Art for Arts Sake
“Gimme your body / Gimme your mind /Open your heart Pull down the blind Gimme your love gimme it all / Gimme in the kitchen gimme in the hall / Art for arts sake / Money for Gods sake”
10cc
Let’s get this out of the way first in the interest of full disclosure: I am not an artist. Not by any stretch of the imagination. My interests are vastly more mundane, although I do know artists and have what I consider a fine appreciation of their efforts. I believe art, in all its glorious forms, is a fundamental part of the human condition and an indispensable foundation of any thinking civilization. Humans do art. Art matters.
But art — and artists — are under assault in our modern world of neoliberal economics, where everything is a commodity and at the unsensory mercy of the market price mechanism. Art is bought and sold like so much pipe in the hardware store, pipe with no practical use except that someone might find it appealing. Markets were never designed for art, nor should art be constrained by their vicious and uncaring nature. In this way art suffers the same fate of so many other indispensable features of a functioning society, other things like food, clothing and shelter, things that are common and essential to all humans but denied them except by way of purchase, at a price, with money, from markets.
Art is a proxy for the very human drive to create which underlies two thousand centuries of human development. Humans imagine, and then they create.
The essence of art is the creative process, a process driven by imagination, imagination being a building block of innovation. Art is a proxy for the very human drive to create which underlies two thousand centuries of human development. Humans imagine, and then they create. In this way all things are possible and in this way, all things produced by humans came into being. Art and artists are the sharp edge of this miracle, creators who use their creativity in the most obvious fashion, a purity of innovation unconstrained by anything but imagination. Artists innovate not to solve a problem or to meet a need, artists do what they do for the simple sake of doing it.
Precisely because it is free of market forces, art is a reliable barometer of civilizations in that anything that impedes art impedes societies.
However, though art should be free of market forces — bought and sold for its own sake and for no other — the artist is not. The artist, being human, is very much constrained by the market inasmuch as she or he must devote time and resources to meeting their basic human necessities. Artists have to work first at living, and then with the time and energy left, at creating. This sad feature of lost opportunity is shared with all creators, that when they are doing something else they are not creating. Not art. Not science, engineering, medicine, biology, or building the better bird house. The markets don’t reward creativity, they punish it. Indirectly, we are harming society by impeding creativity and innovation by impeding the creators and innovators. We are developing a low pressure system on our civilizations barometer when the world is one of high pressure complexity, and as a result, a hard rain may fall.
It’s a fool who believes however that the market system is going anywhere soon, or that our punishing consumer capitalism will disappear next Tuesday. We will surely innovate our way out of this mess but it’s the very definition of pointless to hold our breath until we do. It isn’t going to leave of its own volition and that is that. What’s needed is a bridge to get us from here to there, an intermediary step, a starting point, an incremental advance along the road to the future in the same fashion our ancestors stepped gingerly yet deliberately to get us to here, today, and now. An escape valve to release the pressure. I believe that bridge could be the idea of a Basic Income.
A Basic Income provides some insurance against the worst ravages of that roller-coaster of fortune for ourselves and our children (and theirs), while at the same time it unleashes a torrent of creativity and innovation to deal with our progressively complex problems.
The idea of a Basic Income — a monthly stipend due to all citizens just for being citizens — is not new as it has drifted around the periphery of radical thought for some time, promoted by cranks and dreamers whose time never seemed to come. They believed that we had advanced our civilizations to the point where technology and globalization were starting to eat away at our collective ability to earn a living from ever decreasing, lower paid work. But they also believed that our advanced civilizations were wealthy enough because of this technology to guarantee economic security to its citizens by covering their basic living expenses by way of a monthly income.
But in a time of plenty who cared? Capitalism was king. What could possibly go wrong? And then, in the wake of 2008 and the collapse of our trust in the only world we ever knew all things seemed possible, and thinking about the lives we live suddenly awoke from its placated consumer slumber. Suddenly, the cranks and dreamers didn’t seem so cranky and dreamy. Suddenly, we were wondering, “is this the only way it has to be?” No, no it’s not the only way it has to be. From the twisted wreckage of global financial collapse, austerity, rampaging inequality, corrupt politics, and brutal retail regimes it does seem that all things may indeed be possible again — if only because they have to be.
We live in a world unlike any that has gone before, a world of incomprehensible complexity which we drive exponentially forward. Ours is a world of chaos. We will be jolted and rocked by increasingly volatile events which are unknowable and unforeseeable, events we can do nothing about but react. This is new to us — we who believed were the masters of all we surveyed. We are learning that we are not masters but rather, just riders on forces we cannot understand. A Basic Income provides some insurance against the worst ravages of that roller-coaster of fortune for ourselves and our children (and theirs), while at the same time it unleashes a torrent of creativity and innovation to deal with our progressively complex problems. The Basic Income is an epoch changing solution to a changing epoch.
We are still using past centuries thinking to deal with this centuries problems. And those problems are getting bigger, faster, and harder.
