The New World of Art
The world has forever changed due to the internet. There is now the capacity for infinite leverage through media. According to Naval Ravikant, “If you’re a young ambitious person today you don’t go into real estate or oil or extraction of natural resources, you go into content. Ideas are the new oil. All of the great fortunes are being made in the idea space.”
What I’ve learned from observing different creators and working as one myself, is that ideas are products. Ideas can be packaged and sold. Not only that, but they can be repackaged and resold in a different form. You can sell one idea in a newsletter, and then take the best quote from it and sell it on X. You can take an original idea from YouTube, chop it into shorts, and sell them as Instagram Reels and Tik Toks. You can sell them across as many platforms as you want, and then chop them up, reshape them, and resell them on all of those platforms again.
The reason this is worth doing is because attention is the new currency. Attention is what companies and individuals are after, because attention can be monetized. If you have 3 million followers you can monetize that fairly easily through ad revenue, affiliate marketing, or by selling your own product. It almost doesn’t even matter what it is or if it’s any good. If it’s on-brand, 1-10% of your audience will probably buy it.
Everyone is now a personal brand. We associate Joe Rogan with mixed martial arts, aliens, psychedelics, ancient civilizations and conspiracy theories. That is his personal brand. It used to be that only celebrities were personal brands, but now, everyone on the internet is managing and curating a personal brand .
It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to. That’s what you’re doing. You are shaping the public perception of who you are through what you post and share. If you post pictures with cute puppies, over time, “dog lover” will become one aspect of your personal brand. If you post tik toks at the gym or tweet about nutrition, “fitness and health” will become a part of your personal brand. You are constructing a public image whether you like it or not. That is the world we have created.
People follow the personal brands that they vibe with. The guys I know that watch the Joe Rogan podcast vibe with him on at least one of his interests. Either they watch UFC fights or they are into aliens, conspiracy theories, or self improvement. The exceptions are the ones that don’t vibe with Joe Rogan at all, but they tuned in to listen to the guest that week that they do vibe with.
We are all curating personal brands whether we like it or not, and if you want to monetize art in the 21st century, you’ll have to manage and curate your personal brand. Everyone is competing for attention, and if you want your art to get attention, you’ll have to earn those eyes and ears. That is the inconvenient reality.
Many artists, (myself included) are introverts. We don’t want to be the center of attention and we don’t want to constantly pander to the crowd to get attention. We’re not court jesters, we’re artists. We want to disappear for months and then return to a crowd that’s been waiting at the edge of their seats to see our new creation.
Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. If you want to maintain an audience for your art in the 21st century, you have to feed and nurture that audience daily. No disappearing. Unless you are already famous, if you disappear for 3 months, when you come back, most of your audience will have moved on. There’s simply too much incredible content competing for their attention.
Artistic competition used to be localized. You would compete for the attention of people in your village or region, and if you were the best of the best you would compete nationally. The internet has brought all national and regional walls down with a crash. You are now competing against everyone in the world, everywhere, all the time. For everything.
It is a daunting prospect, especially when you are first starting out. Don’t get discouraged. There is a silver lining.
There is greater opportunity than ever to carve out your own little area of the internet, gain a following and build a small community around your art. Maybe even enough to live off of.
If you create a physical craft you can keep it local while also dappling online. You don’t have to spend your life on a screen because you manage your audience in person. You sell your pieces at trade fairs and farmer’s markets. If you want to, you can also have a website and Etsy account to attract some distant customers. Taking pictures of your work and showcasing it on Instagram is a great low commitment way to keep people up to date on what you’re doing.
It is far easier to make money locally as a creator of a physical craft such as jewelry, paintings, metalwork, woodwork, weavings, leather, or clothes, than it is to monetize intangible crafts such as audio or visuals. For musicians, podcasters, actors, comedians and content creators, the internet is where you have to put your stuff if you want people to see it.
However, since the tools and free time to create art are more available to average people than they ever have been before in history, there is more competition, but there are also more and more niche communities forming around artists and creators. Instead of record labels deciding which 300 artists deserve to be heard or seen by the world, now everyone can be heard and seen by the world.
Everyone (including you) has a Macbook and an iPhone. That means you can create, but so can everyone else. Competition has never been more fierce. You have to be your own record label. Your own publishing house. Your own agent. You have to do your own graphic design, direct your own films, run your own advertisements, manage your business finances, hire assistants, curate your image, and market your work all while continuing to create your art consistently. You are competing directly against everyone else to be heard and seen.
Now, as artists, of course we are supportive of each other’s art. We want everyone we know to be successful. But it isn’t up to me. It isn’t up to you. It’s up to “the people.” If they appreciate that artist’s work, they’ll “follow” or “like” or “subscribe.” If they don’t, they won’t. Some artists will gain an audience that sustains their ability to continue to work on their craft, and some won’t. In the new world of art, it is each and every artist’s responsibility to directly manage every aspect of their career. No one but you can gain yourself an audience for your art. Art is business and business isn’t fair.
What happens over time is, the more successful an artist becomes, the more people they can hire to help them create content and push their content. As they gain traction they can afford to run ads and marketing campaigns. This puts them in front of more eyes and ears which brings in more money. As they get more money they can move faster and more efficiently. Now their art is in more places more of the time. That brings in even more money. Now their art is in even more places more of the time. That brings in even more money.
As with any other form of business, success becomes a snowball. The more successful you get, the more successful you get. Yesterday’s underdog is tomorrow’s emperor.
So how do you build a snowball? With persistence. That’s the only way. You have to be relentless. Your first work of art is one single snowflake. Tiny and easily dissolvable. No traction. You have to build that snowflake into a large collection of snowflakes that work together as a single portfolio that captures your brand identity and showcases it in the best possible light. Then, you have to push it, and you aren’t going downhill. You’re going uphill.
This is the journey of the modern artist. Imagine you’re pushing your snowball, but you’re facing a hill. You push your snowball uphill for years and years, with no idea where the top of the hill might be. You pray that things will flatten out, that it will just become a little easier to push this snowball. Someday it will. But you have no idea when. The first half of your journey is all uphill, but at a certain point it gets easier, it starts to flatten out. Then, all of a sudden, it starts to take off, collecting snow and growing all on its own.
Unfortunately, you have no idea how big your personal hill is, or where the top might be. All you have is the belief that at some point you’ll reach the top, things will get easier, and then all of a sudden, they’ll take off down the other side.
