I’m reasonably sure that being an artist is as much a “paying job” as is being an author – only the very top 1-5% I think can expect to make big money out of selling their creations, about the top 10% can reasonably expect to quit their jobs to do it full time and make a living off it – and the rest of us just do it to augment our incomes, or for a hobby. We live in hope.
Artists (like authors) have always been historically poor, relying on sponsors and patrons for incomes – although unlike authors, artist’s work used to be only really ever worth anything after their deaths.
Look up famous artists who died poor and you will see what I mean: Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Vincent van Gogh, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin to name just a few. If they were alive today, they could be millionaires – even billionaires from their art, right? Hmmm. I’m not so sure, and for lots of different reasons.
One, being alive, their past works would probably be worth less because they wouldn’t be exclusive anymore. Two, if they’d only just started painting more recently, they’d be in the same boat as all their modern contemporaries… resoundingly humped and at the mercy of a jaded, for-profit and annoyingly elitist industry.
Commercial art – unlike art for pleasure or aesthetic beauty, is a different story – people are paid to create advertising images, these days with software, and they work for salaries in the IT/design departments of PR/advertising firms. Even they are turning to using AI generated images in their marketing campaigns. And why not? It’s faster, cheaper and easier. The person wanting the image for whatever reason gets to have close to full control over what the final product looks like, rather than having to describe their vision to an artist – who will take much longer to back-and-forth “do you like this? No? What changes need to be made?” and back to the drawing board/easel/mouse etc.
In contrast to all the mainstream versions of art and the art industry, Graffiti and “street art” has long existed on the fringes of the so-called “respectable” art world – and is also often regarded as vandalism and therefore a criminal act. It has also, consequently, very rarely resulted in payment to the artist. Graffiti artists like Banksy (who is anonymous so nobody knows who they are or if they have a real job to fund their exciting and edgy lifestyle) can transform a run-down building from being worthless to being worth millions more just because it is decorated with his work. A video recently circulated on YouTube showing a man stealing a STOP sign in London that had been painted on by Banksy – presumable so he could sell it somewhere on the black market – which is probably the only place there the thief could sell it without drawing attention to himself.
I’m pretty sure most of the artists complaining about AI image generation being made available to everyone (what was actually meant by leveling the playing field) aren’t the ones who actually earn big bucks from their art anyway – and they’re not “Banksy’s” either, but probably wish they were. Not that Banksy actually profits from the sale of their work in the least – so that’s also something to bear in mind as a case in point. They risk legal penalties if they are caught for their love of art and “making statements” – without benefiting from it personally in a financial sense.
When I think of “artists” I think of sandal-wearing, impoverished, long-haired dread-lock wearing hippies with paint under their fingernails, who speak incoherently, haven’t slept in days, drink way too much coffee, who are chilled out and just get on with their craft – not profit-motivated suits with corporate 2-dimensional souls out looking to make big bucks out of the image of whatever they slapped together with Photoshop or another image creation software to punt on DeviantArt for $$$.
Art for sale is a commodity – if you make art for the love of it, fine – but as soon as you make art TO SELL it, you’re entering the commercial sector and the resulting art becomes a PRODUCT and the artist becomes an entrepreneur in a free market economy. Complaining about competition in a free market system makes little sense – except in the sense of trying to kill off all competition – something which is still regarded as “dirty tricks” and underhanded practices.
Authors have it tough too – especially indies. There are THOUSANDS of us (if not actually a few million) and the market is so swamped with competition, it’s essentially dead. I’m pretty sure it’s even tougher for anyone out there who wants to make a career of being an artist.
Why? Because unlike writing, which has publishers to scout new talent and peddle its wares – and a bookshop in every mall around the world, the industry also allows an indie lane (as if it has any choice in the matter) where indie authors can do it all themselves.
Where do artists sell their work? At markets in the park? Sure, people will admire it, ask questions, pick it up and compare it to the one next to it, but will they be willing to fork over hundreds of Rands for it? Thousands? Get outta town! How about door to door? Lugging pictures or paintings? Aside from the logistics of that proposition, most people these days expect two things when their doorbell rings: a beggar looking for booze money, or a scammer looking to fleece them in some way. Door to door? Yeah – ask the Jehovah’s Witnesses how well that goes and then get back to me.
The most practical for an indie artist to sell their wares is online of course – but unlike authors, they do so without the aid of actual publishers. Does Amazon sell art? I doubt it. And to sell to the well-to-do (a.k.a. leeches and parasites at the “top” of this joke we call “society”) you need to place your art in a gallery – but not just any old gallery, a reputable, top-notch gallery… and THEY only deal with artists who have pieces of paper that allegedly proclaim they have artistic talent or worth and have fancy-pants art-critic reviews attached to vouch for them.
I once dated an artist for a brief time during the 2010s – and after DECADES of struggling to get noticed for her art (while rooming with friends who supported her art habit). Last I heard, she finally got her “big break” – a commission to create an A0 sized painting for display in a local hotel lobby, for “Mr & Mrs Smith” to yawn at while checking in or checking out. That’s not exactly what I’d describe as a “big break”, but then I’m a writer not an artist. Is R3000 enough for a one-off painting that takes anything up to six months of planning, agonizing over, materials and labor? Have you seen the cost of art supplies and materials these days?! *Shrugs*. Perhaps I’m just being a cynic, but if I were to compare that to being offered R3000 by a publisher for exclusive rights to any one of my books, well… I’d tell them flat-out where to jam it.
