I’d like to talk about what’s happening to writers, and consequently what we’ve come to view as art. With the multi-national conglomerates taking over the publishing industry their over-riding, one might say all-consuming all-driving all-motivating ethos has become a virus which has infected everyone it touches. That corporations are about making money is nothing new, but now they have restructured art itself until it’s become an objective money-making enterprise intractably governed by the bottom-line; an unchanging, immutable “round hole” into which all the “square pegs” must be reshaped in order to fit. We’ve abandoned the Muse in favor of a kind of Capitalist Socialist Realism where the artists have adopted the role of the state/corporation, measuring their “art” by how it will sell, and adjusting it accordingly to fit the prevailing guidelines of commerce. The best most vital most dangerous most life-affirming life-changing art out there now is that which is being made in spite of this omnipresent mindset, and is consequently ignored to the point of invisibility. We are engendering and supporting a generation of “Capitalist-Socialist-Realist suck-ups to the man” in the name of “art” while simultaneously giving birth to, and ignoring once again, a generation of Van Goghs who labor in obscurity, monetary oppression, and constant rejection because their art is defiantly rejecting the status quo mentality. The struggle of the artist today, specifically the writer, has become especially perilous. The paramount challenge is no longer to be a good writer, nor is it to be published and recognized. Rather, it is to avoid the self-censoring and thought control dictated by the bottom-line driven corporate publishing conglomerates, for the sole purpose of getting published and maintaining a livelihood and a career. “What’s selling?” is the question today’s writer asks himself, and he promptly answers, “So that’s what I’ll write.” And the cost is true creativity, originality, and art itself as it’s redefined; as it becomes nothing more than Socialist Realism as in the old Soviet Union, with the artists and writers censoring themselves. And where is the truth of the artist’s vision, its uniqueness, its voice, if it is merely an echo of the officially-sanctioned and acceptable “truth and vision” allowed by corporate publishing? As T.S. Eliot once said, “The artist is the only genuine and profound revolutionist.” I pray that there are still some of us out there who believe this.
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