How Valuable are Artists?

Despite all the news about our going into a "recession", "economic slowdown" and all I have nevertheless found myself with more demand for my art over the last 6 months than ever before.

So how valuable are artists?

Your art, your ideas, your entire creative output - is more valuable to the day to day world that anyone would ever possibly imagine.

Our art is the virtual source of the life of our culture we create every day. We take our audience to realities that we imagine. We bring hope. We show ways to envision futures.

The British poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy stated it beautifully in his book Music and Moonlight:

Ode

"WE are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth."

Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1844–1881

Hang a copy of that in your studio. There's more truth right there than you might currently imagine.

So ignore the "experts" predicting doom, and realize something basic about yourself; You are the entire cause of your future and your own economy.

If you paint, then paint up a storm. If you write, write something wildly subversive.

And you will find there are more audiences than you'd ever notice while paying attention to media or experts.

I make a point every single day to back away from the the general "reality" and find a different game to play. And I play that game.

It never fails to take me out to where there is inspiration and energy and a higher spirit of play.