It may sound outrageous to say it — I used to think so — but without art we are lost. What do we live for otherwise? Our children? Love? Perhaps, but to what end, if not to together experience the intangible pleasures wrought by art and its cousin, culture? And before your face distorts in indignation let me first explain what I mean by ‘art’. I mean art as a living process of discovery and sharing; of communication, reflection and invention; of creating a common experience and understanding between not only friends, but even more importantly, among people who have never met.
In early 2020 my girlfriend took me to see a charity Stan Rogers tribute concert. It was put on by local musicians in a pub right before Coronavirus lockdowns began. We were lucky to land seats at a table at the front with two complete strangers, a pair of instructors from the local college out for a shared good time with beers. (If you’re not familiar with Stan Rogers’ music I strongly encourage you to check some out.) The evening progressed with the band belting out inspiring songs of down-home struggles and victories. At our table we snatched brief bits of conversation between the music and roared and clapped at the on-stage banter. I finally got up to use the facilities and as I made my way from the very front to the very back, through a tightly packed crowd, I was struck by the number of smiles and nods I received on the way as I squeezed by so many people. It was as if they knew me. It felt like I belonged. Seated among a couple hundred people I had never met, there had grown a camaraderie and warmth of spirit born out of a common sense of experience and purpose. We had become for this one brief evening a tribe. And to my great surprise a feeling of joy washed over me that no work accomplishment could ever evoke.
I hesitate to use the term ‘life-change’ or ‘epiphany’, but through the experience of attending that concert I was struck dead between the eyes with the realization of the failure of my way of living. I drank the kool-aid long ago and had just realized it. Like most of us I had been mentored in a belief system that says that working hard, making decent money, and being appreciated by my employer is where I can get the most bang for my karmic buck. But this night put an end to that delusion. It’s strange to say it at my age (how sad), but I was finally able to capture the emptiness I felt at toeing corporate lines for more than three decades. Feelings of unease and dissatisfaction had always been a part of my working identity, and never in a way I could clearly articulate. But upon leaving the pub on that night I turned to my girlfriend and said “I make a living. But you (artists) make a life.”
The aim of our economic system, like any system, is to perpetuate itself. It doesn’t concern itself with what is best for people or the planet. The system only concerns itself with doing what is necessary to guarantee endless self-continuance — until it can’t. And since we’ve all been born into this society and have been inculcated into ways of thinking that serve to perpetuate it, we can’t even begin to imagine any other way that things could work. We are so desperately dependent on this system of capitalism we’ve invented, it’s quite ironic that it does so little to support us as human beings.
The fact is that capitalism cares little about humans as humans. We are very literally cogs and prisoners in a machine of our own creation. The Matrix is real. We place demand here, consume there, and produce waste over there, serving to keep the endless conveyor belt of stuff moving so that cash-flow can be maintained and ideally increased. To assist in that endeavor, of course marketing and advertising as well as the manipulation of laws are employed where possible to coax off-handed wishes into wants, and wants into needs. Spiritual and emotional nourishment are recognized as concepts, to be sure, but they are only supported insofar as they can be monetized.
Capitalism is a zero sum game whose foundational tenet requires the reduction of all things to a dollar value. This allows disparate entities and concepts to be compared, conscience-free decisions to be made, and profits derived. But as the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. This brings us back to Stan Rogers. Art and artistic endeavors enrich the soul, not the wallet, and the conventional tools of evaluation and quantification employed by quarterly profit-driven markets are not up to the task of assessing the value of fuzzy concepts like ‘feelings’ or ‘community’.
You value what you measure. Capitalism doesn’t (can’t) measure art and culture, so it doesn’t value them. But there is a world of difference between “unmeasurable” and “immeasurable”. On the contrary, I would argue that if a capitalist system ascribes little or no value to something then surely a closer look is warranted, as the question must be asked: “If this ostensibly has no value, then why do we care about it? Why do we crave it? Why do we invest time and effort into it?” The answer is that the core of what it is to be human (as opposed to what it takes to sustain a human) exists almost entirely in the squishy zones into which capitalism is unable to tread. Clearly the system we trust to ascribe value to all things fails to adequately value some of the things that matter most. The value of family, for example, or friends, or of feelings of belonging, protection, validation and all of those baffling ineffable qualities that we require to be truly healthy, content, functioning human beings. All of that is a minor footnote in a capitalist system, and the footnote reads “Mostly inconsequential”.
Without art, life becomes pallid and flat, devoid of colour, and contrast. In other words, life-less. Only art lifts us from the muck of quotidian existence, creating meaning from nothing. In so doing, the act of experiencing art and artistic endeavor constitutes life. Real life. I don’t mean literal life, of course, but rather life worth living. Yet the very thing that enables us to put our shoulders to the Sisyphean tasks demanded by capitalism goes unacknowledged by it.
Many years ago, I recall my father lamenting that my uncle pursued his art (classical guitar) full time while living off the government teet, with no intention of ever getting a ‘real’ job. He busked on the beaches of Vancouver and its downtown, and lived in a seedy rooming house reeking of desperation and terminal sadness. I told my dad that I admired that a person would suffer for their craft and pursue their art rather than take on the yoke of corporate interests. My dad said he had the same respect for artists pursuing their craft, but pointedly made the argument that they had to do it under their own steam, without relying on taxpayer’s money — why should they get to have fun while the rest of us have to work? I reconsidered and agreed with him. He had a point, I thought. But now with a lot more life experience under my belt and a broader perspective I recant that decision and will double down on my original sentiment. What we need more than ever are more artists, not fewer. We need more people who can absorb the cultural zeitgeist and weave it into stories, songs, paintings, sculptures, dances, mime… anything. People who can create expressions of who we are and reflect them back to us. Expressions that make us think, make us recognize, and make us interrogate ourselves. But also expressions that make us feel joy, empathy, that create understanding, and generate kindness and goodwill, or that embolden us to rise up against oppression.
Unfortunately, it is a sad fact that most artists give up the pursuit of their craft because they have to make a living. While that statement may not engender much sympathy in the rest of us (“Boo-hoo, we all have to make a living. Grow up.”), that attitude is the result of a misconception about how artists spend their time. Being a full-time artist isn’t glamorous or easy at all. It’s very hard. For many it means living in poverty and flirting on the edge of homelessness. It’s all well and good to live poor and with a cohort of friends in a house while you’re young; but the instant raising a family becomes a necessity, priorities shift and talented people are forced to give up on what they’re good at, frequently taking on low wage jobs, because what they produce by their best talents isn’t economically quantifiable. Being good as an artist is not enough to hit it big. Most are never recognized for their talents simply because they haven’t been fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time for their “discovery” — a matter of blind luck.
The truth is that we owe artists a great debt. Many of them are local talents, unrecognized by the larger economic engine, and relegated to scraping by on subsistence wages (2016 data shows that the median income for artists in Canada is a mere $24K per year, 44% lower than the overall average of $43K). Each one of them makes our world just a little more interesting, a little more exciting, a little more fun, creating a tapestry of connections that forms a crucial part of any community. They draw us to the pubs, the coffee shops, the streets, the concert halls, and galleries where we congregate and gain the significant benefits of meeting and interacting with our neighbours in a way that isn’t motivated by economic purposefulness. But the vast majority of artists, while talented and capable, succumb to the crushing heel of economic imperatives, their unique visions and perspectives left hidden and unrealized to our collective detriment.
I believe that the expression and enjoyment of art in all its forms is crucial for a healthy, fully functioning society. What we do not have is an economic system that adequately recognizes and supports that. Regardless of judgements of ‘economic value’, so much of what we need to foster contentment and happiness in all our lives is embodied in squishy new age-sounding concepts like ‘nourishment of the soul’. Pick whatever language you want to couch that in that makes you comfortable, but the underlying truth remains: humans are not robots. Experiencing art and culture is a crucial part of why we are willing to go on living at all.
Given all this I propose the radical notion that we should make it easier for that to happen. As a society let’s find ways to support the development of more art. Let’s make it so that people who are artists first are able to pursue their craft to our mutual benefit, nourishing and growing our communities in ways that are spiritual, not just economic.
The most obvious way to enable artists to help us is to help them. We can start by stepping up our visiting of pubs and coffee shops that host musicians and spoken word artists, by going to street festivals, museums and art galleries, by buying a book from a local author, throwing a fiver in a busker’s hat, supporting local film festivals, or buying someone’s original art. Anything is better than nothing.
But thinking bigger picture, let’s all of us openly acknowledge that there are important things humans need that are simply not valued by the economic system in which we put so much faith. More to the point, in matters of community building, mental, and social health it is an abject failure.
So how can we fix this? I think the answer lies in the conversation I had with my dad. I’m doubling down. I think the best way to address this problem as well as many others is to adopt a system of Universal Basic Income (UBI). Before you turn your nose up at the idea, understand that this was originally a conservative idea put forward because it saves money and results in more people working. It may seem counter-intuitive, but several studies bear this out if you care to do a little research. I’ll save the details of that for another article, but the crux of it is this: UBI would put reliable money directly in the hands of everyone, no strings attached, to be spent in whatever ways people want (no, people don’t tend to become entitled layabouts and drug addicts). In the case of the topic at hand, this would enable many artists to worry less about how to put food on the table and pay the rent. It would allow them the security to pursue what they’re good at instead of working at pointless low wage jobs that waste their talents and do society little real good. The cash boons reaped by capitalism in the form of taxes can be harnessed to feed a parallel system that compensates for the things it’s not so good at valuing. Each individual will decide for themself what is valuable to them, and will put their resources, time and effort into that. Artists make art. Art builds community. Community is something we all need more of.
Let’s create a society that gives art its due, even if capitalism doesn’t think it’s worth much. Because while we may think that capitalism is the best tool we have for managing an economy, it falls woefully short when it comes to properly valuing the squishy stuff that we all need to be human.
Well said and way overdue.