Escaping the Creator Economy and Breathing Again
My feed felt like a mall food court during a fire drill — everyone juggling trays, alarms, ring lights, and a brand voice, while even the cows have adopted Gen Z cadence and a serotonin-deprived wink (and it must be said: this is not an indictment on Gen Z themselves). A singer’s grief sits next to a cat wearing chainmail next to a PhD thread on Byzantine iconography next to someone’s beadwork, and all of it gets flattened into the same 1080×1920 slot with the same pleading caption: “like/comment/share/save so the algorithm will let me live.” Nuance doesn’t die here; it’s never allowed to be born. The scroll is a centrifuge that spins craft into content and then asks content to act like a friend.
In that din, every object becomes a skit. Myth is cut to a punchline. A painting gets reduced to a before/after. Even the sacred becomes clickable. The effect is claustrophobia with confetti — bright, loud, and airless. The feed teaches you to speak fast, to disarm your own seriousness before the replies do it for you, to sand down the spine of anything that might ask a person to slow down. The etiquette is simple: preempt yourself. Make it cheap. Make it cheerful. Make it now.
I have played along. I have posted the drafts and the almosts and the what-do-you-think’s because that is what the room rewards. But there is a cost to living in a place where everything is “just for fun” and also somehow your rent. The cost is that you begin to apologize for wanting your work to be taken seriously — to be taken out of the food court and placed where breath is longer than a swipe.
The Forced Humility Trap
There’s a particular trick the internet runs on artists. It is not the demand to be humble — humility is a good thing and I need more of it — it is the demand to confuse humility with self-erasure. The rule isn’t “don’t be arrogant;” it’s “don’t be upright.” It’s the quiet pressure to hunch: to meet every announcement with a nervous laugh, to cushion every price with a disclaimer, to narrate every invoice as if you might be escorted out of the party.
I caught myself doing it this month. I was writing a post about new work and new prices — beadwork that took weeks, illustration that braided mythology with maximalist design, mixed media with a spine of research under it. And without thinking, I started drafting a pre-defense: I know times are tough, I’m keeping a low tier on Ko-Fi, I’m not trying to be inaccessible, I promise this isn’t me thinking I’m better than— It read like I was asking permission to exist.
That reflex is not virtue; it’s conditioning. It’s the conditioning of the feed that tells creators their ambition is indecent and their costs are a character flaw. The same feed that tells you to spend three days on a piece and then slice it into seven clips with a trending audio and a caption that translates to, “Sorry for wanting bread.” Forced humility is a trapdoor. You pull the handle yourself.
The antidote isn’t arrogance. The antidote is clarity: I make work that takes time, training, materials, and a particular kind of attention; it is not morally suspect to charge for it. A price is not a confession; it’s a boundary. A boundary is not a snub; it’s the grammar of sustainability. And if I must choose between apologizing for existing and disappointing the algorithm, I will disappoint the algorithm and sleep.
The Redefinition of Fine Art
Here is my thesis, and I mean it with both hands: Fine Art is not a class marker; it is a discipline of intention. It’s the long, stubborn commitment to craft, to research, to a conceptual through-line you can trace with your finger and defend with your breath. It is the refusal to let an object be only attractive. It is the insistence that even beauty has arguments inside it.
“Fine” doesn’t mean oil paint in a white room while someone with a clipboard pronounces you serious. “Fine” means finished but still speaking. It means the material and the idea were introduced properly, allowed to court, to fight, to make a treaty. It means the artist did not abdicate the last ten percent when the likes plateaued.
By that measure, maximalism can be Fine Art — the riot of color, the devotional clutter, the baroque joy that knows exactly what it’s doing and why. Mythology belongs here — not as a costume but as a language you spent years learning so you could say something new in it. Anime-inflected illustration belongs here — when the lines are chosen, not chanced; when reference becomes argument; when the page carries the hum of study. Beadwork absolutely belongs here — precision in millimeters, labor that becomes light, pattern that carries memory across generations like a riverboat. Mixed media belongs here — when “mixed” isn’t an excuse but a method, a way of making materials confess to one another until a new honesty emerges.
Fine Art is not about who gets to enter the museum. Fine Art is about how the work was made and what the work knows. The posture is simple: intention before attention. Depth before distribution. And yes, this may bite a little, because it asks us — myself included — to admit when we have been decorating instead of composing, posting instead of finishing, costuming an idea instead of letting it grow a skeleton.
I do not owe the internet an apology for treating my work as Fine Art when that is how I made it. I owe the work the dignity of being named by its discipline.
Accessibility ≠ self-erasure
I believe in access. I practice it — not as penance, not as apology, but as design. There are pricing tiers for prints and originals; there’s Ko-Fi and community support; there are essays like this one for anyone who needs the argument before they meet the object; there is openness about process because thresholds are kinder than walls. Accessibility is a bridge, and I’m building bridges on purpose.
But a bridge is not an invitation to dismantle the builder. “Make it cheaper” cannot be the only ethic. If everything slides to the lowest price that the loudest voice can imagine, there will be no studios left — just content farms and nostalgia for things we never let mature. Accessibility is about paths, not flattening; about routes, not guilt. It is hospitality with doors that actually close, so the house can stay a house.
I will keep offering on-ramps: study notes, behind-the-scenes, limited runs, open studios, small pieces whose job is to introduce you to the larger work without pretending to be it. I will keep a low tier so students can support and learn. I will keep writing so the ideas can travel farther than the objects can. That is accessibility.
Self-erasure is something else. It’s selling your hours at a loss and calling it kindness. It’s apologizing in advance for needing to eat. It’s letting anyone who says “community” hold your labor hostage. I am not required to disappear to prove I care. In fact, if I disappear, the bridge disappears with me.
Breathing in clear air
I left the food court. Not forever — I still visit; we all do. But I took my work outside to where the air moves and the sound has somewhere to go. Out here, there is weather and slowness and the length of an unbroken afternoon. Out here, a bead can be a planet again instead of a pixel. Out here, a page can take a week to bloom and no one asks it to sing while it does.
The silence is not empty; it’s dignified. You can hear the materials when the crowd stops shouting. You can hear your own hand — the small corrections, the patient returns. You can forgive what took longer than the feed said it should. You can spend an hour solving a single corner and know it mattered.
I used to think the problem was me — that my seriousness was a mood I needed to fix, that my prices were an offense I should preface with a blush, that my insistence on intention made me a snob in a world that rewards speed. Now I know better. I’m not the problem. I am the one making something that lasts.
So here is the refusal, plain and gentle: I will not apologize for finishing what I start. I will not apologize for charging in a way that keeps the work possible. I will not apologize for calling Fine Art what has been made with fine attention. I will build bridges without setting myself on fire to light them. And when the din tries to pull me back into the flinch, I will remember: clarity is not cruelty; boundaries are not arrogance; excellence is not a crime.
There is room out here to stand up straight. There is room to speak without the nervous laugh. There is room to breathe, to make, to price, to rest. The algorithm can keep the apology. I’m keeping the art.
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