First Exit: Giving It Away

It's been a couple weeks since my last post--weeks filled with exciting travel to Split, Ljubljana, Vienna, and Bratislava. It's not because I'm not writing. I started this post the first week of May and keep noodling it over. It's still a rough draft as I get my thoughts together. I'm pretty sure all my friends who are writers, artists, musicians, dancers, etc. will hate the suggestions I'm making, but touring some of the world's great museums and seeing so much art the past several weeks has started me thinking deep thoughts. What a dangerous thing to do! So, of course, I'll sprinkle pictures throughout.

This is what I mean by "traveling light." The little bag contains my laptop, tablet, journal, camera, and any snacks I think I need for the day. The big bag contains everything else I need for eight months on the road. Currently, it's mostly dirty laundry!

I’ve been talking about 'giving it away' on and off for a couple years now, but have never encapsulated it. This was not the post I intended at first, but it is probably more upbeat than the one about scars and wounds of life that I’d planned. Now you know what to look forward to in the future! What inspired me to this post, however, was a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The museum is next door to the U.S. Embassy. It is fairly small—just one floor with permanent exhibition on the left and temporary on the right. One of the museum’s major draws is the Café Moderne in the basement where they served me an entire Chemex Pot of coffee!

The inspirational part of the trip was the exhibit of Constructivists. I kind of understand that movement as I studied it in relationship to theater. The movement (started about 1913 in Russia) rejected the idea of autonomous art in favor of art as a practice for social purposes. But I discovered that I don’t go to art museums to learn about art. I go to find pieces of art that speak to me. The Constructivists railed against art as they created it. They were against paintings, religious artwork, representational art, etc., etc. Yet their paintings and constructions are here on display in a museum. Hanging on a wall. How ironic.

While touring the castle in Ljubljana, I found that it was used as the first penitentiary in the mid 1800s after a revision in the legal code started the practice of incarceration as a penalty for breaking the law. Prior to that time, recompense and capital punishment were the prevailing trends. People were put in prisons to await trial or to be held for ransom. I noted that the average term of incarceration was ten years and both men and women were held there. The most common offense for women? Child murder. Apparently, there is something to be said for mothers who eat their young.

A few years ago, I started reevaluating my goals in writing. That had a strange sound to it. Did I have goals? Don't we all just want to be published and have a best seller with a six figure advance and a contract for our next three books. And a movie deal? My ego loves stroking, so I wanted people to read my writing and to tell me how much they liked it, but I really had no pretenses of having a runaway best seller that would provide for me through my old age. That was when I started writing on free story sites and giving books away. Over the past two years, I’ve ordered paperbacks as I was traveling around the country and simply gave them to people who I felt would appreciate them.

I started giving it away, and I liked it.
I proposed a conference topic to the PNWA called “Giving It Away” because I detected that many people who attended had other goals than to get an agent and publisher and income. But that is what the conference is targeted toward. I think there are other reasons for writing and so I’m creating my manifesto.
Art should be free. Writers, artists, sculptors, painters, dancers, musicians should not be paid for their work.

Apparently I have half of all I need!

How is an artist supposed to earn a living?

Who cares? That’s been my thought for many years, as far back as the 70s when I rebelled against theater people who felt the public owed them for their performances—even if they were poor performances—and should support them simply because it was art. Bullshit. I’ve listened to many fellow artists talking about how they can’t pay the rent with “exposure” and that downloading music from free sites steals from the artist and that we need to strengthen copyright laws to protect the rights of artists. Bullshit again.

If I could describe a perfect world (which I’ll probably do in a wildly successful runaway bestseller one day) I would say that no one should earn a living from their art. I don’t mind getting a little extra spending money occasionally when someone buys a book or simply donates to keep me writing. But I am not entered in the popular publishing lottery. I will soften this by saying that political and religious leaders should also not earn a living from their ‘service.’ There are probably several other ‘professions’ that I could list here.
Once an artist bastardizes his or her artwork to make it more successful in the commercial world, the art loses some of its artistry and ultimately its value. Money becomes the reason instead of art.