These days anyone can publish their own book, that’s true enough – regardless of quality. Likewise, anyone can call themselves an author – absolutely ANYONE. Again, delving into my interesting past, I once knew a woman who was a colleague of my mothers – someone who developed a very swollen head because at one point during the 1990s she had allegedly received a contract with a local publisher for her children’s book. She was going to quit her job to focus on “the important things in life” i.e. writing more kiddies books, attending book signings and TV interviews – pretty much what every author daydreams about. Uhuh. *Scratches my head trying to remember when last a kiddie’s book author received that kind of attention* Enid Blyton maybe? Seventy or eighty years ago? Today I can’t even remember her name – which is a pretty good indicator of how all that turned out, sorry to say. I’ve no idea what became of her at all.
See, not even the author business works out the way people think it does. To further this point, if I wanted to provide another example of dashed hopes and unfulfilled dreams, I could just plonk myself down before you – like a rather unattractive still-life display in an art class. I’m 50 years old now and I’ve been at this writing lark since I could hold a wax crayon. Although I only started seriously pursuing the career of an indie author since 2005 or so, 19 years on, I’m still barely making any real headway. (There are a lot of reasons for this, and I went into them in detail in my book A Guide To Self-Publishing In South Africa, so I won’t here.) Yes I do earn something from my books, but at this point it’s still only pocket money – and I doubt I will ever be able to chuck my job and wave out the office door to my colleagues and laugh “Bye bye – I’m going home to be a full-time writer!”
No, I’ll only be able to do that the day I waltz out the door on my way to retirement!
Coming back to the similarities between the publishing and art worlds; like art works, books and stories produced by different individuals are equally unique and individual themselves. Yes, they could be utter garbage, but they could also be masterpieces in their own right – and either way, the author’s fate lies in the hands of the “mob” – financial failure or success is a matter of pot-luck.
Unlike the broader field for authors, not just anyone can be a successful money-making artist. The field is much, much narrower. Sure, you can paint, you can draw, you can etch a little… you can mix media and create beautiful breathtaking enrapturing works… but how would you fare in the industry? That’s the real test, isn’t it? Without references and qualifications? Without those bits of paper? Without access to the connections of the “art industry”? You see, talent is not enough. Sometimes it’s not even a prerequisite.
Have you seen half the trash produced by some of the “top artists” and what it sells for these days? A blank canvas entitled “Take the money and run”? (I’m sure there was some sort of irony at play there!) A series of colored stripes across a canvas? A canvas covered in one single solid color – or parody-like scribbles that wouldn’t look out of place in a kindergarten? And this sort of unadulterated tripe sells for vast sums of money – but is that really “art”? People say that as a standing joke – but IS it? Well, if it isn’t tragicomic, it certainly is bizarre.
Yet the poor guy begging on the street corner who has standard 3, doodling in his sketchbook, producing photo-quality images with the stubby end of an old pencil has more artistic talent in his pinkie finger than these people – but the system won’t touch him because he doesn’t have a university degree in fine art – he’s not “qualified” enough, or just “not the right sort of people”.
It’s like the Medieval system of guilds, you see. If you don’t meet our rancid list of expectations, then you’re not a member of our elite group and you’re not going to succeed. The whole shebang is an elitist rat’s nest of inequity, greed, unfairness and shady deals. It’s not hard to believe that this set of circumstances would cause artists to look around for someone to blame.
And then along came AI image generation. Chat GPT, Bing, Leonardo and a host of others – and many artists-for-profit instantly went totally berserk and dis-regulated all over Facebook. How dare they have competition?! Their favorite target, apparently, has been authors using AI generated images on their book covers – which (in spite of their witch-hunt) they can do for free and instantly – instead of paying artists-for-profit to whip something up in a few weeks or months, for varying amounts in cash. Riiiight.
It seems to me that the people focusing on AI image generation as “the death of art as a career choice” have missed the mark completely – art as a career appears to be far more stymied, undermined and bogged down – as it has been all along, literally for generations – but by the internal fuckery rampant within its own system far more than by the recent appearance of AI image generators. This then, would appear to be a clear-cut case of misdirected aggression.
The art industry itself is its own worst enemy – or rather, the enemy of those lower down in the pecking order – those struggling to succeed, craving to be noticed artists fighting the battle to achieve in spite of the odds stacked against them, and it has been so for a very long time.
The art industry itself is a smoothly running corporate machine skewed in favor of the middlemen, dealers, collectors and profiteers. Instead of attacking others laterally, artists should be taking on those who head their industry to level their own playing field.
Of course, it’s far easier to just sit there and complain that “it’s all AI’s fault” that they’re not raking in the millions they thought they’d get from being artists, and insist that everyone else owes them their undivided (i.e. paid) loyalty and preferential treatment – rather than making use of free or cheaper alternatives.
…And that’s all I have to say about that today. All this deep soul-dredging philosophical wrangling has left me a little thirsty, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some December relaxing to catch up on!