Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, Dutch economist and visual artist Hans Abbing

To make the artists worthy of the money they were paid and the patrons worthy of having the money to dole out, art had to have powerful moral and spiritual implications. This is, in the basest terms, what separates artist from artisan: an artisan can make you a good thing, but an artist will make you a good person. For that, you can justify almost

This is the birth of the artist as we understand it today: someone possessed of a vision and talent that makes them stand apart.

But if the point of art is to know ourselves, and the point of an artist is to make art, we’d better know what money has done to us.

The drive to create still stands outside of money: people will squeeze it into the cracks of their lives, sacrifice comfort or even necessity, fight and claw and carve out time to make something, to share their understanding of the world. They shouldn’t have to, but goddammit, they do.

part of the point of sharing art is to give people something that cannot properly be valued.

Whatever you might think about the relevance of political boundaries to the greater human condition, the nut of the idea here is basically true: who ‘we’ are, whatever the we, is pretty tightly wrapped up in our stories about ourselves, our myths and ideas expressed in whatever arts happen to have sufficient public attention.

on and creates the context of the world around it. Art of any kind endures because it captures some understanding, some piece of the world, so purely that it becomes a piece of the world itself.

Time spent thinking about art is time spent wondering what it really feels like to be you.