Guagua Pública

I'm an expert writer. Don't laugh, it's taken me a long time to be able to say that. So I become frustrated when people try to downplay the worthiness of some text when they don't get it. As if they were actually able to predict whether something was quality art or worthy of your attention. They're the leftover gate keepers of a scare economy in charge of unwise gates in an abundant economy.

If I tell you that it only took me five minutes to write this, do you start to doubt it's worthiness? By the way, it didn't. :-/ On the other hand, if I told you that I had been working on that sentence for 10 years, do you start to question my sanity? What if I say, to be honest, it's more like 25 years. Ever since I was first tasked to write a report for the United States Army back in 1986, I've been studying the art of writing with the English language.

Of course, when you put it that way, it seems clearer that my writing might be worthy of your attention. Or does it? In my advanced theory of the "Tower of Babel," our minds are so unique to make it nearly impossible to expect that any one person will see/hear/say/feel things the way an artist did when they created their art. So we look for clues to help us see/hear/say/feel what the artist did. Unfortunately we continue to look to the gatekeepers for that help, instead of artists offering their own help.

We have a fundamental need to categorize things, if we can not find our own way to see/hear/say/feel what the artist did we must find help. If we don't find any help, we must rapidly discard it from our attention queue and route around the interference to the next item waiting. we are networked Homo Sapien.


I once again must state:

"It is impossible for anyone to predict with any high degree of accuracy what someone is willing to buy or pay for."

Two billion is such a LARGE number, it towers over any imagination. The complexity involved to increase your accuracy in such a large market quickly becomes cost prohibitive. As the costs of publishing or producing approach zero, it should decentivize anyone from investing in that effort.

As with the practice of any art, artistic freedom can only come when you detach any expectations of those who experience your art. Therefore, as self publishers and producers, we must focus on producing art with as much passion and precision as possible, then share the hell out of it. We've got to make personal connections with equal efforts. We must have a social graph with enough people in it to vastly increase our odds of finding enough fans willing to share your work and hopefully, give us the opportunity to ask them to buy something as well. This is the convergent economy, get used to it.

Photos Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons: rita banerji & aurelio.asiain