The artist in the market

Imagine there are two spoons. You go to decide which one to buy. One is made of aluminum. One is made of steel. One is quite beautiful and ornate. The other is just functional. One, it seems, will not last very long. The other will not only last, but it will also be nice to look at. But they both serve the same function. They're both spoons. They are both going to be used for the exact same thing, putting nutritious items—hopefully—into your mouth and feeding you or feeding the people you choose to make food for.

Two spoons are essentially the same thing. We find that we live in capitalism, inside markets, and the value of an object is decided on the basis of a few factors. In the case of these spoons, it is probably going to be durability because it is not even possible, I think, to improve the spoon as far as design is concerned. There is a book called This Is Not the End of the Book, where the authors—one of whom I think is Umberto Eco—talk about how there are some machines whose design it is impossible to improve. One of those things is the spoon. The other one, ironically, is the book.

I say ironically because the topic of this episode is what differentiates art and why it is not always healthy to describe art as a consumer product or a commodity whose value is only going to be decided by how much people choose to pay for it. While two spoons are essentially the same, two stories are not the same. They may serve a similar function as far as appearances are concerned. For example, for any two stories, the thing you’re going to do with them is read them and get some variety of edification. You’re going to find yourself happier, sadder, more excited, or wiser at the end of reading a story. Or at the very least, you’re going to be entertained, as in the story is going to help you pass the time. That is the function of a story.

But is that all a story is? Like the spoon, is the story eventually reducible to the thing that it does to us? I do not think so. I think that at the heart of art is uniqueness. The reason we go for art, the reason we consume art, the reason we appreciate art, is because we want something unique. We want a unique experience. We want a unique insight from the thing we have read. That is primarily why we go for art. We wish to find something relatable. We are different from other people, and we are looking to find something unique out there that would validate that feeling in us. Something that would tell us, "Yes, you are strange, you are different, but you are also equal to everyone else in the sense that everyone is different, and everyone is unique in their own way."

We look for that. We go out looking for that when we go out looking for art. The trouble is, the place we go looking for art is the market because eventually that is where we are going to find everything. Take this podcast, for example. I record these in order to express myself. I am aware that whatever I make is going to have to compete with other things of the same kind in a marketplace, which is either your favorite podcast player or YouTube or wherever you’re consuming this. But that is only part of the equation. That is not the entirety of it.

When I say that I am expressing myself, I am making art, I am making something that will pass for art at the very least. What I am doing, I would still do even if it did not have to perform in a market. No matter how many people listen to this, no matter how few people listen to this, no matter how good or bad it is, I would still do it. The spoon will not exist if it did not have practical utility. Art is created to express something. From the point of view of the person who creates the art, it is also created to experience the act of expressing yourself.

We are presently living in a time where the value of art is being defined in terms of how much it sells and how much money it can make the person who’s creating the art. This is not com