I’m currently reading Andrew Keen’s insightful book on the Web 2.0 movement, The Cult of the Amateur. Its arguments—while a bit pat and polemical—reveal a lot about why things are heading south currently in so many “traditional” sectors of cultural production—such as the press, the book industry, the music biz (and I’d add the art market).

One focus of the book is that, while the utopian vision of the Web 2.0 movement is appealing to a wide swath of the populus, it ends up diminishing overall cultural accomplishment. That is, if suddenly everyone is deemed an artist, a musician, a political commentator, a filmmaker, then suddenly truly talented professional versions of these figures are left out in the cold–unsupported (in real financial terms) or forced to water down their content to gain support from a wider (but less deeply supportive) audience.

The music industry is probably the best indication of the way things are going. It’s all so au courant to bad-mouth the music industry—to claim it gouges us, it doesn’t treat artists fairly, it’s uncaring and unfeeling—as a rationalization for our habitual stealing of the intellectual property of music. There’s a widespread assumption that everyone’s stealing music—the kids are all stealing music—so, why shouldn’t I?

Well, interestingly, here’s a letter to the editor—written in response to a Penn State Daily Collegian article called “Music lovers deserve free market of songs” (which argued: “No matter what they call it — illegal downloading, piracy, whatever — a free market for music is a good thing.”)—that clearly hints at the results of the “utopian” vision of free art for all, whenever and wherever they want it:

The column “Music lovers deserve free market of songs” Oct. 30 failed to acknowledge the consequences of free music and the music industry’s suffering. The music industry employees are paid for their effort to bring the public music. Without these people, music would not be able to be distributed. Consumers are the only way the artists and industry employees obtain their paychecks.

The essay I wrote about the current cultural overemphasis on creativity-for-creativity-sake (which included a small jab at all the pointless blogs overrunning the internet), interestingly created a modest amount of buzz in the blogosphere. That is, the original version of the essay–published on mnartists.org–was linked to by dozens of bloggers. This is first time anything like this has happened to any of the 170 or so arts pieces I’ve published in the past ten years. Probably this is because the sentiments of the piece run so counter to our culture’s received wisdom, but it may also have something to do with the times (and the explosion in the number of blogs).

For samples of the blogoscussion on the Creativity that Kills, go here, here, or here. There seem to be three basic reactions to this essay’s ideas. The first, and surprisingly most common, is “Amen, brother!” The idea that there are too many creative people and too much cultural emphasis on creativity seems to have touched a nerve for a lot of people. Of course, the people are quick to cast fingers at everyone else–saying, “Yes, I wish all those other people would stop trying to make art!” But I suppose this is human nature (to blame others and avoid blaming oneself).

The second reaction is “That guy’s just bitter!” This may or may not be true, but it was not my intention to come across as someone whose view of art and artists is ruled by his bitterness. Instead, as I hope is becoming clear on the Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America, I intend to look at difficult or troubling aspects of the art world solely in the hopes that things will one day be better. In some ways, you could say I’m a hopeless optimist about art and its role in the culture. Still, I’ve taken this reader reaction (that I’m “just bitter”) to heart and have made revisions to the original essay.

The third reaction is “He may be right, but things are no different now than they’ve ever been; there’s always been a lot of bad art and very little good art.” I won’t go into all the reasons that I disagree with this, but I would like to point out that those who had this response said nothing in response to my essay’s description of how “creativity” is overmanifesting itself in the culture (and what this does to a potential art audience):

“…we’ve become so inundated with creativity–in weblogs dedicated to every petty interest and whim, in vanity websites created by people of not much interest, in random belly-gazing podcasts of the braindead, in home-edited YouTube snoozefests, in well-meaning “preprofessional” writing associations, in endless craft groups and quilting associations and art meet-ups, and so on and so on—that actual audiences for honest-to-goodness good art and real creativity and cultural production are driven into hiding. Isn’t it the supreme and telling irony that even as the cultural emphasis on creativity grows, the actual audience for art is shrinking in real numbers?”

