We’ve all met them at some point.
That horde of interchangeable young women with acoustic guitars, who try to steal your attention in a crowded bar by taking turns at a microphone. I’m guessing you’ve never listened to one for longer than five seconds. If you have, I congratulate you: their music is always about some dead parent or lost lover, and thus far too upsetting for one to listen to while maintaining a good mood.
They’re the men on the street who make dogs out of sand all day and ask for your money. They’re the cartoonists who always draw your chin to an insulting size and expect financial compensation for their obvious lack of natural tact. They’re those overgrown children you meet at parties, with ruffled hair and only one pair of jeans, who tell you in earnest that they’re ‘working on a novel’, even though it’s obvious they haven’t yet reached page 3.
They’re artists.
How do we even have so many in the country? You’d think that most would give up after their second art installation on ‘identity’ (consisting of several wavy papier mache structures arranged in a circle on a community-centre floor) fails to develop an audience or stream of revenue. But no! They delude themselves into believing this is just the start of my career, or maybe someone on Twitter will notice me, and continue wrestling garbage into shapes they believe to be profound.
Even the successful ones don’t seem to enjoy themselves. Let’s have a look at what some famous ones think about it all. Here’s Ernest Hemingway on the writing process: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Doesn’t sound fun to me. Sounds like something a vampire might be into. Perhaps I’ll dress as a writer this Halloween, just to really terrify the family. I’d have trouble finding scruffy enough clothes though.
Joseph Heller, writer of that godawful Catch-22, said “Every writer I know has trouble writing.” Every writer? Why do they do it to themselves? It seems absurd to me that there’s an entire class of people sitting around writing things that they make no money from, and don’t enjoy doing.
It can’t be due to generosity. All one gains while consuming a piece of art is age: a distraction in one’s journey to the grave. Perhaps that’s why so much art is consumed by artists themselves.
Don’t be fooled by their desperate cries for help: you might have the unfortunate liability of an artistic relative, who is now driven to plastering their social media pages with catchy quotations like ‘The arts and culture industry make £10.8 billion a year for Britain’, or ‘Think of all the art you consume in your daily life through Netflix and Spotify.’
Ignore them. They’re the final yelps of a dog who knows what’s in the vet’s needle, pleading one last time that your sympathy will prolong its miserable life an extra week, until it’s killed by the sheer agony of its own overworked heart.
Do the right thing. Put the dog down.
Thankfully, after many years of entertaining the fantasies of this parasitical race with arts funding schemes (however tentative those may have been), one man has had the bravery to finally say it: Rishi Sunak has told all the UK’s artists to retrain.
They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks; we’ll see soon enough whether these mutts are capable of ripping their bleeding paws from their typewriters and discovering the world beyond the arts.
It’s an act of generosity. Given time, like the RSPCA, we can rehabilitate these abused animals and help them find a more loving home. Preferably in real estate or finance.
And what do I do, you might ask? What vital function do I hold in society, that distinguishes me from the dreamers I have herein destroyed?
Well, I’m glad you asked: I’m a landlord.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to do an early morning Sainsbury’s shop. ‘Essential worker’ and all that…
(This post was written by Betty Scott-Nothing, as part of an attempt to broaden the horizons of this blog, allowing space for obviously incorrect opinions. I have noticed the fact that, in order to be a respected and highly-consumed source of media coverage in the 21st century, one must intentionally host a plethora of garbage-espousing idiots. Betty executes the role marvellously.)
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