Making good art is really hard; getting paid for it is even harder

Almost anyone can type. Some of those people can write and think clearly enough to shape a coherent story. A tiny fraction of those do it well enough to get a good novel published.

Anyone can splash paint onto a canvas. Even if you have no talent for illustration or composition or brush strokes, you can make painted shapes and call it modern art. A tiny fraction of those can convince critics that their work should be sold in galleries.

It’s true for every field of art. With the tools that are readily available today, almost anyone can make a creative project — a film, a sculpture, a photograph, a book. A few of those will be really good.

It requires talent and work and patience and luck to produce something that most people would see as art. It’s incredibly difficult. It’s something many people spend a lifetime trying to do.

But as difficult as those things are, it’s even harder to earn a living today with art.

For some people, it’s simply because their work isn’t good enough. But even many people who produce excellent work can no longer make a living from the art they most want to create.

The world has changed in ways that make things very hard for creative people today. I don’t like the changes. I’ve ranted about those changes and been angry about them, as have many creators.

But the media world of the past is gone. It’s not coming back. For me, that means I have to change. It’s time for me to stop fighting reality.

The media world didn’t change because a handful of executives got together in a smoke-filled room and decided to make life miserable for artists. It changed because technology changed. Every major advance in communications technology has reshaped the way creative people reach an audience.

The printing press changed literature. Photography changed painting. Radio changed music. Television changed politics and entertainment. As Neil Postman argued years ago, every medium changes not only what we communicate, but how we communicate. The internet didn’t interrupt that process. It accelerated it.

For generations, creative people lived in a world controlled by gatekeepers. Book publishers decided which authors would be printed. Record labels chose which musicians would be promoted. Film studios determined which scripts would become movies. Newspaper and magazine editors decided which writers would be published. Galleries chose which painters deserved to have their work shown.

Those gatekeepers were often wrong. They overlooked talented people, rewarded mediocrity and sometimes confused fashionable work with meaningful work. But for better or worse, they were human beings exercising human judgment.

Today, most of those gatekeepers have either disappeared or become dramatically less important. Almost anyone can publish a book, release an album, upload a film, display photographs or publish essays for the entire world to see. The barriers to creating and distributing art have largely collapsed. At first glance, that sounds like an extraordinary victory for creative people. When it first started happening, I expected it to lead to a creative renaissance.

The problem is that removing gatekeepers didn’t remove gatekeeping. It simply replaced human judgment with social media algorithms —

Algorithms don’t ask whether a novel is profound or a photograph reveals something true about the world. They don’t wonder whether a song will still matter 20 years from now or whether an essay might quietly change someone’s life. Their purpose isn’t to identify significance. It’s to maximize engagement. They reward whatever keeps people scrolling, clicking, commenting and watching for a few more seconds — because that’s how advertising platforms make money.

That subtle change has enormous consequences. Instead of editors making imperfect decisions about what deserves an audience, algorithms increasingly reward whatever captures attention most efficiently. Outrage outperforms reflection. Familiarity outperforms originality. Quantity outperforms craftsmanship. The result isn’t that good work has disappeared. It’s that good work has become increasingly difficult for the people who would value it to discover.

For artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians, this changes the economics of everything. Producing excellent work is no longer enough. Increasingly, success depends upon understanding platforms whose priorities have almost nothing to do with artistic quality. That’s a game many creative people were never interested in playing, yet it has become one of the primary ways audiences discover new work.

I don’t think this new reality is going away. I wish it weren’t true, but wishing doesn’t change what’s true. The media world I grew up in has largely disappeared, and no amount of complaining will bring it back. I can spend my time resenting what has happened or I can begin asking a much more useful question.

What opportunities exist today that didn’t exist before?

That question leads somewhere surprisingly hopeful.

For years, artists dreamed of creating without asking permission. They wanted freedom from publishers, producers, record labels, galleries and editors who stood between them and the public. Ironically, we finally achieved much of that freedom at almost the exact moment the economic model supporting independent artists began to collapse.

That’s a genuine loss. But it’s also an extraordinary opportunity.

Today, I don’t need a publisher’s permission to write an essay. I don’t need a television network’s permission to produce a video and make it available to the world. I don’t need a magazine’s permission to publish photographs or an editor’s approval before sharing an idea. If I feel compelled to make something, I can simply make it.

The challenge has changed. It isn’t creating the work or making it available anymore. The challenge is helping the people who would appreciate it discover that it exists.

That problem is real. But unlike the old gatekeepers, it isn’t controlled by a handful of institutions deciding whether my work deserves to exist at all. Somewhere out there are people who will appreciate what I create. My task is simply to find better ways to connect with them. That may eventually happen through communities, subscriptions, patrons or entirely new models that haven’t yet been imagined.

Every major technological revolution has eventually created opportunities nobody could foresee while living through the transition. I have no reason to assume this one will be different.

In the meantime, I have another choice available to me. I can earn my living some other way and create the work that matters to me anyway. If the market no longer supports the kind of work I most want to make, that doesn’t mean the work shouldn’t exist. It simply means I shouldn’t expect the market to validate every creative decision I make.

Oddly enough, that’s a liberating realization.

Once I stop expecting the market to tell me what deserves to be created, I’m free to create the things I believe are worth creating. I can write the essays I think need writing. I can produce the videos I want to make. I can experiment, fail, learn and continue creating because the work itself matters to me. If an audience eventually finds it, wonderful. If patrons emerge, even better. But neither becomes the reason I create.

Perhaps the self-supporting artist is becoming an endangered species. If so, that’s sad. But the artist isn’t disappearing — and art isn’t disappearing.

People will continue painting, writing, composing, photographing and filming because human beings are creators by nature. The opportunity before us isn’t to recreate the media world that disappeared. It’s to discover what becomes possible in the one that has replaced it.

That seems like a much more interesting challenge than spending the rest of my life wishing it were still 1995.