Advice to all artists: open an account on Twitter to promote your work Photo: REUTERS
It’s bad news, I argued in my 2007 book Cult of the Amateur, a polemic which suggested that the Internet is killing our culture and undermining the livelihood of cultural producers. No, it’s good news, counter the techno-optimists like Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky - who argue that the Internet offers creative artists and organizations an opportunity to escape from the sometimes unjust and inefficient control of industrial age mass-media.
Today, more than two years after the publication of Cult of the Amateur, as the destructive pace of technological change in the media business has dramatically increased, the debate about the impact of the Internet on high cultural artists and organizations has also become more urgent. Today, as the old mass media industries of television, newspapers, book publishing, recorded music and movies are being fundamentally restructured by the digital economy, it’s become clear that the early 21st century digital revolution is having as profound an impact upon culture as the mid 19th century industrial revolution.
Indeed, the relationship between creativity and technology has become such an emotive issue today that a new international political movement, the Pirate Party, has emerged which actively supports the rights of both the cultural producer and consumer against big media conglomerates. Thus, in an interview earlier this month in The Telegraph, Pirate Party UK leader Andrew Robinson underlined his party’s commitment to reforming copyright law in the UK which, he claimed, adds to the “wealth of big business” rather than “benefiting the artist.”
So is Robinson correct, has old-fashioned mass-media really impoverished creative artists? In the spirit of Internet democracy, I took the issue of artistic poverty to Twitter, sending out a tweet asking: why are artists poor?
My Twitter responses extended to everything from lucid one-worders like “oversupply” to philosophical tweets such as “because they live in the moment” to Clay Shirky’s terse and elliptically authoritative “unequal distribution of talent + supply and demand”.
Yet, as many members of my Twitter network reminded me, not all creative artists are poor. Take, for example, Jonathan Littell, the Franco-American author of The Kindly Ones, a 900 page Holocaust novel that won the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française and Prix Goncourt in France, and which the News Corp owned Harper Collins paid $1 million for the privilege of exclusively distributing in the American market.
Littell is a good example of a cultural aristocrat in the analog ancien regime, a writer acclaimed by high-end cultural curators for his “talent”. Last February, for example, he was interviewed by Jeffrey Trachtenberg, the book reviewer of The Wall Street Journal. “Will you come to the U.S. to promote your book?” Trachtenberg asked him.
“No,” Littell replied, disdainfully. “I don't do that kind of thing. I don't consider it my job.”
So what, exactly, is the “job” of an artist like Jonathan Littell? Historically, at least since the industrial revolution of the mid 19th century, his commercial function has been to create art that would then be manufactured and sold on the mass-market by his publisher. For the last 150 years, there existed a clear division of labor between a Littell who created art and his mass-market publisher who printed and sold copies of the finished product.
Over the last twenty years, however, an interconnected trinity of technological, cultural and ideological events have revolutionized the mass-market copy economy:
1. The appearance of the Internet as a global platform for the creation and distribution of content.
2. A broad legitimacy crisis of the traditional copy economy, both in terms of its economic and cultural value.
3. The ideological assault on the supposedly “elitist” idea of talent and of the role of cultural gatekeepers in the discovery and development of high-end artists like Jonathan Littell.
Before we get to this revolution against the ancien cultural regime, let’s remind ourselves how the old gatekeepered economy worked. As Clay Shirky tweeted me, the culture business rests on the unequal distribution of talent and of its supply and demand in the marketplace. Like any other economic arrangement, therefore, scarcity and abundance determines price and both the availability and nature of the cultural product.
Critically acclaimed 900 page novels about the Nazis might be rare, but there has never been any scarcity of obscure novelists trying to sell their work into major publishing houses like Harper Collins. But in an industrial economy in which books have to be edited, printed and then shipped to bookstores, it’s literally impossible to publish everything. Thus, an ecosystem of agents, editors, studio owners, record label executives and publishers emerged – cultural gatekeepers of “taste” and “talent” – who, from the commanding heights of their offices in downtown London, Los Angeles and New York City - determined what should and shouldn’t be brought into the marketplace.
