washwords

Friday is DCblogsin day… I recommend you go there – DCblogs – EVERY day; it’s first on my blog list… but here’s a more-in-depth look at one of the posts I selected for today, that particularly caught my attention.

Cost analysis: the price of free art

What’s the trade off of a world where everyone is an artist, asks Words from Hannah. She reacts to a recent NYT photo gallery: reader’s photos of the recession, with interesting commentary on what happens to professional artists, with such openings of the lines? Quick thought about art in the depr/recession.

I love her blog and this post in particular. This is an important topic, worth thinking about much more. I felt much the same way as a freelance writer competing for jobs with those on elance who seemed to be “charging” fractions of a penny per job, if not outright LOSING money. How could this be??

My feelings have shifted a bit since, maybe (probably) because I’m no longer dependent on that income.

Yes, I think there need to be standards and rewards for professionals – there is a difference between what WE do and what THEY do but… that said… I love how accessible blogs (for example) have made the world and how they’ve opened the world of good writing to me from sources I never expected.

Similarly, some of the best writers/actors/photographers… are those with no training who literally fall into it or are discovered. Romantic, maybe? but I believe in this.

I love the work of the photographers Hannah mentions, but I also love seeing everyday takes on an everyday dilemma/experience. Kids’ art has always been particularly enlightening to me. A shift of perspective.

There are particular times when the everyday becomes extraordinary BECAUSE it is “normal,” perhaps because it is in the midst of chaos, or because it’s an experience that can only be captured by participant observers in the language of research academia.

On that note, one of the most moving exhibits I ever attended was a show in Prague of children’s drawings and poetry from a class taught in a Holocaust concentration camp, an effort of a young teacher, to offer normalcy to her students but perhaps also to leave a record of the horrors in a voice not otherwise captured. Think too of Anne Frank.

To me, the recession, 9/11, getting dumped, seeing a cherry blossom for the first time, are experiences unique in some ways to the beholder.

The idea that everyone is an artist – just as everyone reads the same work or sees the same colors differently – doesn’t seem so threatening anymore. It seems good. And well, it’s happening, like it or not.