Money or Nothing, Chicks Still Free

Like Alan, Sonny airs a complaint:

journalism has always been little more than a delivery method for advertising. But it’s still unclear just how to deliver those advertisements to the customer when the written word is your medium and those words are transmitted for free. It’s even harder to see how freelance writers are supposed to make a living in this endeavor. And once the great writers stop being paid to write, they’ll stop writing. Do we really want to live in a universe where the only people who traffic in letters are bloggers doing so in their spare time?

This is an invitation to a long riff on Marx, but Shawn Macomber will be preempting that riff this afternoon. For Shawn has been to Jimmy Carter’s granddaughter’s art exhibit:

He may not be the skillful, feisty artist his granddaughter is, but his reach and influence are obviously much greater. “We joke because he sold his last painting for $150,000,” Chuldenko ” told New York magazine. “He’s like, ‘How much do you sell yours for?’ And I’m like, ‘Nothing.'”

There is a certain snob appeal to proving one’s value by abusing the laws of supply and demand. The situation is compounded by the digitally reproductive powers of the internet. If my creative product — art, writing, music — has a supply effectively approaching infinity, how awesome it must be if demand still remains high! Especially when ‘demand’ is measured within the tiny circles of tastemaking that can lift a person out of impoverished obscurity and into high-profile bohemianism.

I don’t want to scold, here. I’ll have more to say later, hopefully, about the internet as a brilliant postmodern Marxist social welfare program.