One of the bloggers suggested my beef is with the entire Web 2.0 movement. As someone who’s used the web to expand my audience (through blogs, websites, and other such web services), I started to object to this, but then I read Andrew Keen’s anti-Web 2.0 screed, The Cult of the Amateur. Here’s his take on a similar problem (the loss of quality public discourse), which I think connects up well with my thoughts on creativity:

“We–those of us who want to know more about the world, those of us who are the consumers of mainstream culture–are being seduced by the empty promise of the “democratized” media. For the real consequences of the Web 2.0 revolution is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of information. One chilling reality in this brave new digital epooch is the blurring, obfuscation, and even disappearance of truth… The undermining of truth is threatening the quality of civil public discourse, encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft, and stifling creativity… Instead of more community, knowledge, or culture, all that Web 2.0 really delivvers is more dubious content from anonymous sources, hijacking our time and playing to our gullibility.”

A longer version of this essay was originally published by mnartists.org on 10/5/07:

Creativity Is Killing the Culture

By Michael Fallon

“Creative people must be stopped.”***
–recently sighted bumper sticker

THANK HEAVENS FOR BUMPER STICKERS. Call them visual pollution, call them corny or trite—a good back-of-the-car sentiment sometimes helps one to know what to think about things. I spotted the above sticker on the back of a green Ford Prism in Saint Paul on a crystalline Wednesday afternoon this summer, and in one quick moment of clarity, it helped me resolve a vexing internal argument. It was an argument that seemed counterintuitive to my art-centered belief system—and one I’d been mulling over for weeks.

“Creative people must be stopped” is, to be sure, an awfully stringent sentiment, and one completely at odds with received wisdom in our culture today, but then—isn’t it true? Aren’t there really too many people in this country trying to do too many creative things—like the proverbial too many chefs attempting to make too much proverbial soup? Isn’t it the case that with all these creatives roaming around we simply don’t have enough people left over to ingest all the creative soup?

These thoughts had come into my head a few weeks before, because I found myself hating the sentiment of a song on the new album by Wilco, a band whose music I usually enjoy. Called “What Light,” the new song extols the listener to, if they feel compelled to, go ahead and paint a picture or sing a song, and “don’t let anyone say it’s wrong.” Such people, apparently, should simply sing what they “feel” and paint what they “see,” whether or not it’s any good at all or if anyone cares to see it. And if, as is inevitable when given so much creative freedom, these creators become “strung out like a kite” or kept “awake in the night,” then that’s okay too. For you see, apparently, there’s a light, “a white light,” inside each of us that makes all this creativity-related discontent and unhappiness inevitable.

TODAY, THERE IS AN ENDLESS LINE OF PEOPLE WHO PAINT PICTURES OR SING SONGS and don’t care if anyone else cares to look or listen. This may well be because of the endless hidden and not-so-hidden messages (such as in this Wilco song) this culture gives, particularly to young people, to get up and start creating.Just create, says the world. Go ahead and line up along with thousands to be on American Idol or America’s Got Talent or whatever. You can do it! And while you’re at it, why not fill the web with your poetry, videos, art, musings, and every little snippet of creative detritus you can muster. And don’t let anyone say it’s wrong!

Never mind that no one really has a “light” hidden deep inside that makes them able to paint or sing or whatever. You could argue that most people, genetically speaking, do not possess the recessive traits that make creative talent likely. You could also argue that few people also have the perseverance to endure long hours of training, preparation, and hard work that make true art work possible.

Such hard realities aren’t in keeping with the times—when Nike exhorts us to “Just Do It” and Xerox screams “Express Yourself”; when students receive ribbons just for participating in the art exhibition, regardless of the quality of their product; when the very notion of “creativity” has spawned an entire industry of books (140,587 titles on Amazon.com last time I checked), countless magazine articles, and websites, such as www.creativity-portal.com, which among its many features and articles has links to fifteen expert “creativity coaches” who promise to help you “find inspiration” and “unlock your creative talents”; when people flood the internet with self-promoting blogs like www.agirlwhocreates.com by a children’s book illustrator who describes herself thusly: “Holli’s artistic talent and creativity has been evident from a very early age. Although she excelled in many areas of school, art projects were always her favorite. In third grade, Holli’s art teacher presented her with a big green pencil case (which she still has today) for having the best drawing in the class,” or like http://www.onesongeveryday.com, maintained by a guy who wrote, for whatever reason, one toss-off song a day for an entire year; when social scientist Richard Florida starts an entire cottage industry by inventing a new social classification, the “creative class,” and a new job designation, the “creative industries,” that impossibly includes about a third of the current work force; when “thinking outside the box” and “thinking laterally” and “pushing the envelope” become such commonly repeated sentiments that they are almost universally accepted as useful ways to approach almost every problem; and when a new organization called CASK (Creative Art Space for Kids) has as its philosophy that we are all born creative and this needs to be fostered because “when a child creates a work of art, they are not just drawing a picture, they are creating aspects of self-importance (!) [and] individuality (!).” (Exclamation points mine.)

