I give away a lot of my art and photography.
I don’t often or consciously think of it like that, but in the moments when I am challenged on the value of what I make I also tend to get snagged on this little reality: I give a lot of it away for free and don’t think twice about it, either.
There is a value proposition mixed in there, of course.
Value comes from demand and demand is not automatic: that is to say, my photos, say, only have value if someone wants them and just because I take them doesn’t mean they automatically have a corresponding someone who wants them.
Value, in this way is a bit circular. You need to create the value by creating an audience, and you create an audience by lowering the value, often to zero, of your work so that the audience can have it, learn to love it, and eventually want to pay for it.
At least, that’s one way.
I’ve never consciously done that… but I have done it unconsciously. I have taken photos on my own time and motivation and become the guy that someone has said, yes please, here’s money, give us more. It really has worked that way.
But maybe you have to give a lot away first.
And maybe too, you have to be okay with something you made having a value that is something other than a cash transaction.
Terms FROm this POSt
- audience
- Creativity is often a dance between creator and audience. Art can exist in a vacuum, of course, but the perception of art by a receptive human mind seems to me to a critical half of the creative equation.
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
