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Casual Sundays with Mr Curry
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Art and Economics
This entry was posted on 12/8/2011 10:38 AM and is filed under blather.
I have hardly any work to do.
This is an unusual situation for me. In the thirty five years that I've been designing needlepoint, I've never been out of orders. I'm not out of orders now, it's just that it's slowing down faster and earlier than ever before.
Usually, the winter doldrums start in January and continue until the customer base returns from warmer climes in May. We've always used the intervening months to design new, irresistible things for when the snowbirds return, winter projects finished and hungry for something new and gorgeous to stitch.
The trick is keeping up enough cash flow to keep the doors open until they return and it's been getting harder and harder to perform that trick every year.
In the world of un-crony-capitalism, we have to earn the money to keep afloat; no one's going to give us loans to keep the lights on until the customers come back. We could threaten to hold our breath till we turn blue, like union members do but we'd turn indigo before anyone would notice.
We micro businesses have no political power; we're just tax payers.
This is the part of the economy that the left never seems to get; we little folks depend on the big folk for the ability to pursue our lives.
I'm an artist. As I've written and said so often I'm bored with it myself; what I do is unnecessary. No one needs art. Not like they need food and shelter, anyway. Without the Evil Rich, there is no art.
Without the Evil Rich who have enough disposable income to be willing and able to give a chunk of it over in return for something as ultimately useless as a pretty picture (or sculpture or music or theater tickets) we have to get jobs (HA. Where, exactly are we supposed to do that??? Most of us are unqualified for human society, much less retail.) which leave us no time or energy for creation.
And don't point out to me Nancy Pelosi's solution that the government will take care of us artists so we don't need to worry about paying our bills; I'd rather not move into your slave quarters, not even for 'free' health care. As I've told my kids, "FREE" means "someone else paid for it". I don't relish the idea of a future as an economic leach.
Those of us who have actually worked professionally and by that I mean sold our work, understand the economic truth that you simply can't have more dependants than earners. That way lies ruin, poverty, slavery and eventually Mad Max.
Government sponsored art isn't art. It's propaganda. And I have no problem with it as long as I get paid because I'm a capitalist. No, I wouldn't work for anyone who offers money but if I do take a job, I always try to produce to the best of my ability.
Blah blah blah...whatever.
Sometimes you're painting for milk.
We've all heard that artists have to suffer for their art and I didn't understand that when I was young. I didn't understand the nature of suffering. Like most people, I assumed that meant you had to be poor and live in a dump. I didn't want to do either. Turns out that's not what the saying means. In fact, physical suffering has no more effect on an artist than on anyone else.
But just like an athlete has to push themselves to the edge of endurance to discover how far they can go, artists need to push themselves and it can hurt, really bad.
Imagine working on a drawing for weeks, only to have your instructor come up behind you and sigh "Well, it doesn't make me want to vomit."
Ouch.
Until you've kept yourself up at night, crying and feeling sick to your stomach because whatever piece you're working on isn't working, or for that matter, kept yourself up night after night, forgoing food and sleep because whatever piece you're working on IS working and you're afraid if you stop even long enough to use the bathroom, you'll lose it, you haven't suffered for your art.
There's a really good reason 'artist' and 'crazy' go together like chocolate and peanut butter.
But crazy or not, I have bills to pay and I would really, really rather earn the money to pay them myself.
And I can't do that if there aren't any rich people left.
So the question becomes; how do we get more rich people?
Well, for starters, we can stop bashing them, thereby scaring anyone who may become rich and therefore discouraging them.
It's good to put down greed, corruption, theft and dishonesty. It's not good to pretend that all success is dependant on such behavior.
I have a theory as to why some in our culture are so willing to attack CEOs, businessmen, heart surgeons and the like when they make a ton of money but think nothing about the amount of money Johnny Depp, David Beckam or Justin Beiber make; they understand that they can't do what Depp, Beckam and Beiber do, so they respect it. They don't know what CEOs do to earn the big bucks, so they have no respect, thinking (erroneously) that given the same chances, they could do that job, too.
I know for a fact that I couldn't do a job that involved A) dealing with numbers  dealing with people or C)showing up every day.
I couldn't do it. Not for any amount of money.
I have loved living in a society where I could do my bit without having to deal with A,B or C.
All I want from the government is for them to stop overtaxing the wealth creators, ease up on the regulatory burden they've placed on the movers and shakers, stop fomenting the envy of the talentless, ill but overly educated, unwilling to suffer for anything crowd and let me get back to work.
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