ANATOLY IVANOV / PROSE / 2024-01-02

STRUGGLING ARTIST? GIVE AWAY YOUR WORK FOR FREE.

by Anatoly IVANOV

ART THEORY / ECONOMICS / LITERATURE / SOCIETY / OUTSIDE NEWS

Yann Le Cunn, a Chief AI Scientist at Meta, writes that “only a small number of book authors make significant money from book sales. This seems to suggest that most books should be freely available for download. The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison.”

So if you don’t make a lot of money with pop art — the stuff for the median of the normal distribution of readers — just give your art away for free. Maybe stop eating and remove yourself from the gene pool as well, while we’re at it? 🤦🏻‍♂️

Our “society” seems to have lost the “social”. And forgot that the difference between entertainment and art, design and exploration is the utility or lack thereof. (That’s been my demarcation for 26 years as pro creative, doing both).

What puzzles me — again — is how simple principles are difficult to grasp for Turing-awarded PhDs. If we had a small total number of books to choose, none would rise to the “small number of books with significant sales”. Quantity and iteration is the name of the creative game.

Creating for free doesn’t pay the rent, nor shuffles glucose to the brain.

Another model — often suggested by the likes of Le Cunn — is the “hobby model” alongside “a useful job” does not yield the pro-grade quality of 12-hours a day projects.

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