The Cost of Art

 

Over the last few years artists and creatives of all types have watched with growing horror as generative AI has consumed everything we've ever made and begun spitting out mediocre facsimiles of our work. Very few people outside the art industry know what it's really like to be an artist. Let me break it down as quickly as I can:

• A lot of publishing rates have not changed much since the 1960s
• A lot of publishers take forever to pay and pay literally every other bill first before paying the artist
• There are virtually no protections for artists working as independent contractors
• As a self-employed artist taxes are higher and wages are usually much, much lower
• Many artists are making as little as 15,000 a year and pocketing almost nothing by the time they pay expenses and their tax bill. In fact, some married artists would be better off not working at all because of taxes.

Over and over we hear that if we give executives at the top millions of dollars in bonuses, it will trickle down. Meanwhile the people at the top still don't pay their fair share in taxes, and it's not a stretch to say that some self-employed artists (like yours truly) pay more in taxes than some billion-dollar corporations do.

Wage inequality is staggering in the United States, and artists are among the first to feel it. When average people don't have the money for luxuries, they stop buying art. Art, even inexpensive art, is a luxury for most people, and it's an easy thing to do without. A luxury car will still get you to work, and if forced to choose between a painting above the fireplace and a nice car in the garage, a lot of people will pick the car.

For decades now CEOs and other executives have been given enormous bonuses and gigantic salaries, and while we've waited for it to trickle down, they've come up with stuff like ChatGPT and MidJourney. Instead of letting that money trickle down to artists they funded a nightmare mimeograph machine. The upper class used to spend enough on art that it kept a lot of artists in nice homes and luxury of their own. Now hardly anyone can afford art and those that can would rather fund reproduction robots that are trained on the stolen labor of the artists who have been living on the scraps and crumbs offered by the publishing houses many of these rich CEOs own, or hold shares in.

I wonder when enough is enough? When will there be a new American Revolution that sees livable wages for all and the fair taxation of people with millions and billions of dollars? Why has our government let these people skate for so long, and why isn't the government doing something about generative AI? At nearly every campaign rally and televised interview or debate I hear Kamala Harris talking about how we have to be first in AI - does that also mean generative AI? Does anyone in the government even know how it works, or what the actual cost of art is?

Every day I see people bragging about the "cool" images they "made" with programs like MidJourney, but would they still think it was cool if they knew they were taking any of the crumbs offered to artists by this society?