These principles act as a soft manifesto for myself, and for anyone else who wants to be an artist practicing for softer reasons at softer paces in softer spaces:

1. Can you afford to break down any barriers between your work and the audience? (monetary, language, accessibility, etc.)


2. What can you gain, that is not money, from the work?


3. Who, that is not

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Being an artist within an economic system that favors private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, a price system, and competitive markets belittles my practice into a hobby. I am an amateur with no artist statement, thesis show, or MFA. The money I invest in creating art is a temporary loan to myself that I feel pressured to repay quickly... See more

The monetary motivations of capitalism can be a comfortable place to some because it is known. Capitalism is a well-established masculine monoculture of stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression that relies on dependencies and power structures

As Deleuze and Guattari put it in What Is Philosophy , “Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master.”

These principles act as a soft manifesto for myself, and for anyone else who wants to be an artist practicing for softer reasons at softer paces in softer spaces:

1. Can you afford to break down any barriers between your work and the audience? (monetary, language, accessibility, etc.)


2. What can you gain, that is not money, from the work?


3. Who, that is not

... See more

“creativity under capitalism is not creative at all because it only produces more of the same,” as Oli Mould puts it in Against Creativity

“Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master.”

The desperation, exhaustion, and hopelessness in both the content of my thoughts and the method of capturing my thoughts exist because I work to live without getting to actually live, or process living.

When you’re losing a game you don’t even want to play, or forcing a fit into a form you don’t want to be in, the best thing to do is to stop playing and go find your shape.