Speaker A
[Music] Society has always hated artists. This hatred is not the way you think. Hatred really expresses itself. I mean, artists aren't being burnt in mass or being beaten up on the road. In fact, on the surface, people love to consume art. They binge TV shows, they blast music, hang paintings on their walls. In fact, people seem to love art, but the people who create the art you love, society has spent centuries making sure that these people stay powerless. Winston Mang, one of the most famous painters of all time, just sold one painting while he was alive. Think about that, just one. He died penniless, alone, and convinced that he was a failure. Today, his work sells for like hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever, but none of that goes to him, nor did he ever see any of this wealth. Franz Kafka, a pioneer of existential thought, was so disillusioned with what his work had brought him in his lifetime that he instructed his best friend to burn all his work after he was dead. His friend disobeyed him, and Kafka went on to become one of the most celebrated thinkers and writers of the 20th century. And even when artists do succeed in their lifetimes, they're often met with hostility. Nina Simone, one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, was blacklisted by the US government for her work in civil rights activism. She was monitored by the FBI, driven into exile, and spent years struggling financially despite her massive influence. This isn't just all bad luck. It is a pattern, and this is a pattern that's been repeating for a long time. And let me show this to you in this video. One, history repeats itself. Throughout history, artists have always been controlled by the powerful. During the Renaissance, the only way to survive being an artist was by getting a patron. I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse: a king, a noble, or the church. That meant your creativity or your output wasn't totally yours. Michelangelo didn't paint the Sistine Chapel because he wanted to; the pope wanted him to paint it. Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest artists of all time, spent most of his time designing war machines, not because he loved destruction, but because he needed the money from the Duke of Milan. His genius was at the mercy of those who funded him. Fast forward to the 19th century, and we had Romanticism and the idea of the starving artist, the belief that suffering is necessary for great art, that if you really love what you do, you should be willing to suffer for it. But in a way, this was never a romantic idea. It was just a way to justify underpaying the artist who lived in that time period, all under the guise of Romanticism. Let's go over some more. Charles Baudelaire, one of the most influential poets of all time, died in poverty. Edgar Allan Poe, the father of modern horror, lived in financial ruin his entire life. Even Frida Kahlo, now considered a feminist icon, spent much of her career struggling to be taken seriously. And I don't know why, but this mindset exists solely for artists and creative thinkers. No one tells doctors to work for exposure; you'll be laughed out of the room. No one tells engineers that their passion should be the reward for their work. But to make suffering a part of someone's identity is pretty unique to artists and intellectuals, and it's something that most of us have emulated and maybe even embodied. That without pain, there is no success. Why? I want to ask, why do you, the customer, value the most poignant works of art as almost being valueless? And why do you, as a creator of it, accept that pain is a part of the process? It's a sadistic relationship, I think, that society has with its thinkers. This myth keeps artists desperate, and desperate people are easy people to exploit. This is why an artist willing to sign away work which is potentially worth millions for pennies is a patron or an investor's dream: infinite value for minimal investment. And if you thought this would have ended a while ago, the 20th century arrived. Corporates took over the places of kings and emperors. Hollywood locked actors into brutal contracts. For example, Judy Garland, while working on The Wizard of Oz, was made to take amphetamines so that she could keep working insane hours. Record labels have always taken the majority of the royalties while the artist keeps scraps, and it's basically a chokehold. Whether you listen to them or you're faced with failure, Prince had to change his name to a symbol just so that he could get fair compensation. Painters were told that their work had no value unless a gallery owner decided otherwise. Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the greats of her time, whose paintings now sell for over $100 million, was seen as a street kid and never respected while he was alive. And today, streaming platforms pay musicians pennies, gigs are lowering costs, everyone is trying to squeeze the artist. In 2025, while the CEOs of these companies are richer than any musician to have ever lived, social media buries posts unless artists pay for promotion. AI models still work to create AI-generated art without ever crediting the artists whose work they have scraped their data from. The game has always stayed the same; just the tools have changed too. The system keeps artists poor on purpose. There's a phrase that people love to say: if you love what you do, you'll never work another day in your life. But I believe only a person with a great love of pain or a sadist could have coined this term. It sounds nice, but in reality, it's just a way to get people to accept low wages. Imagine telling a lawyer you should be grateful that you get to defend people in court and uphold the law. You don't need money; you are defending people. You are a good man. Go, Mr. Lawyer, defend people out of the goodness of your heart. The lawyer laughs in your face, man. But musicians hear this every day. So do artists, writers, actors—anyone in the creative field hears this every day. You should be so grateful that you do what you love for a living. And I do think this is politics of envy, just because you feel that it must be so much fun to make music or art as your profession, and you don't love your job, so it's only obvious that you get paid while the artist struggles. It's so obvious, rather than questioning yourself, that why the hell are you doing a job that you don't love? Your reasoning goes to because I do a job I don't love, so a person who loves a job must suffer. It's a self-hating argument, in my opinion, and I think you should really ask yourself why you spend most of your day doing something you don't want to at all. And when artists do try to make money, they run into the next problem, which is the gatekeepers. Record labels decide which musicians get funding. Streaming algorithms decide who gets heard. Gallery owners decide which art gets exposure. Publishers decide which books get published. And in our current system, this funding is like a giant chokehold around your neck. Do what I, the patron or the corporate or the label, wants or we cut your work off. This is the template of what we want, and if you don't fit in, goodbye. See you, thank you for coming, next please. That's why most mainstream art sounds and feels just like a McDonald's meal: a great investment but a bad burger. And as artists, we aren't competing with each other; we're competing with the people who own the system. And 2025 is showing us the endgame of these corporates: make artists replaceable. AI can now generate music, write books, make paintings in mere seconds. If art is cheap, artists are worthless, and that's the game. Point three: society needs art but refuses to value it. Every major movement ever was fueled by art. Music fueled protests. Bob Dylan's songs became anthems for the Civil Rights Movement. Film shaped public opinion. Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator mocked Hitler openly while the rest of the world was silent. Literature sparked revolutionary ideas. George Orwell's 1984 exposed authoritarianism decades before it became a warning sign. Artists don't just make things that are pretty and play in the background and keep your mood peppy. They are the originators of the ideas.