Mmm. Schweinbraten, Sauerkraut, und Knödel. Und Bier!

So we are supposed to suffer for our art?

No! We are supposed to suffer without it. Not writing, not painting, not sculpting, not playing music should hurt. The artist should suffer if he or she is not creating art.

This would certainly cut down on the number of mercenary artists. And art itself would become more treasured. I have noticed as I traveled in Europe that there is a lot of graffiti. But I have never seen graffiti on an ancient monument or artwork. Amazing. It is just as illegal to tag a train as it is to tag the Parthenon. Yet those monuments are avoided. The art is treasured.

Graffiti in Ljubljana.

Artists, in my Utopia, would have to support themselves in other ways. Certainly there are some who could rise to a position of importance (profit) in their profession and still satisfy the ache in their psyches by painting or writing most of the night. Most artists, however, would fill the hard jobs—non-intellectual labor that leaves the mind free to create when the job is left behind at the end of the day. The leaf-raker doesn’t need to rush home, shower, dress formally, and head out to the leaf-rakers' charity ball. The apple-picker does not waste mental cycles trying to solve the problems of fruit production when he leaves the orchard. He can focus on just two things: art and sleep.

Artists would find it difficult to form long-term intimate relationships. That is no concern. Artists have always had difficulty with long-term intimate relationships.

The Butchers' Bridge in Ljubljana is a place where people write the name of their lover on a padlock and lock it to the railing on the bridge. I have seen this repeated in Vienna and Bratislava as well. I guess that's one way to make a permanent relationship, but do they keep the key in case they need to go remove the lock sometime?

How do we prevent ‘bestsellers’?

I would propose banning mass reproduction of any form of artwork. Music would return to being a performance medium rather than a recording medium. Libraries and museums would become the places where people go to view, listen, read. They would become the places of worship they mimic.

Gutenberg was a criminal! He took living words and killed them in a wine press. The mass production of Bibles froze Christianity. It pitted book against book as nations pitted flag against flag. Neither had anything to do with what it represented. Of course, those books are not art. The result of Aldus Manutius creating books that would fit in a saddlebag meant that people no longer had to go to the book to read. Books became cheap commodities and lost their value. Even more so now that they are nothing but electronic bits displayed on cell phones.

Banning critics would also help. Critics do nothing to enhance the value of art to the artist or to the public. They serve a commercial function by instructing people on what they should like/buy and what they should not. They seldom have anything to say that is actually relevant to what the artist intended or felt when painting, writing, or performing. Discussion of the art, however, should be encouraged. Libraries should not be places of silence, but rather places where books are read aloud and people respond with laughter, tears, joy, anger, and even love.

The cheap imitations of art that people hang on walls prevent people from decorating their space. Even as a long-time proponent of wallpaper, I say there is no art in wallpaper. It prevents us from filling the palettes of our homes with dynamic, meaningful expressions of life. If you "own" an original piece of art instead of a reproduction, you need to share it with others. Invite them into your home. Talk about the artist and the artwork. Invite him to dinner!

I have an acquaintance who gets up each morning and takes a picture of sunrise. Rain or shine, no matter where she travels. I've thought that perhaps I should collect pictures of 'man on a horse' as there seems to be one in front of nearly every train station or palace or museum.

But there are so many more interesting subjects! I could be out finding a sculpture of naked women every day! Or maybe live ones!

Are you suggesting we live in monasteries?

That might not be as far-fetched an idea as you think. Under the conditions I describe, the poor artists are going to have to live somewhere! And so is reborn the artists' commune. I know for a fact that there are people who collect around artists. Call them groupies if you want, but really they are disciples. Authors, sculptors, painters, musicians become holy men and women. (Well, maybe not drummers.) They are the source of what is good and beautiful in the world.

What they can't do, however, is depend on government grants, tax-exempt donations, and welfare to see them through. Needs must be met through the traditional forms--labor, servitude, and begging.