Flutterby™! : Art & Markets

Just copying over from posterity: On a MeFi entry that links to There Are Too Many Video Games, I wrote:

I think there's a question here about for whom we make our art. If we're doing it just for ourselves, great, any external appreciation is a bonus. I have a hobby like that.

If we do it for our community, or for the accolades, it gets a little harder. As has been mentioned up-thread, the mass market means there's a lot of really good art widely distributed, and unless there's something specific to a differentiated community or differentiated people, the product, of, say, the little bit of time I spend singing arpeggios at my garage walls, is unlikely to find a broad market. No matter how much my wife appreciates it.

But there's this middle-ground where there might be a community, and might not, and then we have to start to weigh off how much of that artistic endeavor we want to put into our own projects, how much we want to put into building some sort of group, and how much energy we want to expend to appreciate the art of others.

I'm the sort of person who quickly gets pushed to front and center of any thing I get interested in, but I'm not super good at building group relationships and dynamics, so I have two things where I and a few other people have built small communities and put on small events. By "small" I mean events with from, say, ten-ish to 60-ish people.

As we've talked about growing those two groups (on wildly different topics) more, we come into the problem of too damned many things to be involved in. The larger of those groups is focused on civic engagement, and we do about two presentations a month, but we're trying to get people involved in the larger community, and suddenly that's two or three City meetings a month, plus whatever sort of unofficial meetings with other groups we want to be chatting with, and...

A couple of months ago I went to a picnic organized by a local Pride organization and it was like "oh, maybe we don't need more organizers and leaders, maybe we just need more people coming to picnics".

Maybe I don't need to be the community organizer, maybe I need to be knocking on doors for candidates. Maybe I don't need to be calling the square dances and trying to build a square dance club, maybe I need to be taking swing lessons, or doing something else that roughly interchanges. Maybe I don't need to be performing, maybe I just need to be the audience.

I think a lot of us are finding that we don't have the sorts of community connections and strength that we'd really like, and we'd love for our art to be the focus of those community connections, but the sorts of people that we really want to connect with also want their art to be the focus, and we haven't figured out how to collaborate on that art.

And that's the real struggle, because, of course, the wider we collaborate, the more like bland mass-market that art becomes, and the more we're competing with the people at the top of their game who've dedicated their lives to something that replicates easily.

I mean, I've got a few friends who are making games, or writing, or whatever. I love their work, but part of why I love their work is my connection with them, their work doesn't have that thing that'd make it mass market. Do I have time to consume everything they're putting out and work on my own stuff?

I don't, and so I go on making things that, when my friends see them, say "this is really cool" and "I really appreciate that you're doing this", but that aren't really changing the world. And I deeply understand that frustration.