It’s funny you mentioned Sam Clemens. My wife and I have been watching a documentary about ol’ Mr. Twain.

I obviously agree with you about getting paid for your art. But I would have you consider this. For a lot of creatives who start a business with their art, they end up doing less and less art and more and more of running the business. I know I deal with that many times. So, let’s flip this paradigm on it’s head. What if you had a regular ol’ 9 to 5. At 5 you are completely off the clock. That gives you the rest of your time to do all you want, how you want, with your art. No clients telling you how to edit something. No jobs you take just for the $$$. It’s art for art’s sake. Your bread and butter is taken care of by the 9 to 5. Just something to think about.

I firmly believe that art should NOT be free. Making art is hard work, and artists make things that other people can’t make.

Expecting to enjoy music or paintings or photography or a good book without paying the person who made it is like going to an auto shop and expecting them to fix your car for free. It’s like going to your hair stylist and expecting to walk out with a great hairdo without paying for it. It’s like calling a plumber to fix your leaky toilet for zero dollars.

Someone expecting me to make photographs for them for free, is like me asking them to to their work on my behalf for free. Would you go to your job and put in a hard day’s work if you didn’t get paid for it?

If an artist puts in an eight hour day creating paintings, or music, or photographs, or writing a novel, or making a movie, isn’t she just as entitled to get paid for that work as the person who puts in an eight hour day assembling cars or driving a delivery truck or styling people’s hair?

Frank Lloyd Wright once opined that “Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well fed.” Artists need to eat, too, and if we have to hold a full time job to pay the rent and put food on the table, we’re not spending that time doing what we’re really good at – and THAT impoverishes the whole society by severely limiting the artist’s output.

Let’s face it online piracy is rampant almost no one pays for music or movies anymore however money isn’t lost by an industry I’d say it’s spread to wider market, massive amounts of internet bandwidth, connection speeds, hard drives, media players all these owe their massive popularity to online piracy. There are millions of artists on the market today and it’s quite literally impossible to buy all their music unless you are filthy rich, the old way of doing things are dead, record companies, etc will have to come with better ways of generating profits.

Thanks for commenting Matt. Great story about the filmmaker. For me it’s easy to know the difference between the two. The trick is that achieving that balance. I’m hoping in 2012 to take some risks and chances so that more of what pays the bills also fulfills my spirit.

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with an older filmmaker that recounted a concept that I think is very true. While telling me about his upcoming projects for 2012 he mentioned that one of his friends recently put a personal project on hold to pursue a 9-5 job as a DP on a well-known TV series. He said his friend didn’t even like the show, was not being challenged, and even further, was compromising his integrity of filmmaking for “cliche TV bullshit.” But it paid the bills and gave him notoriety. Rather than criticizing his friends decision, he said that as a filmmaker he had no problem with that type of work, so long as you end the day knowing the difference between the two.

Like you said Ron, some of your favorite projects are ones you haven’t been paid to do, and you have done projects that don’t excite you in the least. I think that’s ok, so long as you know the difference between the two.