There is a 100 per cent probability that, at some point during your day, you will engage with art of some kind. The music you hear, artist. The album cover art (that just shows my age), artist. Building designs, coffee mug designs, brand logos and colours, the ads you see in this paper/on this website. The most heinous and most peaceful of symbols throughout history were and are created by an artist.
Why perpetuate the myth of the starving artist? The image suits everyone except the artist. Unless they suffer from the martyr syndrome. Sadly, some do. Literally and figuratively, “poor me, poor me, poor me.”
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But I digress.
How does this label benefit people?
For the Paleocon, borderline alt-right extremists, the starving artists and probably artist in general are one of many poster children for their attack on what they consider the welfare state and how frivolous of these artists to be, well, making art. How terrible of them to tell the truth, to define a culture. How reprehensible of them to exercise the freedom of expression. Kind of like what I am doing here.
Now, before you right wing cons (what an appropriate moniker) get your boxers in a bunch, we will swing the pendulum to the left and include the bleeding heart, eco socialist, Stalinist extremists who would hold artists up as beacons of freedom, a representation of the downtrodden.
They then would take whatever money the artists did make and give it to someone else. Freedom of expression, they would shout. Bemoaning attacks and restrictions on our expressive freedoms, all the while ranting that any view not aligned with theirs is somehow fascist. Should we, at any time, share an opinion, create an image, use a word, and/or a turn of phrase that might hurt someone’s feelings, the cancel culture kicks in. That whole political correctness thing is enough fodder for an entire column.
It appears nobody is going to emerge unscathed in this one. Except for the centrists. Wishy washy to a degree, but mostly they are about admiring the art or not admiring it, buying it or not buying it and, as Jerry Saltz, the New York Magazine, Pulitzer prize winning critic (yes, there is a Pulitzer prize for failed artists who go on to be critics) says, and I paraphrase; “Art, you either love it, or you don’t.”
Art is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. That is why, during these especially unique and difficult times, it saddens me to see artists selling their artworks at ridiculously low prices. It not only devalues their work; it has the same effect on all creatives.
Artists are grateful for the government’s help. For many, not just artists, it is the difference between having food or not. Hell, it is the ability to have one’s basic human needs met. The pandemic has uncovered the flaws in the system. The government, in implementing the CERB, have shown to many minimum wage earners, what a living wage looks like. Perhaps even what a Universal Basic Income might look like.
Yes. Universal Basic Income. A minimum income for everyone.
Of course, the detractors on the right will scream welfare state, those on the left think everything is a good start but “never enough.” Like every system, it has flaws. The pros, however, outweigh the cons. Without having to worry about losing homes, feeding their children or getting swamped in debt, people of all kinds, not just artists, will be free to explore. This will encourage creativity, experimentation, invention and innovation. Some people will choose not to work, that will never change, no matter the system.
Some artists will still starve and sadly, some artists will not succeed. They will still sell their artwork at prices lower than what they are worth. Devaluing the entire market. Some will give it away for “exposure.”
I got news for you, kids; people die from exposure, and yes, starvation.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
