The Artist as Consumer
The act of creating in absence of professional gains is frightening to the artist who’s need to create comes from a deep need to keep moving forward, in material and in thought. However with each investment money disappears into a vortex, the economy eagerly sucks up our ambitions by accepting educational fees, material costs, membership fees for industry organisations, exhibition costs, travel costs for attending shows and lectures, studio rent, a nanny, tools and internships
keeping companies afloat who cannot break even unless they make use of free labour. If the dividend to this is an occasional bit of press and intermittent sales then who is to say that artists are anything more than consumers in the artistic market and their work merely a by-product of the sales figures in the sector?
Is the vocational nature of this profession being exploited by commerce and fuelled by ego? Success merely a carrot dangling from a stick with the ego galloping along after it?
Between 2003 and 2018 I have tried to look at the under layer of things and to play with the zone between truth and fiction, pretension and reality. Confronted with a child one wants to believe, at the very least in beauty. Faced with the Trump era, at the very least in facts.
A chapter ends here and something new must find it’s way to the surface.