Make Your Art No Matter What

I’m always looking for ways to improve my productivity and creativity.

So, when I saw a book titled Make Your Art No Matter What by Beth Pickens it seemed like a natural fit.

The short review: Don’t bother. There is nothing in here that is new, novel, or all that helpful.

The longer review is that the book reads as if it were written by a committee headed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Over and over again the author tells the reader that socialism is the answer and capitalism is the problem. And it becomes clear that the author believes that everything they like is socialism and everything they don’t like is capitalism.

And then she goes on to argue that the wealthy among us who have no need to work have just as many issues with being creative and finding time to do their art as the rest of us. More money more problems, so we are all on a level playing field…except when we aren’t because capitalism means some people start life with an advantage and others with a disadvantage while socialism would mean we all start equal, financially…or so she says.

And then she falls into parity and stereotype. As but one example, she describes what she calls Punk Damage, which is the result of coming of age within the punk scene. The damage is the lingering sensibility into adulthood that money should not matter and that people with punk damage do not charge enough for their work.

And then this sentence, “Not all artists come from punk culture, which can read as a white person’s context though people of color have always been part of and intrinsically linked to punk.” Hmm. There’s a lot of foolishness in this part of the book.

So, I’m a liberal. I believe we should have universal access to health care, address economic inequality, deal with systemic and structural racism, aggressively work to mitigate climate change, etc.

However, when I look at socialism versus capitalism it is beyond clear that both are ideologies and both are flawed, unless you get the rules, laws, norms, social contract, and equality/equity piece right. Further, I also know that the social democracies in Europe—pretty much all of them—are not socialist countries. They are democracies with free market capitalist economies and generous social welfare programs. They do a good job of getting the balance right, mostly. The U.S., not so much generally, but in some areas we fail utterly (racism, income inequality, universal health care) and others we don’t do so bad (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, and so on).

And there are many socialist countries—Bangladesh, Algeria, Nicaragua (Wikipedia has a good list of actual socialist countries)—where income inequality and a range of social justice issues are terrible.

The point being, even if we generously include Denmark and Sweden in the list of socialist countries—they aren’t, though—there are still a lot of socialist countries that do a terrible job at promoting equality, equity, social justice, and freedom, especially artistic freedom. And the same is true of capitalist countries, some get it right while others get it horribly wrong.

Where the difference lies is in the laws, regulations, governing structure, norms, social contract of each country. It’s not the ideological label, but what you actually do and promote.

As an artist, there are capitalist countries that are terrible and socialist countries that are terrible too.

So, the author is more than welcome to her opinion and to try to use her attempt to help artists be better artists as a means to argue for her political ideology. But it fails to offer anything substantive to those of us who believe in art and social justice, but not big fans of ideologues.