Today’s mother’s day in Slovenia and while unrelated to art it got me thinking about our ability to do what we do. 

Without a mom, we obviously wouldn’t be able to exist, but there is a bigger, more universal provider that also has an enormous part to play in our ability to work in the creative field. Without the enormous advances in our society — both technological and social — our ability to live off selling anything on Etsy (even the existence of Etsy itself) would’ve been impossible to imagine.

Creative work, especially the kind of solo work we artists tend to do, can be incredibly demanding; people still don’t really understand the value that art — any kid of art — provides, our wages are too often calculated in exposure rather than real, factual currency, and going full-time with our art still isn’t as easy as it is for many other professions.

But among all these downsides, we must appreciate the fact that it has never been easier to live off your work as an artist. Not by a long shot.

The point is simple: the more a society progresses, the more basic and higher needs become satisfied by commoditised products that basically most of its contributing individuals can afford.

I’m not talking about the quality of said products — good food still is and always will be expensive, the same goes for anything else — but questions of quality aside (don’t get me wrong, they’re important, but that’s not my point) the shear amount of needs that have become commoditised is beyond incredible.

If 50 years ago plumbing, fresh water and food were scarce, now (in developed countries) more people than ever have access to all of them, and as such our standards of living have skyrocketed.

Every time standards go up, more jobs and more possibilities for people to create value for others appear. If before, people were either hungry or nourished and the food industry was concerned more or less with just the quantity of production, now we have thousands of different similar products on the markets, all aligned with a particular kind of personal demand their consumers might have.

And only in such an abundant environment can artistic objects flourish (especially performance art and conceptualism). 

Because art, unlike shovels and hammers, has no immediate utilitarian purpose, pertaining to satisfying any physical human needs like the need for food or shelter. It aims at satisfying higher psychological needs, like the need for status and self-actualisation, and such needs only arise if all other, more basic ones have already been met.

It’s like soap; if the basic demand for just the quantity and basic quality of such a product wasn’t being met, the conversation about subjective qualities like the colour, smell, design and other non-vital traits f soap wouldn’t even exist.

Even though many of us struggle with getting financially independent through our art creation, let’s not forget to still take a moment and be grateful for the fact that we even have the ability to try. 

Because those who were born or lived through the great depression weren’t concerned with the amount of organic growth of their Instagram profile and the audacity of building a working business model on painting various types of mandalas would’ve gotten you laughed out of a room.

In 2019 though, all of this is possible. 

Let’s take a moment and appreciate all that people who came before us accomplished, so that we can spend our lives concerned with whether or not to find the courage to finally have a go at oil painting, not whether or not we’re going to get anything to eat this week.