Most people have no idea what it takes to make good art, whether it’s music, film, painting or anything else. They don’t know how much training and study has gone into building the artist’s skills, and how much practice of that skill it took to allow them to make something, especially if it’s great. A lot of people take it for granted.

Most artists have other jobs that sustains their artistic habit. But time is a finite resource. The more time you spend at another job, the less time you have for practicing, studying, marketing and, most importantly, Making your work. The less time you have to make work, the less income you could possibly make from it. The less you make from it, the more likely you’ll continue to work in another job, keeping you further from practicing, studying and making. Over the course of 10 years, working another job that keeps you from practicing your art will keep you from becoming great at it. (This doesn’t even take into account when you reach a time in your life where you might want to have kids.)

This is a vicious cycle, a catch-22.
This is why I believe many successful artists got in most of their 10,000 hours of training before they left home and had to start paying rent.

This misunderstanding about the time and skills required to make art makes the audience less likely to pay for it. (So does how relevant they think it is to their own lives, but that’s a whole other story.)

As new technology has taken hold, many of the middle-men who used to be the ones asking for the audience’s money (publishers, record labels, magazines, promoters, distributors, stores, studios) are disappearing. The artist is the one who’s now asking for money to live from, and some of the audience isn’t used to it, and doesn’t like it. It doesn’t help that as distribution becomes cheaper and cheaper, internet culture at large wants everything for free.

Amanda Palmer, artist best known as the lead of The Dresden Dolls, says:

artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art.
artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye.
artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks…
dead serious: this is the way shit is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it…

it’s also not a matter of whether an artist is starving or cruising on a yacht.
i would hate to see my fans turn on me once i actually have money in the bank with a “well, i would support you if you were starving, but now that you’re eating, no way.”
fuck that…
feel ok about giving your money directly to paul mccartney. he may be rich, but he still rocks. show you care.
feel ok about giving it to fucking lady gaga if you’ve been guiltily downloading her dance tracks for free.
rejoice in the fact that you are directly responsible for several threads in her new spandex spacesuit.
it shouldn’t matter.
it’s about empowerment and it’s about SIMPLICITY: fan loves art, artist needs money, fan gives artist money, artist says thank you.

She is experimenting with ways to make a living, from paid live video to auctioning her artwork. What are other new ways artists are making a living from their work?
Do you feel ok helping to pay their rent?

Read the entire post from Amanda Palmer – Why I Am Not Afraid To Take Your Money

Get the work of Amanda Palmer.

Everybody’s Gotta Live, from Who Killed Amanda Palmer

Related posts:

1. Thank you Richard Florida for giving The Bohemians so much power. Now please tell us – when will we ever benefit from it?

Richard Florida’s latest book, Who’s Your City?, has a lot of interesting ideas. It is a continuation of his work which started with the often quoted, celebrated and vilified Rise of the Creative Class.

In essence, the original book argues that economic greatness in any given place depends on the place’s ability to attract creative people. Creative people like openness, night life, authentic culture and great aesthetics (interesting architecture and grand natural beauty). At the time the original book came out, cities were not focused on these things. Instead they were erecting bigger shopping malls.

To Richard Florida’s credit, ever since the release of Rise of the Creative Class, there has been a big discussion about the quality of life in the places we live, and that this quality does not come from shopping and big business. I think this is true for whatever your passion is, and whatever you do for a living. This is a good discussion to have.

But I have always felt some nagging problem with his approach that I couldn’t quite pull into focus. There seems to be some things that are missing in his big equations. After reading Who’s Your City?, I finally started seeing what they were.

Who’s Your City? shows, through extensive research, that despite first impressions of the global economy, where you live is very important to your happiness and well being. This is a simple idea that seems like common sense. The details springing from this premise are more surprising.

