Creatively Pasteurized

The title comes from a great spam poem I received in my InBox and adequately sums up my feelings on mixing artmaking + moneymaking. The combo just curdles and neutralizes all the joy of doing art for me. Thinking and working in a honest fashion is hard enough without having to add making a serious career and/or living from it. So which will it be...Am I a thinker or a laborer? (as mia fineman puts it via artpowerlines) Fascinating.) Maybe it's destined to be a little of both (thinking AND doing, but not in fineman's art world), if I plan on keeping sane.

It's a very perverted system we have that attaches everything to money (corporate fashion funding, and corruption) as a rate of exchange. Let's be honest, the art market isn't selling artwork...that's just the fancy candy wrapper, what's for sale are levels of greed and egotism. I'm sure an economist, sociologist or historian would be better qualified to speak, but when did the barter system fade from the economic vernacular? Surfing through a slew of blogs during a night of insomnia, I found it curious that so many blogs talk about the values and virtues of collecting art as good investment. Invested in what, exactly? Status (of being so-called cultured)? The manipulations of certain gallerists, curators and their ilk, per Gusky's web of conversation? or how about the supposed non-elitist attitude Ashes discusses re: Winkelman? Not to be ignored, but certainly best to be aware of the system that plays like a broken record from traditional and alternative views alike (good to maintain perspective).