February 20, 2011

Income from your art!

I read an article in Fast Company this morning where Rico Frances makes the observation that "gold has lost its prestige," and "When gold was the only store of value, it was sacred. In medieval art, gold was everywhere. Viewed by candlelight, it created a dazzling, spiritual effect. Today's world doesn't want to be dazzled by gold. We just want to know how much money it can be converted into."

Unfortunately, this is how many of us tend to view what we do with our art and our time. How can we sell a great idea to make a ton of money? How can we make our art appeal to the masses so we can make a living doing what we love? In other words, we water down our passion and put a price tag on it in the hopes that someone will be willing to pay for it.

Maybe, through our pursuit of profit and appealing to the masses we have lost the joy, beauty, and magic in creating? Perhaps, if we simply returned to drinking in the beauty of the world around us, and started again to create for the joy of creating, we would find that our art appeals to more people than we could have possibly imagined?

2 comments:

Rob said...

Good thought! Where is our creative output and why do we create? Out of the love of creating or out of the love to sell it. Thanks for sharing!

Andrew Frank said...

Thanks Rob! I am glad that you found value in it!