Please, Do Feed the Artists

Valuing Creatives in an Entitlement Culture

Photo by Amauri Mejía on Unsplash

I’ve been around a long time.

Over the last forty years, I’ve worked as a freelance illustrator, an art director, a working musician, and a published author.

During that time, I’ve watched the sad and slow erosion of appreciation for creative human beings and for the work of their hands.

I could nuance the language and wordsmith the delivery to make it more palatable, but the naked, unadorned truth is that people simply don’t value art anymore in the way they once did.

As a result, they don’t value the artists behind it, either.

Over the past couple of decades, many people have gotten so used to getting content for free or for almost nothing that they now feel entitled to everything. So much so that they almost take offense at being asked by creators to ascribe monetary value to their work, as if they don’t deserve to be compensated for their labor in the way that a dentist, plumber, or mechanic would. For some reason, if people can pull it up on their phones or laptops, they stop asking how it was made or who released it into the world to begin with.

Add to this climate of entitlement the unrelenting flood of AI-driven apps offering free, silent, soulless labor, and the net result is that more and more artists are being marginalized, replaced, and rendered unable to make a sustainable living doing what they are uniquely gifted to do, whether paint or write or design or produce music or make films.

We used to rightly call the makers of beautiful, vital work across all disciplines artists: visual artists, performing artists, recording artists. Now we label them content creators: producers of stuff, manufacturers of consumable material, timeline fodder. The distinction isn’t just semantic, it’s revelatory: we’ve cheapened what should be treasured.

Creative people spend years honing their craft, developing their skills, and refining their voices, often sacrificing time, relationships, and opportunities in the cause of their muses and convictions. They invest small fortunes in materials, training, and study, only to spend their professional lives buried by algorithms, replaced by keystrokes, and left struggling to figure out how to justify their worth in the eyes of people who voraciously ingest their work but feel no obligation to tangibly support them.

Right now, a generation of journalists, illustrators, photographers, bands, and playwrights has essentially become full-time beggars on the sides of the virtual roadways, expending an obscene amount of time and energy trying to convince the masses speed-scrolling by to spare a dime for their wares.

The only way this changes is if we, the consumers, think about the human beings behind the art we love, the music that moves us, the words that stir our hearts—and decide to concretely support them.

Artificial Intelligence will never be capable of anything other than ingesting artists’ past work and regurgitating it in another form. It will never walk down crowded streets, looking into the faces of strangers, trying to give voice to their stories. It will never suffer in the aftermath of devastating personal sorrow, hoping to connect with other similarly heartbroken human beings. It will never eat or drink or dance or love, and lose sleep and sanity looking for a way to allow other people into their experience of being human.

Authors, songwriters, painters, journalists, poets, dancers, singers, filmmakers, and screenwriters are invaluable in days like these. They tether us to one another and remind us of our commonalities. They spur us on to courage, unearth our latent dreams, and reach into our lonely places, allowing us to feel seen and known.

In a time when many of us are hanging by the thinnest of threads, the artists are that thread.

If you regularly find comfort, healing, hope, or kinship in something on this platform or anywhere else, please consider financially supporting the hearts and hands and minds that birthed it— and failing that, becoming a public advocate by leveraging your social media on their behalf. Abandon streaming apps and aggregate sites and give to creatives directly through their websites and merch stores. Gift friends and family members their work for the holidays. Subscribe to their newsletters and download their songs.

We are living under an Administration that places no value on creativity, that is defunding Arts programs, and that despises the beauty and truth found in the hands and voices of the artists because fascism always does. We need to defend the makers and the builders and the dream-crafters by allowing them to make a living with their life’s work.

The lion’s share of creative people are self-employed, and they live precariously without the safety net of low-cost health insurance, pensions, paid time off, or a predictable paycheck.

The title starving artist isn’t romantic; it’s tragic.

Yes, sacrifice for one’s work is often necessary, and no person who turns themselves inside out to speak the words inside them shies away from it.

But there is a difference between spending oneself on behalf of one’s passions and going bankrupt because the beneficiaries of those passions feel no sense of loyalty to it.

This is an invitation to become a patron of the Arts.

This isn’t about me. I’m fortunate to have a large platform and to be the beneficiary of incredibly generous benefactors, and my work in these spaces is sustainable, but many are not so fortunate.

I’m asking you to stand with creative people in every way you are able, especially those with small platforms whose survival is quite literally in your hands.

Please feed the artists so that they can feed a world so starved for the true and beautiful things.

Thanks for listening.