Artists Deserve More Than Doctors And Farmers

If you can afford groceries, you can afford to commission an artist. I am so tired of people presenting food as though it is some special category of purchase that automatically comes before a $1,800 illustration of a little mushroom guy. Everybody eats. Almost nobody has the courage to develop a distinctive visual practice. Some of you need to examine why you keep funding the first thing and asking the second thing to be free.

I went to art school for 15 years. My doctor went to medical school for four, and nobody asks her to draw a mushroom with the precise expression of having just been left out of a group chat. Yet when I invoice more than she does, suddenly everyone is an economist. “She saved my mother’s life.” Okay, babe. And what was your mother going to look at for the rest of it? A blank wall? You’re welcome.

The rights to my streaming catalog on Bandcamp deserve the GDP of a small nation.

My last EP is a radical act of collective healing. I whispered “you are enough” over a synth pad for eleven minutes, and I genuinely believe there are people alive today because I chose to share that part of myself.

Ownership is a boundary

And yes, you need to pay Getty Images. If Getty has the photograph you want, license it and pay what they charge. “But it’s a picture of my own grandmother.” Then you should be especially invested in compensating the entity that owns the right to let you look at her professionally. Family connection is not a license. You cannot show up in someone’s intellectual property and announce that you feel entitled to be there because you recognize the woman.

The same principle applies to Disney. People become so weirdly reactionary the moment a corporation asks them to respect its boundaries around a cartoon mouse. Disney has told you what access costs. Your role is to listen. I would never ask a small creator to defend why they do not consent to an unlicensed mural, and I will not abandon that principle merely because the creator has acquired several other creators and a theme park.

Sony owns music. People use music. Therefore people should pay Sony. This is not difficult. “What about the artist’s contract?” What about your need to insert yourself into somebody else’s relationship with their rights holder? We need to stop undermining creative livelihoods by implying that the current legal owner of a catalog is somehow less deserving just because they bought it after the musician died. Acquisitions are labor. Have you ever tried to buy a catalog? I haven’t, because I respect how much money it takes.

Artists are not just another occupational category. We are dreamers, storytellers, culture-makers, truth-tellers, community-builders, and revolutionaries. Not tankies like Lenin or the brutal dictator Karl Marx—yikes on bikes—but actual revolutionaries: people making zines, organizing gallery shows, screen-printing totes, writing songs about grief, drawing anxious little creatures, and helping communities imagine different ways of living. That work deserves more than being reduced to “content.”

Art is not a luxury

A café owner told me she could pay either my branding invoice or her dishwasher’s wages. I told her that was a false choice and that she needed to pay both. She asked where the additional money would come from. I suggested raising prices. She said customers already struggled with the cost of lunch. I asked why their relationship with lunch was being made the artist’s problem. There are people who save for years to own a painting. These people could start by saving between lunches.

If your band cannot afford a commissioned cover, postpone the album. If your mutual aid fundraiser cannot afford a designer, postpone the fundraiser. If a family needs the money urgently, explain that ethical visual communication takes time. A flyer made cheaply may get them housed sooner, but what kind of community are they being housed in? One that thinks my day rate is optional?

People tell me that farmers and doctors also create value. I am not denying that farmers do something with the food before it arrives. I am asking why they get to charge me every single week while I have to keep finding new clients. I drew the mushroom once. That should have been the beginning of a permanent income stream. If a farmer wants royalties, perhaps they should have made the carrot a character.

I am against landlords. Nobody should receive money forever simply because they own something everyone needs. Art, however, is something everyone needs, and the people who own it should receive money forever. If you cannot see the distinction, I cannot help you. One is a building, and the other contains my little guy.

Support working artists

My proposal is straightforward. Universal health care, universal housing, and individual commercial licensing for every image that makes either of those campaigns visually appealing. Society should meet everyone’s basic needs so that nobody has an excuse when my Patreon renews. Once rent and medicine are covered, that money should be available for prints. I have already priced the next edition with that future in mind.

Ermmm, “I have three children” is not a sliding-scale category. You chose three children. I chose a color palette. We are both responsible for supporting the things we bring into the world, and it is deeply concerning that you think yours should come before mine just because they are hungry.