Advice to all artists: open an account on Twitter to promote your work
Photo: REUTERS
It’s bad news, I argued in my 2007 book Cult
of the Amateur, a polemic which suggested that the Internet is
killing our culture and undermining the livelihood of cultural producers.
No, it’s good news, counter the techno-optimists like Jeff Jarvis and Clay
Shirky - who argue that the Internet offers creative artists and
organizations an opportunity to escape from the sometimes unjust and
inefficient control of industrial age mass-media.
Today, more than two years after the publication of Cult of the Amateur, as
the destructive pace of technological change in the media business has
dramatically increased, the debate about the impact of the Internet on high
cultural artists and organizations has also become more urgent. Today, as
the old mass media industries of television, newspapers, book publishing,
recorded music and movies are being fundamentally restructured by the
digital economy, it’s become clear that the early 21st century digital
revolution is having as profound an impact upon culture as the mid 19th
century industrial revolution.
Indeed, the relationship between creativity and technology has become such an
emotive issue today that a new international political movement, the Pirate
Party, has emerged which actively supports the rights of both the cultural
producer and consumer against big media conglomerates. Thus, in
an interview earlier this month in The Telegraph, Pirate Party UK
leader Andrew Robinson underlined
his party’s commitment to reforming copyright law in the UK
which, he claimed, adds to the “wealth of big business” rather than
“benefiting the artist.”
So is Robinson correct, has old-fashioned mass-media really impoverished
creative artists? In the spirit of Internet democracy, I took the issue of
artistic poverty to Twitter,
sending out a tweet asking: why are artists poor?
My Twitter responses extended to everything from lucid one-worders like
“oversupply” to philosophical tweets such as “because they live in the
moment” to Clay Shirky’s terse and elliptically authoritative “unequal
distribution of talent + supply and demand”.
Yet, as many members of my Twitter network reminded me, not all creative
artists are poor. Take, for example, Jonathan Littell, the Franco-American
author of The
Kindly Ones, a 900 page Holocaust novel that won the Grand Prix du
roman de l'Académie française and Prix Goncourt in France, and which the
News Corp owned Harper Collins paid $1 million for the privilege of
exclusively distributing in the American market.
Littell is a good example of a cultural aristocrat in the analog ancien
regime, a writer acclaimed by high-end cultural curators for his “talent”.
Last February, for example, he
was interviewed by Jeffrey Trachtenberg, the book reviewer of The
Wall Street Journal. “Will you come to the U.S. to promote your book?”
Trachtenberg asked him.
“No,” Littell replied, disdainfully. “I don't do that kind of thing. I don't
consider it my job.”
So what, exactly, is the “job” of an artist like Jonathan Littell?
Historically, at least since the industrial revolution of the mid 19th
century, his commercial function has been to create art that would then be
manufactured and sold on the mass-market by his publisher. For the last 150
years, there existed a clear division of labor between a Littell who created
art and his mass-market publisher who printed and sold copies of the
finished product.
Over the last twenty years, however, an interconnected trinity of
technological, cultural and ideological events have revolutionized the
mass-market copy economy:
1. The appearance of the Internet as a global platform for the creation
and distribution of content.
2. A broad legitimacy crisis of the traditional copy economy, both in
terms of its economic and cultural value.
3. The ideological assault on the supposedly “elitist” idea of talent
and of the role of cultural gatekeepers in the discovery and development of
high-end artists like Jonathan Littell.
Before we get to this revolution against the ancien cultural regime, let’s
remind ourselves how the old gatekeepered economy worked. As Clay Shirky
tweeted me, the culture business rests on the unequal distribution of talent
and of its supply and demand in the marketplace. Like any other economic
arrangement, therefore, scarcity and abundance determines price and both the
availability and nature of the cultural product.
Critically acclaimed 900 page novels about the Nazis might be rare, but there
has never been any scarcity of obscure novelists trying to sell their work
into major publishing houses like Harper Collins. But in an industrial
economy in which books have to be edited, printed and then shipped to
bookstores, it’s literally impossible to publish everything. Thus, an
ecosystem of agents, editors, studio owners, record label executives and
publishers emerged – cultural gatekeepers of “taste” and “talent” – who,
from the commanding heights of their offices in downtown London, Los Angeles
and New York City - determined what should and shouldn’t be brought into the
marketplace.