And so for every Jonathan Littell with his million dollar deal, there were tens of thousands of unpublished writers. In this copy economy, the work of the vast majority of aspiring writers, musicians or photographers never appeared.
The digital revolution appears to change all this. By replacing physical atoms with digital bits, the Internet undermines the monopoly of these cultural gatekeepers. The Internet’s digital platform enables the creation and storage of infinite content. Whereas the physical printing press limited the publication of books, so the web enables anyone to digitally publish anything they like. The market’s supply of culture, therefore, metamorphosizes from scarcity into cornucopia.
Meanwhile, the old media economy – which wrote those fat cheques for Jonathan Littell - is now in crisis. Newspapers all over America are shutting down, sales of recorded music and DVD’s are in freefall, the global publishing business is shrinking dramatically. The gatekeeper, that traditional curator of culture, is withering away. He/She is being replaced by We: the collective cacophony of self-expression, the cult of democracy, an ecosystem of noise.
The dream of techno-optimists is that the democratic cultural talent on the Internet would replace the old aristocratic talent. As the analog historical chapter closed, they dreamed, so the digital one would begin. So has one cultural economy been seamlessly succeeded by another?
This neat historical narrative makes perfect sense in theory, but it isn’t born out in practice. While the Internet is awash in content, the vast majority of it is either free or stolen. Thus, the most popular new online services are free ones like the Swedish start-up Spotify which provide gratuitous music for consumers unwilling to spend money on content.
The “success” of Spotify symbolizes the death of the old copy economy. The inconvenient truth about the digital revolution is that the online consumer has been so spoilt by the availability of free content on the Internet, that the sale of intellectual content is increasingly the holy grail not only of start-up Silicon Valley entrepreneurs but also of experienced media moguls like News Corp CEO, Rupert Murdoch.
So what becomes of the creative class in the new digital economy? If it’s not possible to sell content online, and if the analog market is also in dramatic decline, then must we conclude that the Internet is actually a catastrophe for creative artists and high cultural organizations?
Yes and no. The irony of the digital commodification of content is that, while it destroys the value of the copy, it is actually adding to the value of physical events. Take, for example, the music industry. While it’s true that CD sales have been dramatically declining for years, the music business is actually experiencing a boom in live concerts. While consumers won’t pay for copies of the work of their favorite bands, they will pay for the privilege of seeing them live. What we seeing here is a paradigmatic shift from the 20th century industrial economy to what economist Will Hutton describes as the 21st century “experiental” one.
Thus, artists like Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Prince are all divorcing themselves from their traditional music labels and are, instead, experimenting by giving away their product online as a means of promoting their brands and tickets for their live events. In the old industrial economy, artists played concerts to sell recordings; in the digital economy, artists gives away recordings in order to sell concert tickets.
The same is true for professional writers and journalists. Take, for example, Chris Anderson, Wired magazine editor-in-chief and the author of the new book “Free”, who is giving away digital files of his book for free online but is successfully charging hefty fees for speaking gigs around the world. As with musicians, Anderson is pioneering the new business model of giving away the copy in exchange for being paid to perform in person.
Ironically, for all the insurrectionary rhetoric of the digital revolutionaries, the Internet is actually emerging as nothing more (or less) than a sales and marketing platform for physical products – a medium to create demand for concerts, readings, speeches and seminars.
Thus, Jonathan “I don't consider it my job” Littell is absolutely wrong. For better or worse, the reverse is actually now true. The job of all artists is now self-promotion. In an age in which the old cultural gatekeepers are being swept away, the most pressing challenge of creative artists is to build their own brands. And it’s the Internet which provides creative talent with easy-to-use and cheap tools for their self-promotion.
So where should artists begin? My advice would be to open an account on Twitter. It’s an excellent platform to build one’s brand, acquire a substantial following and publish provocative remarks. To begin, you might pose the question: Why are artists poor?
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She is about 6 months pregnant and drawing her should be challenging and fun. It isn't every day you get an opportunity to draw the beauty of pregnancy. She was a little shy last semester but she has now conquered that shyness and is excited to be back as our model this year. 
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