content. creation.

Every time someone refers to someone who makes music or art online as a "content creator," I cringe internally. (Who am I kidding, I also cringe externally.)

Content Creator has the same icky corporate-ese ring to me as "Creatives" did a few years ago. It implies, I think, the direction of creative endeavor as strictly for commercial use. Moreover, it positions artists as laborers whose job it is to produce output rather than, I dunno, art. It also makes me desperately sad that the ambition of many kids these days - oh my God yes I really just said "kids these days" - is to become a Content Creator...as though that's a job that will even exist when they are old enough to have jobs, but I digress.

Of course, there are people who are in creative roles in corporate environments. I used to work for a company that had incredible copywriters, videographers, graphic designers - all of whom I would call artists in their own right. But I can't imagine that what they created in their "day jobs" was the same as what they would make to fulfill their own artistic desires in their lives outside the office.

The word content implies a vessel. Who's holding the pot?

Artists are writing scripts, editing videos, producing tracks, figuring out how to add the dang captions since they've once again moved the setting... all to fill the vessel of a corporation who profits from (and rarely compensates them for) their work.

My eternal struggle with my career is how to, as much as possible, divorce the act of creation from the process of making a living. I absolutely believe that artists should be paid, but I also believe that artists spending all of their creative energy trying to get paid defeats the purpose. I want to be a working artist in the sense that I want to spend as much of my days as I can writing and performing. That's hard to do, but I find it even harder when I feel pressured to spend my time "marketing" on websites I don't own for audiences that won't see it unless an algorithm deems it a potential source of ad revenue.

I want artists to be paid because I want artists to live, freely and without constraint on their work. I want them to have access to healthcare and housing and safety and great food and joy... not only because I want that for every human being, but because living is what makes the art happen. And the precious energy of one's life is not best spent bent over a screen trying to figure out how many posts they need to make this week to get any traction. I don't want my favorite artists to be making content, I want them to make art, and I firmly believe that content and creation are separate.

Also - if artists I love can live well, I (selfishly) might have the opportunity to experience more of their work. Good art comes from living, deeply, and then telling about it.

The act of creation is a kind of sacredness for me. I don't mean to say that money sullies it somehow. Rather, that the positioning of artists as tools for corporations does. I don't want to be at the whim of Meta or YouTube or Spotify, who all make billions of dollars because they are profiting from "free" labor.

How do we do that under American capitalism?

America insists. America pushes. America does not allow for the slow brewing of artistic endeavor. America wants a product rightdamnnow and some of us do not want to be produced. How do we move away from platforms that have positioned themselves as the only way for artists to succeed and form systems of support for people bringing valuable work into the world?

I don't have the answer yet, just seedlings of ideas... but I want that. For myself, for other artists, for all of us.

Wishing you a slow walk that leads to slow ideas,

Xo,

Juliana