The world has spiky places which are, like ever-growing magnets, attracting more and more creative, innovative people and capital into themselves. This means places like New York City, London, Tokyo and Paris will continue to suck in innovation and capital exponentially, and thus have larger engines to create even more innovation and capital. This also leads to most places outside of these spiky regions to specialize in various industries. Basic examples that you may be familiar with – if you want to be an actor, your chances for making a living at it are very slim unless you are in New York or Los Angeles. If you’re a technology innovator or developer, your greatest success would be found in the San Francisco or Boston areas. There is a lot of interesting detail in this, and if you want to learn more about it I recommend you read the book.

Now for a short break to watch Richard Florida’s appearance on The Colbert Report, because Stephen Colbert sums it up best.

The Gay-Bohemian Index mentioned by Mr. Colbert (“Which may sound like another name for the San Francisco phone book”), which supports some of Florida’s work, sounds like a great endowment of power handed down to anyone who is bohemian, artistic or gay. But in fact, this power to indicate or create new magnetic, economic engines usually benefits people besides the creators, and besides the businesses and families that long lived in the neighborhood before them. Who’s Your City? says

Albert Ratner, cochairman of the board at Forest City Enterprises, one of the biggest real estate companies in the world, likes to remind me that he alone has promoted The Rise of the Creative Class enough to secure its spot on the bestseller list. Another real estate investor once said of my work, “You have provided a map of where to invest.”

Anyone who has lived in a medium sized or larger city for any period of time recognizes a familiar pattern.

A neighborhood is a thriving community. Some type of economic hardship or shift happens in the city, and many neighborhood residents move away quickly. This leaves less sense of community and neighborhood, and as eyes on the street dwindle, crime can rise. At some point, the neighborhood is a shadow of itself, rents are cheap, but the authentic architecture and feeling of community still resonates. So artists and other creative people, who don’t have much money but have a need for space to create in, move to the neighborhood. This creates energy, public artwork (sanctioned or not), new venues to show or perform, and basic renovations. This energy, creativity and center of cultural amenities attracts more people from outside the area to visit and eventually move to. As more people move in, natural supply and demand occurs, causing rent and purchase prices to rise. Larger investors and realtors take note, seeing an opportunity to begin at the ground level, building new condos and luxury apartments. At some point, housing prices become out of reach for the families and businesses that have long been in the neighborhood, and for the artists and bohemians that sparked the neighborhood’s revitalization. They move on to the next neighborhood, or the next city, where the cycle starts again.

King of the Hill covered this in an entire episode, Lady and Gentrification.

Though Richard Florida now speaks to this issue – that a spiky region’s great success often leaves behind a large swath of the population – he doesn’t give it the gravity it deserves. Economic disparities can affect anyone in a region, but the irony is that the families, businesses, non-profits, artists and others who lead the front line of a neighborhood’s revitalization are often the first people to be kicked out by exorbitant housing prices when the fruit of their creative efforts finally appear. The very people that Florida claims are so important to an area’s success often have to move out of the area once that success arrives.

This also applies to businesses that help define an area, and more importantly non-profits. Non-profits find cheap commercial space to grow in, and help a community become a better place. But right when that better arrives, real estate investors buy up the historic building the non-profit lived in, raises their rent by 300%, and off they go to find a new home or shut down completely. This happens time and time again.

So Mr. Florida, how can the people who create so much value, so much aesthetic, creative energy and economic growth benefit from their investments of creativity, and stay where they live to continue helping their neighborhoods and cities grow? Or is it ok that this investment of time, effort, love and creativity in the end only benefits real estate developers and chain restaurants?

Who’s Your City? comes close to diving into this issue. When I read this part of the book, I was on the edge of my seat.

Escalating real estate prices can inhibit innovation. Many forms of innovative and creative activity – whether they are new high-tech businesses, art galleries, or musical groups – require the same thing: cheap space. That’s what Jane Jacobs was getting at when she famously wrote: “New ideas require old buildings.” These spaces, formerly abundant in places like Silicon Valley, San Diego, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and downtown New York City, are where everyone from Steve Jobs to Bob Dylan got their start. Cheap space in these towns is now hard to come by. Several Silicon Valley garages that witnesses high-tech start-ups in the 1990s have been turned into museums. When housing prices rise and buildings are converted into expensive condos or high-end retail shops, venues for fostering creativity disappear…

…They’re forced to move from apartment to apartment as their rentals turn into condos. When creative, productive regions become the province of affluent people who have already made their money (usually elsewhere), the cycle of local wealth building falls apart. At that point, Jacobs once presciently told me, “When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”

I have read this section to many friends because it strikes a chord with what we are living with every day. Condos are springing up like ivy, and fewer and fewer people can afford to live here anymore. Or they feel the place is losing it’s vitality and authenticity, as art cars become scarce and BMW’s are more prominent.

