My art and the art of perfect labor
Let’s see where this one is going.
As I personally struggle with the idea that I have to have a job to make money and to make art and money at the same time somehow does not fit together, I came up with the following idea. What if we as a species are just tired of being good at “work” (work meaning, the thing we had to train to then execute to make money and to have a so called life, to buy food, house, closes and coffee).
This idea just came up as I watched an interview from Tracey Emin, I had found yesterday in the library. Towards the end of this short dvd, she says something like her work not being meant to look like 70’s conceptual work and also her aesthetics are the result of the gesture of her work. With gesture, this is my personal interpretation, I mean for example “my bed” and here very simplified, there was a moment in which she looked at her life and herself and saw the state. The gesture occurs from that moment and the decision to place her bed in an art space. It was not meant to look like anything else than just what it is, with its multiple meanings and analyses. I find her work very analytical and because she is so sweet when she talks, one of my great examples.
So many words to explain things in the context of art...
My point was, if we have been struggling for centuries to become good (or masters) at our craft, it only makes sense now that artists, like myself, let the visual side of a specific piece become a secondary priority.
But with all the stuff/things/images/etc. we have, I think it is most necessary to let this element wander to a secondary position as the meaning of art and what we are looking in art is changing.
I have not found why money and art cannot co-exist in the same space for me personally but I am open for idea’s. Strangely enough, I am sometimes being paid to perform and so I wonder why this subconscious idea is still floating around.
Perhaps I could just let it go for now.
It often feels as if I arrived at my extended adolescence and entering mid-life crisis at the same time. Because in Egyptian times, I would be a grandma by now.
To let go of something that dominates my life like this is quite hard. I wonder how other people, who are not in my environment, think about this. How could you accept the fact that you have to enter this weird structure of earning money. And the act of itself, to “earn”... as if we are not deserving already. This brings me down a path of feeling entitled for everything I don’t have.
But as angry as I may seem, I ... feel curious and stuck by this subject. It is terrible to hear interviews about artists who claim “I don’t do it for the money” or “It was never about money”. Of course not, the world was different back then and there was no one who already made “it” or realized or the dreams you contain.
We live in a time where everyone already realized our dreams.
We live in a reality where many people made money on things we do not expect to have wealth or value.
We live in a time, where humanity got bored of itself and there is not much to left to do that change 360 degrees and start something completely new.
There is definatly a lot to sort out inside my own head before I can make sense of all that is happening with and around me.
izzy806
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon