In the Land of Lotus Eaters, Time Plays Tricks on You
Good morning Los Angeles. In the land of the lotus eaters, time plays tricks on you. One minute you’re dreaming, the next your dream has become your reality. It was the best of times, if only someone had told me.
There is a shift in perspective–a heavy metal fork in the road–where we choose a path of purpose for our creative content.
The choice typically floats in a thin range between content that pleases just the creator versus content that merely pleases the admirer. Most content creators (artists, musicians, writers, marketers) go through the shift at some point, particularly if they choose their hobby as a business. It’s a cautious zone where instead of putting one foot in front of the other at our own pace, we side-step carefully to satisfy the largest majority of our fan or customer base. To monetize, we must embrace any paying fandom as a gift, and react to it accordingly.
Clement Greenberg, a well-known art critic, once described the freight train of art history as taking the rigid path of “self-criticism,” followed by “self-definition,” concluding with “self-definition with vengeance.” And, I think the path to creative, monetary independence is similar. The “self-criticism” is the initial fear of selling out. The “self-definition” is tackling the reasoning behind our creative purpose.1 The final “self-definition with vengeance” is a combination of both, where we try to anticipate not only the audience’s expectations, but our own expectations, in terms of demand.
An artist will probably tell you their greatest payoff, whether hobby or business, is the value of looking back on the ritualistic process–the so called “struggling journey.” Freud disagrees, who said the greatest payoff for an artist is simply fame, money and beautiful lovers.2 Hell, even Warhol was honest. He admitted he would endorse anything for enough money, even putting an advertisement in the Village Voice with his personal phone number.
Regardless, it’s a sort of “be careful what you wish for” mentality. We all want to do what we love for a living, until the lotus eaters decide they want us to do what they love. Sometimes, as much as you may want to, there’s no turning back once you choose a path to take. Do you work for yourself, or do you work for your customers? Do you produce content for yourself, or do you produce content for your fans? If you don’t care, or it’s all the same to you, then you’re lucky.
The ultimate, ideal goal, I suppose, is to travel the road where what we want to create is identical with what we can monetize. No overarching demands besides our own. Just business as usual, where the only real conflict of interest is if it’s self-inflicted.
There’s no right or wrong path; this is simply my self-methodology for making sense of it and how to tackle the various forks in the road. It really breaks down into categorizing personal goals, and deciding specifically how to get there. Just like business, art shouldn’t create a mirror for the viewer, but allow viewers to see it for what it is. And, the “what” should be up to us.
- This is the decision of keeping something as a hobby, or doing it for money. [↩]
- Quoted from Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word [↩]
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