An otherwise prestigious school—Skidmore College in upstate New York—decided a few years ago that creativity is such an important “skill” that, after a multimillion-dollar rebranding effort, it changed its school motto to “Creative Thought Matters.” According to the school’s marketing material, Skidmore people “believe that every life, every career and every endeavor is more profound with creativity at its core.” It explains that the college seeks out faculty and staff who are dedicated to “showing students how their own lives and successes will be shaped by their ability to think, communicate and solve problems creatively.” And, apparently, a science professor at the school described the role of creativity in his work as a “sense of exhilaration—like when you’re hiking and you go off the trail, and you realize that you might be standing on ground that no one has ever stood on before.” (I’d argue that that’s probably a recipe for getting lost and perhaps catching a little hypothermia, but then what do I know about trails anyway?)

Over and over, today’s culture not only reinforces that everyone is creative, but also that we have to be creative in order to be fully realized and fulfilled beings. We are told we need to have creative work, and that our creativity is the key to innovation at our work. This is true even as the number of cubicle-bound paper-pushing jobs ever seems to multiply, and as fewer and fewer jobs really require much creativity. We are told, and have bought the notion, that creativity is now the solution to every problem, and that without creativity we are destined for failure. And having bought into how essential is creativity, we end up constantly seeking validation—from the culture at large or from anyone who will give it—for what we want to hear: that we are creative, essential, important people who are valid and crucial to the working of modern civilization.

What is the result of all this bluster about “creativity”? Well, inevitably, lacking validation for its creativity the creative “class” grows ever more despondent in their lives and disgruntled in their jobs. Statistics show that job tenure has declined over the years, and according to a recent CNNMoney.com poll, 49 percent of workers expected to change jobs in the next year. Meanwhile, rates of depression among the population have increased in recent years. Whereas only 1-2% of the population in 1915 had major depressive episodes in their lifetimes, 15-20% do today, and the number of people being treated for depression increased sharply particularly between 1987 and 1997 (more than tripling from 1.8 million people to 6.3 million). Young workers are rapidly becoming known above all else not for their “creativity,” but for their tendency to become unsettled and to grouse to any and all about being underappreciated for their boundless creative skills.

I know there will be some—perhaps many—out there who will judge me harshly for pointing out such things and for my harping on something so seemingly harmless as encouraging everyone to become creative. But I would argue that the feel-good sentiment of shouting “just be creative” to every impressionable young person leads us toward a very dangerous dead-end—in which we become a nation of navel-gazing dreamy-eyed so-called creatives who no longer consider it worthwhile to roll up their sleeves and get down to hard work to get a job done, or, even worse—and more to the point for the sake of the future viability of the art culture—who no longer deem it worth their time to bother checking out any of the stuff that anyone else has made.

The constant lip service to creativity leads to the creation of more and more stuff—art and music and writing and the like—that is actually not very creative, uninteresting, of poor quality, and off-putting to any potential audience. This may seem an impossible thing to stem from such a feel-good sentiment—more creativity must mean a better world, right?—but the problem is that more emphasis on creativity means less emphasis on what it is precisely that makes art good. It’s not the simple act of making—of creating something, anything—that makes art. It’s the application of craft, dedicated practice, careful thought, hard work, and artfulness that makes art. Real creative art is a rare and precious thing and this will likely always be so.

