How far do we go for something we love?

 Luisa Ji | Feb 19, 2025 | Dispatch #2

How much are you willing to pay for love or a proxy for love? The success of an artist is often told in ambition, hardship, and sacrifice in service to the craft. Art is a labour of love and one of setting the goal and chasing the dream.

The artist—the girl boss—born to touch moss, forced to realize her fullest potential.

When the ultimate measure of worth in the arts is professionalizing one’s practice (I wish to make art full time) and producing art as commodities (I wish my art sells at a good price), do we lose our love for creation in this process? What happens when art—something experienced, felt, and often what makes life meaningful—solidifies as an asset to be measured, bought, and sold? 

This week’s dispatch explores the price of creative labour and the elusive financial autonomy for artists.

The arts are often framed as an investment, with municipal public art programs, arts councils, and private funders endorsing artistic outputs, citing tourism, urban renewal, identity-building, and health and wellness benefits. Yet, this investment is rarely directed at the artists. Take art in public realms for example, where artists get paid for their labour for a public activation event, to  paint a mural or to make a sculpture. Public art projects usually drive up property values, displacing populations deemed undesirable, making neighbourhoods appealing for real estate investment, and ultimately abandoning the very people who created the cultural value in this process. In this model, financial speculation in real estate reaps the benefit, and public art is not what is being invested in. When there’s no incentive to bind art with an investment with clear returns, money dwindles. Similarly, private investment in the arts favours assets with quantifiable returns—paintings traded at auctions, NFTs, and high-value collectibles. While some artists found financial security this way, the process remains opaque for most.

Well-intentioned efforts to support artists' financial sustainability in the mid-2010s have steadfastly led to the rise of the creator’s economy. Artists are encouraged to productize their practice, turning their creative process and outputs into consumable content where the audience lives vicariously through the artists. The value created is not in the art itself but in the visibility and marketability of an artist’s brand—the story, the allure of the backstage, the parasocial relationship. While this movement brought financial autonomy to a wave of ultra-online artists and creators, who do we leave behind? Who can't afford to be public online? What’s the next story to make public and subsequently commodify? 

Storytelling has long been co-opted for commodification. Since we opened with the topic of love, let’s explore this avenue for a moment. We are likely familiar with De Beers’ “A Diamond is Forever” advertising campaign that began in 1947, binding the value of love, intangible, forever, to that of diamonds, tangible. Cultural productions (Marilyn Monroe, Scarface, James Bond, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and so on) chased the extensive push of the campaign. Pop culture solidified the connection between love and purchasing diamonds for a loved one or oneself. Love can be bought. Love can be signified by something material.

The question of genuine love and real diamonds involves distinguishing between naturally extracted diamonds (“certified conflict-free,” of course) and their more abundant counterpart: lab-grown synthetic diamonds. This distinction is not too different from the art world’s value judgments—where authenticity, scarcity, exclusivity, and, more recently, impact dictate worth. Diamonds are only valuable when everyone wants them. Everyone wants diamonds when they are valuable. This circular logic sustains markets, including the art world. There’s no real way of evaluating the worth of diamonds, and most evaluation criteria, despite being calculated and rational, are arbitrary, which makes diamonds, like art, extremely volatile as an investment. While craftsmanship and artistry contribute to value, they are secondary to the narratives that drive desirability—rarity, authenticity, and emotional connection. When these narratives decouple from reality, their constructed value collapses. The self-fulfilling prophecy, like the stories selling diamonds, isn’t forever. 

Synthetic diamonds are “fake” and, therefore, should be worth less than real diamonds covered in blood. Does this also mean that the real authentic backstory of an artist and their misery makes the art worth more?

Does a piece of art's worth determine an artist's prestige in the "art world" and the worth of art itself?

To address financial volatility, we can’t keep avoiding discussions about money in the arts and the relationship between arts and prestige, as well as that of prestige and wealth. Just as you can’t end violence with more violence, you don’t escape the rat race by driving a Lamborghini. 

The narratives shaping our understanding of wealth and value are constructed by those who benefit from our desire to attain them. We learn what wealth is supposed to look like from mass media. Cultural production continuously generates images of wealth. We are told that we might become just like the wealthy through consumption and buying while the wealthy dress up as working-class, signalling “we are just like you.” (to quote: “Everyone wearing Carhartt until it’s time to do Carhartt shit”) Yet, we never genuinely cultivate wealth for ourselves and our communities. Not only do we cease to cultivate wealth within our communities, but communities caught in rapid aesthetic “-core” cycles quickly deteriorate into groups with shared interests, feeding off one another's insatiable desire to belong. Many people learn financial literacy through Reddit threads, YouTube videos, and 15-second brain rot clips rather than from someone in their lives. The notion that wealth is built solely through an individual’s hard work and perseverance is a deeply ingrained myth—one that justifies inequity while obscuring the role of luck, privilege, and other system mechanisms sustaining the disparity. Discussing money can be awkward. If you fail to succeed in achieving wealth, that’s a “you” problem. If you earn more than your peers, you’re a sell-out, but if you earn too little, you’re a failure. If you use AI in your art, you’re a thief, jeopardizing everyone else’s livelihood. Discussing money, how artists make money, and money’s influence in the arts marketplace also has consequences. Being too upfront may put artists receiving financial support from those criticized—such as funders, corporate or institutional buyers, and investors in the arts—at risk. Artists follow the rules set by their funders to survive: this is not financial autonomy. 

Getting into each other’s business and having others intrude into yours is uncomfortable under this premise.

While we may walk away with less pressure from those who constantly tell us what to do, we also risk losing the wisdom that could guide us away from "business opportunities" that are simply too good to be true (scams!). Discussing money and the economics of the arts among our peers is, in itself, a radical act. The concept of wealth for artists often feels elusive, even though artists’ labour turns the cogs of the machine generating wealth for others through cultural productions of various kinds: music, film, TV, fashion, marketing, editorial, and more. However, that image may become clearer through experimentation and exploration. We might challenge (and subvert) the systems that exploit us, develop new strategies to support one another’s work, create a safety net for our peers when alternatives are lacking, and seek guidance from our predecessors because none of the volatility we encounter is entirely new. At the time of this dispatch, some readers have shared their current circumstances: having been laid off, project funding disappearing due to political decisions, and much more.

I don’t believe we live in a time darker than any other in history. Heck, my grandfather was trapped in a deadly desert snowstorm during his 10-year political exile in the westernmost part of China, with no rescue, and only survived because of the warmth from his horse—and luck.

It feels like this dark time will never pass because we no longer know how to cope with it.

Undoubtedly, it is getting dark, the cold is setting in, and the scavengers are circling, ready to pick us apart for their survival. Now is the time to build a fire so we can stay warm. Those who have endured dark times before us understand this. They’ve lived to see the sunrises and continued to dance, sing, and share stories gathered around many, many fires. The question is, do we remember how to build a fire? Being greedy and feeding a fire that’s too big will destroy us all. If the fire is too small, we won’t last very long. Only by building fires can we learn how to create better ones.

Proof is in the pudding.

Art is when you are in it.

I wish your love for art remains unbound, free as a butterfly.