Whenever I think about the future (or lack thereof) of my career as a writer, the same thought always occurs to me: ‘your art doesn’t have to make you money’. It’s a mantra that all of us hoping for careers in the creative industry have heard time and time again from condescending careers advisors and patient parents who nod away thinking that they’ve solved all our problems. It may take different forms (‘it doesn’t have to be your main support’, ‘why not have it as a hobby?’, etc.) but the message is always the same. And of course that’s true. I think I need to preface this by saying that I understand fully that the worth of art has never been in the financial rewards you can gain from it, and it definitely doesn’t need to be financially viable to be worthwhile; I’ve always known this, and even if I could never hope to earn a penny from what I do, I’d still do it until the day I physically can’t anymore, and be grateful for having the opportunity. The value of any art form, be it writing, drama, music, film, etc., can’t be defined by numbers, but by the empathy it fosters, the emotional experiences it provides. I know this, and its with this knowledge that I feel I need to say something I’ve been thinking for a long time.
Anyone who thinks that art doesn’t have to make you money to be considered worthwhile needs to look out the window
Anyone who thinks art doesn’t need to make you money hasn’t been there while I’ve sat and openly wept because I will probably one day have to choose between having children and continuing to do what I love, because what I love doesn’t pay the bills. Anyone who thinks art doesn’t need to make you money hasn’t watched as one of my best friends had to ask friends and family for donations to help pay her drama school fees, because apparently the UK government doesn’t deem arts education as worthy of the funding every other higher-education student receives. Anyone who thinks art doesn’t need to make you money hasn’t watched the critical flop Batman vs Superman gross $872 million and still have an entire cinematic universe launched off its back, while movies like The Nice Guys, a critical success, and one of the more prominent indie releases of the year, barely make back 15% of their budget in profit.
The truth is that even though art is impossible to value in any currency, we’ll still try to do exactly that. The creative industry is described as an ‘industry’ for a reason, and commercialization isn’t exactly new to any of us. I’ll be the first to admit that capitalism and the creative industry have skipped along hand-in-hand quite happily for years, and this can be a good thing for artists: when I first heard the story that French author Victor Hugo’s seemingly pointless tangents about the Battle of Waterloo and the Parisian sewer system were a result of him being paid by the word, my first thought was ‘Good on him’, not ‘How could he exploit his poor publishers like that?’
It’s a bizarre system, but one that has been able to actually benefit the people who contribute to it. We’ve determined art’s value with varying esoteric systems over the years, but now, after a worldwide recession that quite literally destroyed lives and austerity measures that continue to, the sting of it hurts even more. An entire subset of people is being measured by a scale that simply doesn’t fit. We’re a generation of creators who are encouraged to tailor our skills to advertise to a particular demographic, or to be on the army of writers for the latest instalment of a multimillion dollar franchise. The bottleneck has narrowed even further, with only a few ‘safe’ or ‘financially viable’ creators slipping through the cracks every year. Originality has become the playground of those who were able to establish themselves years ago, and the rest of the innovators are trapped in either franchises or the lower leagues of the industry. The creative industry has become yet another place where capitalist ideas have been implemented, with the people at the bottom receiving the least opportunities, and the space at the top becoming smaller every second.
The film industry is the absolute epitome of this phenomenon. Hollywood blockbusters continue to grow inexplicably larger in both budget and spectacle off the backs of endless franchises and sequels, while the indie scene where smaller creators used to find their feet is being dominated by pre-established ‘safe’ creators choosing to work outside of the system. No hate whatsoever to writers like Seth Rogen, Max Landis, or Shane Black, but the dollar value placed on their names is injuring the chances of new creators every day.
Because of this, the few platforms left to amateur filmmakers are the more democratic ones: YouTube and Vine seem to be delivering some of the most entertaining creators of our generation, but even these platforms are becoming oversaturated with the same array of vaguely familiar faces making monotonous ‘challenge videos’ that are assumed to provide a safe, not-too-exerting route to the big time. The idea that content has to have some kind of numerical value, be it in currency or subscriber count, is strangling originality in the cradle and poisoning one of this generation’s most valuable outlets for creativity.
Capitalism needn’t be the death of art. Indeed, there are cases where ultra-competitive environments can help, and having a system that even offers the slightest chance of being able to provide a platform for creators is a positive thing, but the age of financially viable art is going to affect everyone. This won’t be something that I alone struggle with, and then promptly forget as soon as I get a bit of the money my little socialist heart used to resent so much. This impacts the machine as much as it does the individual cogs.
Art has never explicitly needed to make money, but we’re living in an age where if it doesn’t, it often isn’t deemed worthy of existence. I’m standing on the precipice of a career that is likely to dismiss or accept me based on the money I can pull in, and that alone. How do I know this? Because decisions like that are being made every day. Whether it’s the UK government deciding not to supply student-loan type funding to drama school students and shutting off the option of an arts education to thousands, or the decision to make a sequel to The Blair Witch Project that ultimately destroyed several other writers’ hopes of their own features, artists are being told over and over that we only matter when we’re raking in money.
So where does that leave us? Ultimately this isn’t an issue that many people are likely to be up in arms about. On the surface, this seems to only impact the creators on the wrong side of the door, and some of the people reading this are probably going to think I just sound like another entitled millennial. Platforms like hitRECord and the emergence of they DIY creators are helping to bridge the gap slightly, but the problem isn’t disappearing anytime soon.
Besides, who cares if artists are valued, so long as people get their biannual Marvel movies and yearly Star Wars? But if you want to be watching those Marvel movies for years to come, you’d better wake up and listen, because we’re a generation that’s quickly learning that we can’t be the next Stan Lee or George Lucas, because the gap in the market for originality has already been filled twice over. And if we all abandon hope, and go get the retail or teaching jobs we’re told can be our ‘back-up plan’, things are going to get boring pretty bloody quickly.
