what i did and said

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.-John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything

If you haven't seen it yet WIRED has a great article on the way that the internet and technology has changed the business of buying and selling. It is without a doubt a great read, with interesting thoughts throughout. I can't help but think about how this applies to the arts in this digital age. The section under the heading of The Economics of Abundance echoes some of the ideas that I have been tossing around in my head for awhile and have heard other folks discuss. Last week's TWIT (yes I am that type of geek) is mostly a talk with the musician Jonathan Coulton (for those of you who are John Hodgman fans he is the musician on The Areas of My Expertise. An unbelievably funny yet almost completely undigestable "book?").
Coulton talks around some of the same high points that the WIRED article addresses, but makes it a little more specific to the arts industry (he doesn't really get going until about 45 mins. into the podcast). The most fascinating part is when he talks about how the internet has allowed him to not have to be popular amongst huge groups of people (he calls it Aerosmith sized crowds).He makes the distinction between large audiences and the "right audience." The right audience doesn't need a big distribution company to market to them, the internet does the job. And then, as if shunning fame (but not necessarily fortune) isn't enough, he goes on to detail how he finds these audiences by essentially giving away his creative work (that is free as in Beer). He runs a store from his site that sells all manner of things (including music should you have old fashioned ideas about compensating artists for their labors). He is not the only one who has found the right audience to appreciate his brand of creation.
Radiohead made waves last year with giving the user the option of payments and seemed to score big with the idea. And then there is Corey Doctorow, who puts all of his books online for free under a Creative Commons license....the examples go on and on. What does this mean for visual artists? Is there a tapping into the "free" market that can happen in a way that provides viewers with enough of an aesthetic experience (both qualitatively as well as quantitatively) so that an audience is formed and the cream rises to the top? Art wants to be free. It wants as many eyeballs as possible and as many brains as possible coming together to experience and emote. The internet might be fulfilling the great Warholian ideal of everybody's 15 minutes of fame, it just might not take such huge numbers, and in the age of YouTube gaffs and LOLCATS, is there truly wisdom in the crowds?