Artists Sell Themselves So Cheap

Said the publisher rubbing his hands with glee.

The other day someone posted a comment that I thought I'd address here. They wondered why talented people in the industry have so many problems.

There is this false idea that the red carpet just sort of rolls out for you and people want to make things easy for you so you will produce and make money for them.

That's not really how the world works.

While there are some wonderful people out there who have good intentions and want to do well with you, there are a lot of exploitative people out there, too.

Some people don't believe in the reality of talent or ability. They believe in luck, proximity to power, and opportunity, but not merit.

They can recognize something they can exploit in the work of another, but being fundamentally unable to recognize value or instrinsic quality, they don't believe anything anyone else does has unique worth.

They believe you got lucky, just happened to stumble across a thing because you fiddled at making pictures and stringing words together long enough that you drilled down until you hit oil. It's not like you invented oil, it was just there. And that because nothing is earned since merit doesn't exist, you don't deserve anything more than they do.

While they may recognize that you have something they can exploit, they are no more able to understand what that is than someone who sings who hasn't any idea that they are tone deaf.

The exploiter simply hears music, see the reaction the music has on other people, may have no real idea why that music is good, but they try to mimic the circumstance that created the value from the music.

Exploiters are attracted to makers, people who create value, without having respect for the people who create the value.

Since there is no such thing as merit, success is only a product of networking, and everything is some kind of trick, and you, creator, do not deserve what you have.

Others are attracted to you in hopes of sucking the energy out of you to make the thing they see that other people want to have, while never having a genuine understanding of its appeal beyond its ability to make money or to gain attention.

Creative people are particularly susceptible to exploitation and manipulation because they just want to create. They don't want to have to deal with business, or contracts, or lawyers. They want to make words and pictures.

For an exploiter, this sort of person is a smorgasbord, an endless feast of content from which they can feed while feeling no obligation whatsoever to sustain the source of the feast because, of course, there is no merit, all things are surface and fake, it's all about networking and, as one of my publishers sneered so gleefully, "Artists sell themselves so cheap."

Artists don't sell themselves cheap. If you as a rich publisher/producer/studio got creative work cheaply, you took advantage of someone.

There is an endless supply of content creators. Many people want to be artists.

There are content creators who can make serious money. These are in short supply.

There is the "person who can do the work", the respectable craftsman. They are popped in and out of the engine of the industry like spark plugs skilled, reliable, and things don’t roll without them. They are needed but rarely appreciated.

And they get replaced. Often.

There is a much shorter list of the top talent who can make the craft rise and create real, lasting value. And maybe even quality.

Anyone can draw Batman. Not everyone could make The Dark Knight Returns.

Suits think EVERYONE is a spark plug. They don't have a clue why this guy they paid to draw Batman didn't wake up one day and become Frank Miller. They can't tell the difference between Frank Miller and another creator.

They think it's luck. A trick.

There is craft and then there is creation.

And the suits don’t know what that is.

Suits, of course, love AI art.

Processed cheese pictures made up of the real pictures made by real human beings, easily replaced on the cheap.

Like spark plugs.