Even BMW knows its place in this equation. In this campaign, they appeal to the Creative Class (by name). The thing is most of this class could never afford a BMW, nor could the many other people in the city who help make it tick. This campaign is really aimed at the 2nd wave, wishing to benefit from what the others built.

In the end, what’s left out of these theories, for individuals and communities, is all the stuff that isn’t about money. Regional economic growth and might are the big measurements of success in the creative class model. But how does the majority of the population benefit? Are their lives better? Are they happier and more fulfilled? In many studies, Denmark is often cited as the happiest place on Earth. They are certainly not the biggest economic engine.

And what of human zugunruhe, the desire to move on, and experience something new? What explains some people’s strong desire to quit well paying jobs, giving up money and comfort, to take up teaching, social work or long term travel? It’s definitely not Economics.

This strong human drive for betterment, growth, new experience and beauty is the thing left out of these extensive studies, which ironically focus on the very people who revere these aspects of life most. The reason bohemians mostly do not profit from their action is that profit is not the point. It is instead small accumulating betterment of their own lives and the community around them. This is no different than other people who live in and care about a place. It’s only when other people arrive to try and transform that creativity into profit, causing displacement for the people who were there all along, that an Economic Flag shows up in the study, noting a success, a spiky place.

Why should the benefit and success be measured only when money is made?

Ultimately, it’s much less important what we measure than what we do. Maybe the earlier question should not be directed at Richard Florida at all.

So- bohemians, artists, gays, how can you, who create so much value, so much aesthetic, creative energy and economic growth, benefit from your own investments of creativity, and stay where you live to continue helping your neighborhoods and cities grow? Or is it ok that your investment of time, effort, love and creativity in the end only benefits real estate developers and chain restaurants?

buy the books of Richard Florida

read Richard Florida’s Blog.

Related posts:

1. I Want to be Richard Dedomenici
2. Across the Universe, The Power of Myth, 1967
3. Tekkon Kinkreet – Universally, Land Developers are Seen as Villains

Last week, David Byrne interviewed Thom Yorke of Radiohead for Wired, about their battle with record companies and their ultimate decision to produce and distribute their own music. This was punctuated a few months ago by releasing their latest album, In Rainbows, through their own site, and allowed fans to name their own price for the album. In the interview I am particularly happy with Thom Yorke’s invocation of the book No Logo by Naomi Klein.

At the same time, David Byrne wrote an amazing piece about being a musician in the digital world. As someone who has owned his own label and been a musician himself under different levels of label control, he has perspective to see the good and bad from all the types of musical situations available. This piece is the most concise and informative I’ve seen on the music business. If you are a musician it is a great read. The only option I think he leaves out are services like TuneCore, who allow you to place music on iTunes and other digital services with no withholding whatsoever. You just pay the hosting fee per year and per song (not very much) and they get you on the music stores.

Read: The music industry article for musicians by David Byrne or
David Byrne’s interview with Thom Yorke

Buy work by Radiohead, Thom Yorke or David Byrne (and Talking Heads).

Get No Logo by Naomi Klein.

Related posts:

1. David Byrne’s Perfect City
2. Plastic Records, Italy
3. David Hockney’s Advice for iPhone Painting

I’ve noticed for quite some time that most media web sites and newspapers do not have an Arts section. The closest you find is Entertainment. The meaning of these two is of course very different, not because art can’t be entertaining, it can be. But art often has more purpose to it than that. By sticking only to “Entertainment,” the media avoids discussion of any of the other reasons for art, or the cultural criticisms it might be presenting. It takes the easy route, sticking to celebrity gossip and celebrity fashion, and not a bigger cultural context, or inclusion of any artwork whose main purpose may be something other than Entertaining.

