The economy isn't wonderful and
politics are even more bleak than usual, but those are not my
subjects today.
Art has never been better. We are
living in the era of the greatest outpouring of creativity in the
history of the human race. Everywhere the barriers to self expression
have been lowered. Thanks to technology you can write a novel and
publish it to the world. You can write, produce, and record a song
for everyone to hear. You can design and make clothing, sculpture and
drawings for little to no cost. Almost no area of the arts is
untouched by this. Feel like drawing? If you have a computer and a
connection you can download a very powerful free program (the GIMP)
and manipulate images to your heart's delight. If you write, there
are several text programs to help you.
Millions, possibly hundreds of
millions, are doing so. And the potential audience is growing larger
every day. You can potentially reach billions. In the old days, you
had to get your vision through a battery of gatekeepers. In the
visual arts, you had grant committees who heeded certain critics more
than anyone else. For music and writing, you had publishing companies
who selected works based upon a mixture of whim and marketability.
Those inbred cliques are rapidly
becoming a thing of the past. There will always be winners and losers
in the arts. A novel by a Stephen King or a James Patterson will
always sell better than the latest work of Millicent Shrump or Stan
Forbush. But E L James has literally made a fortune off of her
fanfic. A book that never would have been published twenty years ago.
Today, record your song and either give
it away through YouTube or sell via a plethora of for pay music
channels. You can own the tools to do so for less than two hundred
dollars. Produce a play and stream it for pay or give it away. Or do
both.
Don't like how group X is over
represented in comic books or how Group Y is constantly denigrated?
Stop moaning and whining and do something about it. There are real
live people like you and I who make money off web comics. Some even
make enough to support themselves.
Here's the take away point: It will
only get better.