And so for every Jonathan Littell with his million dollar deal, there were
tens of thousands of unpublished writers. In this copy economy, the work of
the vast majority of aspiring writers, musicians or photographers never
appeared.
The digital revolution appears to change all this. By replacing physical atoms
with digital bits, the Internet undermines the monopoly of these cultural
gatekeepers. The Internet’s digital platform enables the creation and
storage of infinite content. Whereas the physical printing press limited the
publication of books, so the web enables anyone to digitally publish
anything they like. The market’s supply of culture, therefore,
metamorphosizes from scarcity into cornucopia.
Meanwhile, the old media economy – which wrote those fat cheques for Jonathan
Littell - is now in crisis. Newspapers all over America are shutting down,
sales of recorded music and DVD’s are in freefall, the global publishing
business is shrinking dramatically. The gatekeeper, that traditional curator
of culture, is withering away. He/She is being replaced by We: the
collective cacophony of self-expression, the cult of democracy, an ecosystem
of noise.
The dream of techno-optimists is that the democratic cultural talent on the
Internet would replace the old aristocratic talent. As the analog historical
chapter closed, they dreamed, so the digital one would begin. So has one
cultural economy been seamlessly succeeded by another?
This neat historical narrative makes perfect sense in theory, but it isn’t
born out in practice. While the Internet is awash in content, the vast
majority of it is either free or stolen. Thus, the most popular new online
services are free ones like the Swedish start-up
Spotify which provide gratuitous music for consumers unwilling to
spend money on content.
The “success” of Spotify symbolizes the death of the old copy economy. The
inconvenient truth about the digital revolution is that the online consumer
has been so spoilt by the availability of free content on the Internet, that
the sale of intellectual content is increasingly the holy grail not only of
start-up Silicon Valley entrepreneurs but also of experienced media moguls
like News
Corp CEO, Rupert Murdoch.
So what becomes of the creative class in the new digital economy? If it’s not
possible to sell content online, and if the analog market is also in
dramatic decline, then must we conclude that the Internet is actually a
catastrophe for creative artists and high cultural organizations?
Yes and no. The irony of the digital commodification of content is that, while
it destroys the value of the copy, it is actually adding to the value of
physical events. Take, for example, the music industry. While it’s true that
CD sales have been dramatically declining for years, the music business is
actually experiencing a boom in live concerts. While consumers won’t pay for
copies of the work of their favorite bands, they will pay for the privilege
of seeing them live. What we seeing here is a paradigmatic shift from the
20th century industrial economy to what economist Will
Hutton describes as the 21st century “experiental” one.
Thus, artists like Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Prince are
all divorcing themselves from their traditional music labels and are,
instead, experimenting by giving away their product online as a means of
promoting their brands and tickets for their live events. In the old
industrial economy, artists played concerts to sell recordings; in the
digital economy, artists gives away recordings in order to sell concert
tickets.
The same is true for professional writers and journalists. Take, for example,
Chris Anderson, Wired magazine editor-in-chief and the
author of the new book “Free”, who is giving away
digital files of his book for free online but is successfully charging hefty
fees for speaking gigs around the world. As with musicians, Anderson is
pioneering the new business model of giving away the copy in exchange for
being paid to perform in person.
Ironically, for all the insurrectionary rhetoric of the digital
revolutionaries, the Internet is actually emerging as nothing more (or less)
than a sales and marketing platform for physical products – a medium to
create demand for concerts, readings, speeches and seminars.
Thus, Jonathan “I don't consider it my job” Littell is absolutely wrong. For
better or worse, the reverse is actually now true. The job of all artists is
now self-promotion. In an age in which the old cultural gatekeepers are
being swept away, the most pressing challenge of creative artists is to
build their own brands. And it’s the Internet which provides creative talent
with easy-to-use and cheap tools for their self-promotion.
So where should artists begin? My advice would be to open an account on
Twitter. It’s an excellent platform to build one’s brand, acquire a
substantial following and publish provocative remarks. To begin, you might
pose the question: Why are artists poor?
She is about 6 months pregnant and drawing her should be challenging and fun. It isn't every day you get an opportunity to draw the beauty of pregnancy. She was a little shy last semester but she has now conquered that shyness and is excited to be back as our model this year. 
