ART & SOCIETY & CAPITALISM: Me being all "thinky" & wanting to know your thoughts too!

I have never blogged. So this is just a note re the eventual first ever blog post to come.... eventually.

At the moment, I'm having a lot of thoughts and feels about art and capitalism, art and ethics, and art and resistance, which are all separate and inseparably intertwined topics, so in my usual manner of keeping things light, I thought to myself "self, this is the PERFECT first ever blog material!"

Obviously, the logical next step was to Google relevant and easily accessible books and articles, and there I found and then ordered from my local library, "How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy" by Jenny Odell, so I'll be reading that, and then refining my first ever blog post accordingly.

Back to the initial topic (art and capitalism, art and ethics, and art and resistance) as reproduced in my personal life. I worry that when I find a replacement job for the one the pandemic took from me, I will once again slip into a non-productive art-mind-space because grinding through the 8-10 hours, 5 days a week of paid work required to simply have an apartment, food, heat, electricity, internet (it doesn't escape me how privileged these problems are) drains me of the energy, confidence, and self-worth that I require in order to simply allow myself to make art. We live in a society that has made making art the domain of the privileged, and while I have lots more of that than most people do, I haven't ever seemed to have enough to be able to "be an artist".

To this day, I cringe any time I describe myself as an artist. I mean, I cannot possibly deserve that moniker can I? I don't suffer for my art, I suffer because I choose to have a job that will pay for the rent and that has historically left me unable to pursue making art consistently.

I worry that the joy of simply making art for its own sake will once again be de-prioritized in the few remaining hours not dedicated to paid work because I have to parent, make dinner, clean, do laundry, walk the dog, try to sleep, and besides, art's not making me any money and it costs me money to make.

Then there's this whole website business, and using print-on-demand drop-shipping services and the ethics/lack-of-ethics therein: how much are the workers being paid? What's the ecological footprint? etc. If an artist can make a living with these tools, must they then be both resisting and capitulating?

If you read this, Wow, thanks!

I am genuinely interested in reading your thoughts, and book and article suggestions too!