emotional currency – Tracy Durnell

Liked Reflections for 2022, Aspirations for 2023 :: Notes On Attention Paid — by Michael Bogdanffy-kriegh (Reflections for 2022, Aspirations for 2023)

I also aspire to move my production and distribution of art work into the gift, or sacred economy. This is an approach in which the work is offered up as gift. To family and friends without expectation of return, to interested individuals at whatever cost works for them. In exchange, they can give me something they have made, or make a contribution of whatever amount of money it is worth to them.

This reminds me of Lucy Bellwood’s Boat Gnome pin exchange.

I keep seeing this book Sacred Economics recommended, maybe it’s time to give it a try.

Rethinking Success of Art Outside Profit

Liked GOES PHILISOPHY (goesbooks.com)

While these points are in no way true for everyone across the board, neither are they exhaustive, they aim to highlight the ways that capitalism can negatively impact the process of making art:

1. It turns art into a product

2. It restricts the reach of the artist

3. It is a privileged and racist system

4. It encourages competitiveness and fosters individualism over community

5. It links success to financial gain

6. It encourages unrealistic goals

7. It breeds toxic and unhealthy habits

8. It values marketable ideas over others

9. It expects the artist to also function as a business entity

10. It does not foster an artist’s uniqueness

11. It creates a sea of content that too often feels overly similar and repetitive

12. It breeds gatekeepers and toxic business environments

13. It nurtures the tendency to view things through a consumerist lens

14. It is a poor yardstick by which to measure the success and fulfillment of an artist

Very cool project: giving away comics, and gifting comics to strangers.

Their philosophy is interesting and worth considering.

Imagine that instead of a system that ultimately encourages us to favor art that will earn as much money as we can, we are operating in a system that encourages us to create art that will earn as much connection with other people as we can.