Kill the "Artists"

The distinction between Artist and Audience must end
We are all creators

The Golden Thread

Once upon a time, as I noted in my previous post (“Collections and Character-Narrators”), people entertained one another. In nations that have avoided the commercialization of everything, this is still true. It’s only in the commercial nations, which style themselves “advanced,” that a golden barrier has been created which separates the “Artists” and “Creators” from the “Audience” and “Consumers.” But does this make any sense? And does it do us any good?

One of the characteristics of gold is how malleable and ductile it is. Gold can be stretched to an incredible thinness, so that a golden wire can be as slight at thread. It’s even possible to imagine that golden thread stretched out so thin that it is only a few atoms thick. At this point the thread is invisible. You could pass your hand through it, breaking it, and not feel a thing. You wouldn’t even know you had rent the thread in bits. For all any man could know unaided by special instruments, the thread doesn’t even exist.

This is the truth about the gulf between the Artist and the Audience, between the Creator and the Consumer. It exists in principle, but it is so slight that in our practical lives we can consider it an illusion.

Middlemen Dancing on the Head of Pin

What then makes this gulf, this illusion, seem so huge in the commercial world? Who has committed this crime?

There is an ancient principle in criminal investigations. It is to ask the question, A cui bono? — Who benefits?

Those among us who are blessed to be called “Artists” stand out foremost as the beneficiaries of this distinction. The illusion makes these people seem like gods, utterly superior to you and me, worshiped, idolized, mobbed, stalked, enriched, made beauteous, lavished with gifts and wealth and given first place wherever they go.

But the “Artists” are not the primary beneficiaries. And who could imagine these few talented and skilled talesmen, musicians, performers and poets, could have ordered society, rewritten laws, and created this vast legal and cultural gulf? Who else benefits from the illusion of the Golden Thread? The middlemen.

The middlemen are the agents, the press agents, the managers. They outnumber the “Artists” and may well gain more wealth, in total, than the “Artists” they proclaim and represent. But these representatives and pretended newsmen could only foster the cultural side of the illusion. They haven’t the power to make it legally binding. For that we must look to the other middlemen, those with the real wealth, influence, and power.

In the upper levels of the middlemen we find the lawyers, the publishers, the distributors. These are the real power behind the illusion. They have the influence and power to make their wishes into laws that bind us all. They conglomerate into enormous corporations, and then further band into monopolistic trade groups, spending billions on advertising and lobbying, influence-peddling, extortion, and bribery, to bring the full force of the law with all its guns, jails, agents, and judges to bear upon ensuring that this illusion, this atom-wide, invisible, weightless thread, is as broad as the ocean, as high as the sky, and as massive and unbreachable as the Andes.

For every “Artist” we idolize, how many thousands of middlemen do you think there are? And yet all the power and wealth of those upper-level middlemen concentrates and encrusts into the hands of a few, a very few. Fewer than a dozen men in the United States control almost all the wealth, and all the political influence, of all the “Artists,” their representatives and shills of the lower-level, and all the lawyers, lobbyists, account managers, clerks, accountants, and what-not of the upper-level of middlemen.

How?

How is it that they can make of this illusion, this nothing, a force able to control entire industries? They do it through a legal fiction, that they are pleased to call “Copyright” or “Intellectual Property.” This is the basis of all their suits, their guns, their peddling of influence, their terror which they are spreading across the globe.

The upper-level middlemen create expand and compel the enforcement of the legal basis of the illusion. They make the illusion real in law. The lower-level middlemen make us all believe that this illusion is truth. They make the illusion real in fact.

Because we all believe in this illusion, we think that we cannot create. We are not authors, singers, painters, or movie stars. At best we dream, when we are young, that some day we might become such divine beings. We study the arts, learn to play musical instruments, act in school plays, draw in our every spare moment. Some of us, relatively fewer in number, make real efforts to “break through” the Golden Thread into being anointed “Artists” ourselves. And a very-small number of those are indeed so blessed.

And We Abet Them

The rest of us, though we may continue for a while to dabble in such efforts, accept our sorry state as not-artists, as Audience and Consumers only. We put our instruments, our paint-boxes, and our stage-makeup boxes away in the back of the closet, in the cellar, the garage, the attic, and we go on living lives made sadder by our realization that our dreams went for nothing, and that we are not ourselves the “Artists” we longed to be, once upon a time when we were young.

And so we support the illusion, and become accomplices to the crime.

But you and I, and everyone we know, is in fact an artist, and creates something indistinguishable from art every day of our lives. We inform, amuse, entertain, and delight someone in our lives.

This is also art. This is also what it is to be a creator, a talesman, an artist.

The difference is only in the degree. How many do we entertain, and how deeply we move them to wonder, fear, tears, or laughter.

Our Real Crime

Our real crime is not in “violating” copyright, as the upper-level middlemen claim.

Our real crime is in accepting the illusion and ceasing to recognize ourselves, each and every one of us, as the artists that we are.

(First posted Tuesday, 15 January 2008)