In praise of unprofitable art
Every day, I draw silly little comics and slip them into my daughter’s lunch box. They are trifles, but I get a lot of compliments on these one-panel drawings from parents and teachers. My nature makes me incapable of hearing most praise without looking for the hidden shiv, but these compliments usually make me feel a little glow of satisfaction inside… up until the exact moment the plea to capitalism inevitably comes:
“Hey, these comics are great! You should sell them!”
I really do appreciate the generous spirit of these comments. Even so, I think it’s interesting how viscerally I reject the suggestion of trying to sell my daughter’s lunch comics, or my cartooning more broadly. I also think it says a lot about our society that so few people know how to compliment creativity without implying that its true success hinges upon being successfully monetized.
Let’s leave aside the question on whether my comics are ‘good’ enough to bring in any real money, which is really the wrong question anyway: in art, something’s marketability often has very little to do with its quality. What this is really about isn’t money, it’s about value, and whether something can be valuable without being worth money to others.
When I draw my daughter a comic, she is the object of my work. Success hinges not upon satisfying enough of the whims of a faceless crowd to eke out a profit, but by making a child happy whom I know better than I know myself. If my comics make her smile or laugh, they’re a crowning achievement. And even if a comic doesn’t check off any of those boxes, it isn’t a failure, because the comic’s very existence communicates to her that I love her. When she is older, she will revisit these comics, and treasure them. She will know their true value lies in that I made them specially for her.
Within American society, it’s interesting how unexamined the idea is that the value of a piece of art rests on how well it can be monetized. It’s how we’re programmed, but it doesn’t even remotely pass the sniff of a reality test. After all, how many financially successful creatives does the average person know… especially compared to the number of lawyers, or doctors, or scientists, or bankers, or even plumbers?
When I started trying to get fiction published, I remember how depressing it was to learn that many of the authors I thought of as “successful” were either moonlighting their literary careers or simply living in poverty. The vast majority of writers cannot afford to pursue their art for a living, because writing’s monetary value is so incredibly debased. In the 1930s, Isaac Asimov sold his first short story for the equivalent of $1,200 today. It was the golden age of sci-fi publishing, and he considered that a bad rate. Today, he’d be lucky to get paid half that even in the magazine bearing his name.
Many artists looking for a culprit to blame point the finger at piracy, or AIs training off their work, or predatory studios and publishers, or some other bogeyman. And certainly, none of these things help. But the reality is art has never paid. Look to history, where artists ranging from DaVinci to Shakespeare needed their rich patrons to focus on their art. Even today this patronage continues. A billionaire keeps a newspaper or a magazine going as an unprofitable pet project, or a university gives tenure to a glorious weirdo whose only profitability lies in maybe one day being able to teach to other glorious weirdos. Art is called a labor of love, because it has almost never been a labor of cash, at least for the artist.
I used to find this incredibly disillusioning. These days, I find it liberating.
Once you accept that art almost never has monetary value, you are able to focus on its inherent value, which is self-realization and self-expression. If you know your art will never pay your rent, paying your rent ceases to be its object, and you allow its focus to become something else you care about more than money, whether that’s an idea or philosophy, a technique or effect, a person you love, or even your own creative ego. Of course, the irony of this is that once you forget about money, money tends to come looking for you. Pass the level of amateur, and if there’s anything original about you at all, you’re more likely to make money from your art if you focus on your own unique voice, rather than chasing monetization.
Most of the artists I respect for their weird creative texture have spent the better part of their career dancing this tightrope, I think: viewing money as a happy accident of doing deeply personal work, rather than allowing it to be the object of what they do. A guy like, say, David Lynch, only cares about monetizing his art so much as it allows him to have more of his deeply weird projects funded in the future. Success, of course, has paradoxically given him this luxury, but his deeply unmarketable weirdness has always been there, from Eraserhead to Twin Peaks: The Return. It is highly unlikely his art would has ever been financially successful if Lynch hadn’t had the conviction to value his vision and voice more than his ability to be monetized.
All of which brings me back to my daughter’s lunch comics. To even think about monetizing them would be to debase everything that I value about making them. Because just having fun drawing is what makes them worth doing, and not giving a shit if anyone but my daughter loves them is what makes them valuable.
Unfortunately, I’m not entirely in the same mental space when it comes to my fiction. I still care if it gets through slush piles. I still care if it sells. But good god, do I hope I eventually reach a place where I don’t.