Some will argue that there’s always been a lot of bad, uncreative art in the culture, but this seems a pretty pat answer when you truly consider what’s become of the cultural landscape in the past thirty years or so. We’ve become so inundated with creativity—in weblogs dedicated to every petty interest and whim, in vanity websites created by people of not much interest, in random belly-gazing podcasts of the braindead, in home-edited YouTube snoozefests, in well-meaning “preprofessional” writing associations, in endless craft groups and quilting associations and art meet-ups, and so on and so on—that actual audiences for honest-to-goodness good art and real creativity and cultural production are driven into hiding. Isn’t it the supreme and telling irony that even as the cultural emphasis on creativity grows, the actual audience for art is shrinking in real numbers?

Let me just repeat again: While real numbers of artists in this country has grown by more than 300 percent since the early 1970s, the art audience has shunk.

This is what truly concerns me. This is at the crux of my rant. People, your audience is running away from your and your “art,” because they now believe that artists are unable to make anything worth looking at or listening to.

“Creative people must be stopped,” indeed.

*** As near as I can determine, the “Creative people must be stopped” sentiment stems originally from a 1998 album of the same name by the Texas alt-rock band Baboon.

An article by Sharon Butler in the Oct. 2007 edition of the Brooklyn Rail posits, without giving too many specifics, a looming decline in the market for contemporary art, and it suggests practical steps that artists can take to deal with it.

“With the economy slowing down,” she writes, “hedge funds getting shaky, and investors seeking refuge, the art market seems certain to contract in a big way… The emerging battalion of artists on the thin margin of commercial viability is imperiled, and so is the fragile infrastructure that supports them.”

Butler suggests artists will likely fact the following difficulties: being left without representation, losing artwork that is being kept “in storage” by galleries, gallery check kiting and withholding payment for work previously sold, fewer exhibition opportunities for younger artists, fewer part-time jobs for artists, flatter career trajectories for artists, and drops in prices for art.

As a result, she expects: “An artist used to sunnier times wonders whether she or he should continue making art.”

Here’s the crux of the article, from the point of view of www.artisticfailure.com:

Outsiders may regard all this angst as the hand-wringing of spoiled children. After all, American art did not merely survive but flourished after the Depression and World War II. Why should we worry about it now? Real artists will stay their course and make their mark. The idea is that the free market, hard or soft, will filter through the truly great ones. It’s a hopeful and very American notion, but that market, at least for artists, has not historically been so bountiful. Yes, Abstract Expressionism sprung from children of the Depression. But artists like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, James Brooks, Balcombe Greene, and Norman Lewis—to name but a few painters of the era—fed themselves on wages from the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration before they hit it big. Yes, minimalism flourished after the war. But Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held were able to go to Paris and find their muses only because of the GI Bill. Federal subsidies, it would appear, were key to sustaining the nation’s artistic capital.

Systemic sources of extra-market support for artists still exist, but they are not as abundant, generous, or widely available as the WPA was in the Thirties or the GI Bill was in the Forties and Fifties. In this light, it is perhaps too harsh to say that true artists would not default to careers in banking, IT, law, social work, cabinetry, or teaching, as many have. Galleries and collectors once committed to nurturing these artists may simply move on to the new crop of art school graduates, renewing the market cycle. But we’ll never know how their work might have developed had economic opportunities not deserted them. It is a virtual certainty that at least a few of them would have been great, so their foregone contribution could be considered a cultural loss and a failure of the market.

These sentiments are very similar to ones in a published essay I wrote last spring about the education of artists. I noted the disdain and antipathy that surveys show most people have regarding artists, and I also noted that, even so, more and more people seem to romanticize their own interest in making art. “What’s most unfortunate,” I wrote, “is that our country’s paradoxical attitudes about art–i.e., the coupling of a wishful attitude about creativity and a resentment of creative people—has coincided with a constant rise in the numbers of people seeking formal artistic educations.”

The rest of my article maintains a similar passionately ambivalent, slightly resigned shrug-of-the-shoulders tone as Sharon Butler’s. Doubtless, there is no solution for artists, for gallerians, for art lovers, or for the arts market to create its own success. Times will be hard in art, but artists will survive, or as Butler puts it: “the right blend of humility and constructive opportunism can see many artists through. The hardest thing for the individual artist will be striking a psychological balance between Pollyannaism and panic.”