wishes they would get their act together.  So I ask again: what do we take our artists to be?  Do we believe that the popular eye, the hand of the market, the demand of the people will unerringly dredge out the great artists when it is precisely the great artists who the popular eye does not even see and the hand of the market cannot touch?  

The other most common exception is that an artist has a unique blend of character traits: they exercise a flair for social and popular games as well as for creativity.  We might here picture a J.K. Rowling or a Bob Dylan—genuinely imaginative social icons.  But what of the artists who simply do not take the same interest in popular elements, or who value a brand of complexity or condensation or abstraction that renders their work “difficult”—perhaps a James Joyce or an Immanuel Kant?  What do we make of these people?  What place do we have for them?  

This is a difficult question.  On the one hand there must exist some obligation for artists, as exists for all individuals, to pursue social utility.  On the other hand, there are two points to make.  1.) A colossal gap must be noticed that separates those artists who are lucky enough, or popularly gifted enough to succeed economically, and those who are as good and produce valuable work that may be as popularly oriented but are totally uncompensated.  Often this is because they are only great artists, but we demand that they also be great advertisers and sales-people if they are to survive.  Our de facto belief is that Picasso and Nietzsche and Keats ought to starve until they manage to recruit a faithful audience.  We might tell them to get real jobs and play with their hobbies in their spare time.  

I am asking us.  What do we believe?  Can we be both the person who values these great artists in some abstract sense, after they have gained the fortune of approval, and the person who implicitly says that artists deserve nothing?  

2.) We must notice that the artists say the price of a home-run is something like hitting 95% of pitches backwards.  The magnificent final product is the result of allowing chaos and non-utility to enter the process.  It is difficult for a non-artist to understand how sitting in front of a blank page or canvas, not moving a hand for three hours, may be the most productive work an artist does in a day.  It is difficult to explain why the masterpiece required the artist to first fall in and out of love with a foreign woman.  These processes do not align with the graphs of common sense and honest labor.  

In this understanding, the real work of art frequently has no progress markers and frequently looks identical to failure and idiocy.  And if this is the cost of perfect products, then why does it go unpaid?

We’re getting close to the core here.  What is the worth of an art product if it goes relatively unseen?  This is a difficult question.  It seems akin to asking about the purpose of monks meditating or praying in private.  

The artist exists as an unacknowledged spiritual practitioner but has been mistaken for a manufacturer of saleable products.  There might yet exist a cloister for artists, or a special bill of rights, that somehow miraculously works.  We can clearly see why the fraternization or organization of artists has been so rare: it is in their nature to exceed structure.  But it has happened and perhaps can happen now on a scale that it never has before.  

Aaron Franke, 

(Textual Selector,

Library of Alexandria 2.0)

[Take 2 upcoming: The Unpopular Artist]