If your TV station or newspaper covers only Entertainment and not the Arts, write them and ask why, and ask them to change it (not just the name of the section, but what they cover.)

Some examples of “Entertainment” and no “Arts”:

• Google News
• ABC News
• CBS News
• NBC News
• BBC News
• CNN
• Chicago Sun Times
• San Francisco Gate
• Seattle Times

Some great papers that still have an Arts section:

• The New York Times
• The Los Angeles Times
• The London Times
• The Washington Post

Related posts:

1. If You Get Points, Is It Art?
2. Artist Astronauts, Artist Cosmonauts, Artists in Space
3. A New Wave for Japanese Art

The current issue of Wired is all about manga – how the industry works and how it conquered America.

Two stories:

• (pdf) How Manga Conquered the U.S., a Graphic Guide to Japan’s Coolest Export, the story of Manga in the US told using Manga.
• Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex

Read some manga and learn how to draw it in these books, and a favorite from my childhood.

Take a a trip to Japan, it’s beautiful.

Related posts:

1. Haikyo (廃墟写真, Haikyo Shashin) – Japan Photography of Ruins
2. Paintings from Living Rice – Inakadate, Japan
3. Momus – The Norwegian, the Scotsman and the Japanese

The other day, though not in the rest of the post, I linked to the New York Times story discussing that the studio had tested their own cut of Across the Universe without Julie Taymor’s knowledge. I don’t know how that turned out, but it must be mostly ok because her name is still on the film.

Most director contracts do not include right of final cut. Their only final resolution if they are unhappy with a cut the studio has created is to remove their name from the film. When this happens, in the past the film was credited as “directed by Alan Smithee.” As of 1997, the pseudonym changes from film to film. If a film isn’t complete, the studio can replace the director and the new name appears on the film, even when the first director may have originated the concepts and their work may be in the film.

Later, if rights to the film change, or a director gets more clout, a Director’s Cut might be released to theaters or DVD. Sometimes though even these Director’s Cuts are not the work of the original director.

Some directors, like Ridley Scott with Blade Runner, have worked most of their careers to get their cut of a film finally made.

Read more about director’s cut, Alan Smithee and a list of films recut by studios.

Buy films mired in artistic miasma:
Directed by Alan Smithee, Dune, Superman II, Poltergeist, American History X, and Blade Runner. Also check out An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, a movie premised on Alan Smithee starring Eric Idle.

Related posts:

1. Across the Universe, The Power of Myth, 1967

Negativland is a group that creates mash-ups of existing music, sound and video. They have been sued for this, but believe firmly that art belongs to society. They are releasing a compilation of their work, Our Favorite Things, which properly has been mashed up yet again by other artists. They started doing this pre-YouTube and pre-filesharing lawsuits. Adding to yesterday’s post, this is more to show what can be done once work hits the public domain and can be mixed, used and cut up to make something new. (Though Negativland doesn’t wait for the public domain to kick in.)

Read about Our Favorite Things in Wired.

Buy work by Negativland.

Related posts:

1. Japan Ink – Inside the Manga-Industrial Complex

In the late ’80s, Czechoslovakia became a democratic state, and in 1993 peacefully separated into two countries – the Czech Republic and Slovakia. With democracy came capitalism and advertising, and with capitalism and advertising came The Hypermarket. Hypermarkets are the world’s superstores, selling shoes and spinach, pipe wrenches and pumpkins, all you would need to buy under one roof. Compared to the scarcity of goods in the pre-capitalist Czechoslovakia, this abundance was a big change.

Just like people in other countries had become critical of rampant consumerism and advertising eroding their culture, many Czechs felt the same way.

