Your Job as an Artist

Andrew Keen, the so-called Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley, tackles his common ground of technology and creativity in a piece from the Telegraph where he hopes to discover Why are Artists so Poor? After a bit of Twittering, Andrew found that his:

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”.

The shift in the relationship between art and technology, as Andrew continues to explain, is due as much to the lack of gatekeepers (agents, editors, studios) on the Internet as it is to the ease of personal distribution.

With that being said, the (new) job of the artist is more or less strategic 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.

This is a guest post from Alex J. Mann.  You can subscribe to his blog here and follow him on Twitter here.

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  1. […] Your Job as an Artist » Lone Gunman This entry was written by codybaldwin, posted on September 12, 2009 at 7:02 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « Previous Post This is a way tight interview with invader, that I haven’t actually watched. » […]