Debate: Your Art is Brilliant! (As long as it's free....)

There seem to be certain topics that are fairly common and recurring in the world of art and creativity. Or, at least, in the business end of the art world.

I used "art" as an example, but in truth this particular issue also attaches to a number of other creative fields.

A dichotomy I have encountered on a number of occasions through knowing artists — or even in my own case as a writer — is reaching a stage where we enjoy a fair amount of success with people claiming to quite like what we're doing.

"Your work is really good!" they might say, "I really like what you are doing!"

Then this strange phenomenon occurs. As soon as the artist (or creative) mentions that there is actually a price to be paid for their work, most of their alleged supporters all of a sudden disappear into the woodwork like cockroaches when the light is flipped on.

There is, at least to my way of thinking, a rather sad hypocrisy there. How can you say that something "has value" and that you really like it but suddenly that only applies until you're asked to tangibly show that aforesaid objects of your praise have the value you speak of?

I was first exposed to this paradox when I wrote some articles for a magazine on request from their editorial staff. When I spoke to the magazine editor herself, she thought my work was really good and would fit the magazine's overall style extremely well. However, as soon as I started talking about what sort of rates they paid for their writers, she said that she regretted that they were not currently able to pay their writers but that it would look really good on my resume.

When I pressed the issue, she seemed to get a little miffed about it and started talking about how they had hundreds of good writers who would be more than happy to have their articles in print.

Bottom line: Whether or not she actually thought my work was good, she was essentially "fishing for free stuff."

Back when we had the physical Red Dragonfly Gallery we had more than a few artists complain to us about this particular situation. Gallery owners would praise the artists' talent and vision, but were never willing to open their checkbooks... and even consignment deals were only available on terms that basically "raped" the artist.

At one time, the worst possible field was graphic art and design, where creators hooping to land a job doing some design work would be ask to submit some "examples" of what they could do, and after laboring over concept, creation and product the artist would submit the work... only to be told a few weeks later that the company had decided to not hire anyone, but they would like to "keep the work on file" in case their needs changed.

Lo and behold, a few months later, their internal art department would have used the artist's original ideas — slightly modified so it wasn't a direct copy — for their new promotional campaign.

Life as an artist or other creative is hard enough without having to deal with these kinds of situations!

What do YOU think? Have you ever run into a situation where your work was appreciated ONLY as long as it was free? How did that make you feel? How did you move on from there? Leave us a comment!

Thanks for reading!

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