What It Really Means To Be A Creator Today

My interest in the world of creativity started in 2008 after I failed my first guitar exam.

Our teacher knew how hard it was to play the guitar so he was not strict in the marking process. All he wanted was for us to at least have an understanding of the guitar fundamentals.

All we needed to do was play three chords. Many kids tried their best and got very good marks. As far as I know, and to the best of my knowledge, I am the only one who failed.

Since then, the desire to prove to myself that I could learn the guitar pushed me into creativity.

I started by learning how to play the guitar, then on to other “creative” areas like basketball and playing the keyboard and acting believe it or not.

Over the years, I have moved in and out of various creative fields learning how things are done and it has served me well for the most part.

But the one thing I have refused to believe is that most artists, or creatives, in general, seem to be starving creatives.

The reality of “the starving artist” is not a new thing as it has been around longer than we all have.

We tend to think that all we need to do is to create and the world will fall in love with our work. Some aren’t even concerned with the world at all, preferring to create for the amusement of just their eyes.

Today, however, everything that you do equally has someone or countless other people who can do what you do much better than you.

With the internet and global connectedness, the competition is much higher than it was, say, in the non-internet days.

Today you have to think about a lot more things on top of competing with millions of other equally or more talented artists. This is an obvious reminder we need to keep around.

If we are to follow the rules of supply and demand in the sense that if someone needed to get some piece of work done by an artist, there are countless artists to choose from for the same piece of work.

Therefore you’re not better, nor are you worse than anybody but that also means that the value you have to offer is not that special in the sense of being able to do your work well.

I think as artists we have to come to terms with this reality in our work because the essence of art is not just merely creating but I think it has a lot to do with creating value.

Creating Vs Creating Value

You can have your own motivations for doing art. Acting solely from these motivations is simply creating if you do not care about external opinions or the usefulness of your work.

In that case, it may be truly valuable to you but in a bigger sense, it’s not that valuable in the marketplace. That's creating.

A lot of value is tied to finding a way of making the things you care about meaningful in the marketplace.

Using the most common form of value we all know very well, we can say that it is why it’s not always the best artist that will make the most money.

As visual artists, for instance, the most common form of value that is packaged into our work is teaching other people what we do.

Most of us have courses all over the internet and this is one of the laziest/easiest forms of value.

Now, there are NFTs cropping up and artists are still trying to figure out how to build value into them. In the meantime, the business world is taking note of the smart contracts and royalty model in the NFT space and they are working to build other forms of value to exploit the idea.

Artists know that value can be built into these NFTs but still haven’t figured out how.

21st-century artists and creators are actually business people or at least should be.

Your art is not just a memorial piece. It is not just something you do but it is valuable to the world and that value needs to be baked into that work.

For example, I recently made a painting of someone because it was their birthday coming up and I just thought it would be an element of surprise to give them on that day.

They didn’t like it. Worse still, they didn’t even acknowledge that it existed. When you draw, it really sucks to get your work rejected and dismissed as rubbish.

Something that I’ve come to accept is that not all my work is going to be appreciated by people out there. But that doesn’t mean that this work doesn’t have value. It has value but I have to find the market that will find it valuable.

For the birthday portrait, therefore, I did not waste my time thinking about or asking this person what their opinion was about my work.

As I do with almost all my work, I decided that when painting this person I was going to equally make a recording of all the painting procedures minus their actual picture.

I just fired up my computer and set OBS to run in the background to record the entire painting session.

After doing that I packaged it in a course and then sold that course.

This definitely sounds like being interested in making money but that is the whole point.

Artists and monetary forms of value

As artists, we need to change the relationships we have with money as the first step towards recognizing why our work needs to have value and not just be a piece to show off our mastery or hang somewhere for admiration.

There are very many people out there with very creative minds that simply do not do what they’re supposed to do and settle for lifestyles of constant struggle.

This is because they are comfortable with the idea of only doing it for themselves. As a result, few people get to see what they have to create.

People who aren’t as creative but are so money-minded or business-minded end up getting the money and using it to further their agendas while committing injustices in the world.

Creating value is not just about making money. It is about creating something meaningful. When it comes to creative people, their creativity is much needed in coming up with creative solutions to world issues.

A creator today should be someone who uses their work and creativity to actually benefit the world to some degree.

The time when we used to romanticize art is long gone. Millions of people can do what you do even better. The uniqueness comes in the way that work is valuable in the market.

Most of the artists that have been immortalized were not the absolute greatest artists. It was because they made their content valuable.

In music, there was Tupac, Michael Jackson, Dolores O’riordan, and many others. Their messages were not just left in music because they knew that this is not how value is created. They had to get those messages out there through advertising and so on.

Their content not only entertained people but inspired people in many ways. They weren’t the best of the best as far as talent is concerned but it feels that way because their messages helped to shape the world narratives about different topics from culture to ideas of world unity and so on.

An artist’s work is not about having a muse anymore. That kind of art doesn’t really speak to the value in the world. It speaks to our personal preferences.

But I think we could transcend those preferences and try to tap into more helpful creativity because that has to live side by side with the unhelpful forms of governance or dominance in our world.

Being an artist or a creator today is not something that we can just dismiss as irrelevant. This creativity is much needed and required.

I don’t think that we should just sit in our studios or wherever and just paint our lives away. That doesn’t cut it anymore.