Two filmmakers created a fake advertising campaign, including radio, tv, sales flyers, posters and a web site, to promote the new hypermarket named Czech Dream – Cesky Sen. They announced a location and an opening day; built a huge fake storefront in a field, made of a tarp and scaffolding; and 3,000 people showed up. They filmed the whole thing, from inception, ad design, recording the theme song, filming the commercials, to the day 3,000 people standing in front of them found out they had been lied to.

The film is well made, but like many odd art events, the real art happened in the field that morning with those 3,000 people. The film just documents creating that art.

Controversy about the film and the ad campaign stretched all the way to the Czech Parliament and Prime Minister. Government arts funding had been used to make the film (and the fake ad campaigns), which outraged a lot of people. Supporters of the film argued this was no different than the government’s expenses for the huge “join the European Union” ad campaign. Both were advertising an ideology, it was better to also show a contrary view. (Joining the European Union, because of easier trade with other EU nations, was thought by many Czechs to be a huge unwanted step towards materialism and consumerism.)

Like Adbusters, The Yes Men, and some Michael Moore films, the artists set up circumstances that most clearly show the point they want to make. The set up is what usually gets people really riled up, because people feel manipulated, and the films no longer retain an illusion of neutrality. (Documentaries are rarely neutral. How up front a film is about its bias varies.) They’re big, social, political practical jokes.

Lessons of the film: 1. Advertising is bad. 2. Buying things won’t make you happy. 3. Standing outside in a field on a sunny day is much better than going to a mall.

Buy something about anti-consumerism:
Czech Dream (US DVD release date December 4, 2007)
Words by Adbusters and founder Kalle Lasn
Work by Michael Moore

Any decent rockstar by nature is sexual and rebellious in one way or another. By nature this flies in the face of people who, for example, own tv or internet companies, or are heads of government big and small, and want to keep things nice and normal and non-rebellious. There is a history of censorship in all parts of the world. In some places it’s considered typical. Whatever you think of this in other cultures, the people and government of the United States pronounce boldly that Freedom of Speech is one of the things that sets it apart. But here too there is a long history of censorship that stretches up to this week, with AT&T’s censorship of a live Pearl Jam concert webcast. Censorship happens for all kinds of reasons — sexual, political, religious, financial. Here are a wide swath of examples.

One of the first was Elvis, filmed from the waist up by the Ed Sullivan show because we certainly couldn’t handle his gyrating hips.

Ed Sullivan strikes again, having The Rolling Stones sing “Let’s Spend Some Time Together”.

Which was much later parodied on The Simpsons with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

A lot of time passes with other incidents of censorship of many kinds, through The Summer of Love, the Vietnam War, the punk movement of the 70’s, and we hit upon Madonna, who has made a career of doing things to push people’s buttons. The Pepsi commercial she films is shown only once because of the controversy surrounding the catholic overtones in the video for Like A Prayer.

Years after this, Erotica is banned by MTV because it is too, well, erotic. Or maybe just odd.

and we come to the start of the Iraq War and the Dixie Chicks, who received death threats from their comments at a concert, and later turned this into a feature film documentary.

And this week, Pearl Jam makes similarly hot political lyric swaps during a live webcast, which is censored in the live feed by AT&T (or one of their contractors). I’m honestly not a big fan of Pearl Jam’s music (they are one of the first to popularize the Yarling vocal style, which to me sounds pretty terrible). As people though they seem to stand up for what they feel is right, such as their long fight with Ticketmaster (a topic for another post).

It’s probably no surprise that I believe in freedom of expression. But there is a long history of this kind of censorship, throughout the history of rock, and even before it with Swing, or Kurt Weill in pre-WWII Germany. Each time it happens, people seem to react with shock and surprise, like it’s the first time all over again. Then again I also think it’s strange that people in power (whether corporate, media, family or government) are still shocked by what rockstars do on stage. Elvis’s hips, Madonna’s religion, Janet Jackson’s breast, Pearl Jam’s two changed lyrics. Somehow with all that’s going on in the world, these simple acts are still taboo.

Get Pearl Jam, Elvis, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Simpsons, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Madonna, The Dixie Chicks or Kurt Weill.

