You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

I had commercial success in art at the humble age of 23. Not only were my paintings respected and collected by accomplished and wealthy individuals, they formed commissions for years to come. My success was the result of an obsession with craftsmanship and clever word-of-mouth marketing.

Suddenly, one day after insisting on meeting the deadline of the expensive commission, I had a headache and my nose was bleeding. Fortunately, it turned out to be a minimal problem as a result of stress.

I stopped painting for a month and went to rest in the mountains. There I discovered that, influenced by success and the pursuit of perfection, I had lost the most valuable of my talents.

To enjoy the process.

I then vowed to no longer let the need for material success and validation come before my need to express myself visually and feel enjoyment of the freedom to change my artistic style or experiment without direction.

I returned the prepaid orders, apologized for the disappointment I was causing, and moved on.

Not only that, but I realized that I would have to work another job if I wanted to keep the purity of the process for myself.

I began in graphic design, moved to web design and started a web solutions company.

And when my friends ask me to this day: How could you turn your back on your successful art career?

I answer them:

I don't paint for you. I paint for myself. It's part of my life. A place where there are no compromises, no demands, no expectations, no projections, no assessments, no tasks, no metrics, no applause and no glory.

A place where I am happy.

It really seems to be art specifically which people are often keen to describe as worthless, not any particular category of good that artwork might fall into.

Distribution: Completely broken. Wherever you look, algorithms are gamed by a small group of people knowing how to play the game. It's incredibly demotivating to see mediocre grifters constantly winning, whilst people producing far better content get no traction.

Winning is not winning: say you get lucky and do have a little hit piece, imagine 100K likes. This typically translates into very little meaning. Hardly any new followers, only low quality comments, no real "conversion", donations, etc. The engagement "success" is very inflated.

Saturation: People are already on their max screen time, the difference between your awesome work and some lesser work is tiny as it comes to what consumers will do, which is not much at all if everything is endless. Hence deep engagement becomes almost an impossibility. This "Tiktok-ization" of the internet makes this even worse.

Popularity: In big spaces where the masses hang out, you're subject to popular taste. A cute kitten will outrank your very best work.

Monetization: pretty much nobody will pay for anything even if they directly and deeply engage with your works. Typical donation rates are 0.1% of the actively returning audience. Virtually nobody has an audience size to make this meaningful.

So the bottom line is that if you do something high quality, genuinely, out of the goodness of your heart, the internet has infinite ways to encourage you to stop doing that.

If you think all of this is bad, just wait what this next AI wave will do.