But still, there is just something naggy about the idea that humans don’t have to work to be free, that wage slavery is not somehow ennobling, that it is not heroic to waste a human life in a crippling cubicle in order to save it. The idea of a Basic Income, that there would be a transfer of cash from one vast, self-serving part of the economy sufficient to ensure no human is without food, clothing, or shelter (for no reason other than that humans absolutely require food, clothing, and shelter), just seems a little wonky still. Why is that? I don’t know.
But I do know that this is the 21st century, and that here in the most advanced age since yesterday we still cling to all our ideas of the last (and the one before, and the one before that). We are still using past centuries thinking to deal with this centuries problems. And those problems are getting bigger, faster, and harder. This was the lesson of 2008, that we really have no idea at all as a species what the hell is going on. Climate change, resource depletion, rampant inequality, dysfunctional institutions, and captured governments with no one really in charge but the bad guys. We need to think differently. We need to think like it’s the 21st century. Because it is the 21st century.
It’s to be expected of course that on the stroke of midnight at the turn of the millennium we would not instantly change everything about ourselves and our world. These things take time and we shall labor under a host of last century’s systems, beliefs, and institutions until they slowly change or die. We still have full state postal services in a land of electronic mail and expensive lumbering armies that languish in “exercises” until they are beaten by newer, 21st century asymmetric forces in sandals. It takes time and punishment to change some things it seems. But change they do. Eventually. One of those ideas from the past which has stubbornly held on now for over three hundred years, an idea that is holding us back in the most insidious of ways, is the idea that we should have to “work for pay” in the service of honor, esteem, self-worth, and God. That to do any other is madness. But this idea itself is madness, a concept that arose as the “Protestant Work Ethic”, a convenient marriage of religious duty wedded to the profit making needs of a burgeoning world of steam driven machines and textile mills. That by sacrificing our souls on the altar of modernity work would set us free. It didn’t. It just enslaved us to work.
But if we could just surmount that protestant work ethic nagginess, we in the 21st century would be free to understand that in our advanced digital age there is less and less reason to hew to the old quixotic saw and instead allow our technology to do the work for us. After all, it’s not like it isn’t doing the work for people already, it’s just that those people comprise a scant 1% or less of the population and it seems pretty clear they have had no trouble shaking off their work guilt — and getting paid large for their freedom and prescience. They are the yacht encrusted few who know full well it can be done — because they are doing it.
There used to be an old lottery commercial that asked “What would you do with a million?” The folks in marketing who crafted that line knew full well what the answer would be, uttered as a tired sigh from the throngs of beaten down cubicle serfs collapsed in exhaustion in front of their TV’s, survivors of another brutal day at the office or retail hell. Why, they would quit their jobs of course! Because their jobs suck, and their lives suck, and each and every one knew absolutely they had better things to do with their one single life on earth. And they desperately wanted to do those things. So they bought a ticket. Because cashing in that magic ticket meant finally the promise of true freedom would be complete.
Our freedom is conditional not on politics or law, but on the price of things alone.
Freedom is one of those words that has been so misused that it has ceased to hold any real meaning, reduced to weaponized status in our worlds attempt at defeating their world, whoever “their” may be from time to time. But not so to artists, creators, and innovators. Freedom is at the root of what they do without which they could not do it. If our modern history is of anything, it is of the struggle to gain our preciously precarious freedoms of political thought and legal rights for which millions have fought and died over the centuries. Our political and legal triumphs are among our greatest, virtues we literally protect with our lives. But alone, those twin institutions of votes and courts mean little without the third leg of that three legged stool — economic freedom. Without economic freedom democracy and justice are but Pyrrhic victories, and time and again throughout that same history folks have gladly surrendered both for the most meager of economic freedoms — the freedom from starvation and the right to eat. True freedom comes only when economics are wed to politics and law as it is that economic freedom that makes the others relevant. Whether your vote counts or you can appear before a jury of your peers is only partial freedom in a world where you must work or die throughout your entire life, a life you are not free to choose but are forced into by omnipotent market based societies. You are free to be anything you like — as long as it pays enough consistently enough to meet your basic human needs. Our freedom is conditional not on politics or law, but on the price of things alone.
When an artist, creator, or innovator is not free to employ those critical human faculties to their fullest, and when they are spending their lives suffocated by the drudgery of paid work, for money, and to stay alive… we are not a free society. They are not free, nor are the rest of us. We are worse off not just by natural right, but also by the loss that creativity would contribute to our further happiness and security. To a vastly better world for our children and theirs, who face a far less happy and secure society without those freedoms. This is the unfulfilled, unspoken promise of our fabulous democratic societies — the secret promise of economic security, a promise that is frustrated by markets, work, wages, and the price of everything necessary for life in dollars.
Art is a proxy for that wishful dream, a proxy for humans set free from markets to create and to innovate. Give an artist enough to pay the simple costs of staying alive and an artist will create, not because artists are special, but because they are human. Humans want to dream, imagine, explore, and innovate. Many humans freed to do that will dream, imagine, explore, and innovate en masse. And many humans linked in a network of human innovation will produce a better world — and not just dream about it from their wretched cubicles. A Basic Income for all is the bridge to that world, an idea whose time has come.
