Art - Fun = Business

It's strange the things you learn on the internet.

I was doing nothing more than killing time checking messages when out of nowhere, something caught my eye. A user claimed that she was a traditional artist because she was using pencil and paper and not computers.

Well, naturally, I couldn't pass up this opportune moment to be a thorn in someone's side who thinks they are all that. It's the jerk inside me that thinks they know more than the other person. And in some respect I do in this case.

But she held her ground with very simple logic. She draws for fun, she doesn't like drawing on the computer, she likes to call herself an artist even though she probably isn't one in neither the contemporary sense or even in the modern sense. She gets paid for what she does, but she isn't a commercial artist (or at least she didn't consider herself to be one). She just does it for fun. And if drawing doesn't become fun for her, she will simply just move on. Nothing can stop her from drawing. Not even the changing commercial markets or economy.

That's the simple explanation of our hour-long conversation over the live chat box I saw this in.

But she did bring up something interesting, something I forgot about for a while now.

Art for me used to be fun too. So fun, in fact, that it made me want to become an artist of some kind so I can just sit back, relax, and create whatever I want. I thought it was the perfect job I could ever have, because I would be having fun in the process.

Then I went to college and slowly found out that I need this in order for my piece to be considered art or that in order for it to be considered lucrative or this hidden idea in order for it to be taken seriously. The fun slowly but surely got sucked out of it over the course of every class teaching me how to look at things in an intelligent critical light and mind set.

Combine this with the fact that the art that sells the best to Joe Average is the art of the untrained. By that, I mean people without the education I have in the field of art. Like the user I was talking to earlier, they just do art for fun! And they make it interesting, because it is as close to that "pure art" that we as children produce. And that is something I am told all artists strive for. That freedom of expression and communication.

That being said, in a very acute retrospect of sorts, I'm starting to believe I'm being trained NOT to be what I wanted to be originally. I've admitted time and time again that I got into this field because it was something I enjoy doing and I wanted to become better at it. But the more formal training I go through, the more the fun starts to disappear. I don't feel like I'm being trained to be an artist or even like I'm being trained to make art. I feel like I'm being trained how to become a business product that is ever changing to communicate personal interests in a visual format. A tangible commodity of my own mind.

I guess that's what I find so frustrating. I didn't want to become a commodity. I didn't want my skill or even my knowledge to have a price tag (hence why I don't know when to shut up about a subject matter, which got me into this mess in the first place).

I had more fun in my Drawing class this past semester than I did in any of the classes where I had to learn technical skills because I wasn't worried about deeper content or execution techniques. I was finally doing something for the fun of it and enjoying it. But with Advance Seminar coming up, a class I'm told through the grape vine is one of those classes that is heavy on the idea and not so much on technique, I don't think I'll get that fun feeling back ever again.