Related posts:

1. Kurt Vonnegut’s Letters Home After Release from Nazi Prison

For the past few months, 12 7-Elevens in the United States were converted to real life Kwik-E-Marts, the very 7-Eleven-like stores featured in The Simpsons. The 12 stores have outsides changed to Kwik-E-Mart logos and colors, staff inside wears Kwik-E-Mart shirts, and the store sells Squishees, Buzz Cola, Krusty-O’s and pink doughnuts.

Before this actually happened, I always felt 7-Eleven was a pretty buttoned down corporation. I could imagine them replying to this with “we wouldn’t want to dilute our brand.” It’s nice that they didn’t.

To turn this into great installation art instead of purely an adventurous marketing scheme, they could have used less “The Simpsons” logos plastered everywhere, and just let the store be as it is in the show, covert and subtle. Of course, making installation art wasn’t the purpose, it was just a side effect. The marketing part worked like a charm though: stores converted to Kwik-E-Marts doubled their sales.

Another aspect of this marketing experiment is that some Arab and Indian owners and employees are offended by the Apu stereotype, and feel it goes too far, regardless of their increased sales. This is an understandable viewpoint. But beyond the surface stereotypes, Apu has been the focus of many shows all on his own, and beyond the surface, he is actually a smart, complex, interesting character. The same goes for many of the other stereotypical characters on the show (Flanders immediately comes to mind). They are initially shown the way many people expect, but over time these expectations are turned on their heads, to reveal them as individuals, beyond the stereotypes.

That debate will go on, as it should. Either way, like Cinderella at midnight, the Kwik-E-Marts turn back to normal 7-Elevens after July 31st.

Get The Simpsons DVDs

Right now, within a 10 block radius of my apartment, there are about 15 condo projects going up. The average price for a condo is about $350,000, double what the average person in the city could afford. Yet they keep rising from the ground, many times taking down or absorbing perfectly good apartment buildings before they begin. The affordable housing disappears, along with the neighborhood character that took 50 years or more to build. That character, which is made up of the people who have lived there for so long, the aesthetics of buildings and the neighborhood businesses who have long done business there, is the most irreplaceable.

Here and in other cities, when developers show up and convince the government that money will be made, that character is quickly forgotten. Whole swaths of neighborhoods are demolished, and new ones are erected in their place. It feels the developers are from somewhere else, and have no notion or respect of what this place is. They seem only interested in making more money.

In Tekkonkinkreet, Treasure Town is a neighborhood which is far from perfect. It’s old and crumbling and full of crime. But even the old villains, the Japanese mafia, at least understand the nature of the place, they are of the neighborhood and respect it.

The main characters of the story are two kids, brothers, named Kuro (Black) and Shiro (White). The kids are homeless and live in an abandoned car. As the older brother grows up in this broken down place, he has to choose between becoming good or bad (Black or White) in order to protect the neighborhood from being torn down by land developers. The land developers, not the mafia, are the big villains. As he makes his choices, he has to leave his little brother behind.

The movie goes into some deep dark places for the older Kuro, but even more so for the little brother. Watching a kid go through so much trauma when he doesn’t understand what’s going on is very sad.

What Kuro and Shiro face is not that different from what Luke faces in Star Wars, it is a classic myth. How do you protect what’s important to you from bad people and bad circumstance without becoming bad yourself? In the darkest circumstances, the choices you face are even harsher. In the real world, unlike a fantasy of outer space, the choices have consequences, for those people you love, and for yourself. Tekkonkinkreet doesn’t provide rosy answers. That’s why it’s such a great film.

Things always change. Buildings and people come and go. But from Anime to Bollywood to 70’s rollerskating movies, what turns developers into villains is not a fear of change, but the sense that things are changing without regard to a greater good, without regard to the whole, change whose purpose is solely personal gain.

The repercussions of that kind of change is now fueling lots of art in many parts of the world.

Get Tekkon Kinkreet

Related posts:

1. Thank you Richard Florida for giving The Bohemians so much power. Now please tell us – when will we ever benefit from it?