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“It’s great that you do business for a living. Is that a real job?”
Luisa Ji | March 13, 2025 | Dispatch #4
I’m sure everyone reading this newsletter has faced the challenge of being generous with ourselves in a world where, in the back of our minds, we think we have an hourly rate on the hours we are not getting paid for. It’s difficult to practice generosity when the norm is to maximize one’s resources, all while navigating unprecedented changes now daily.
What’s commonly understood as a measure of our worth is money, but also time, relationships, and the often too-late attention to health. The future burns bright. We can have a little humour. We can take some time for ourselves as we stare right into the flame, realizing that we have indeed arrived at the bright future we've been promised.
The winter prior, during a casual chat with Tuomas, whom I know from about a decade ago, when I was still studying architecture, I was introduced to a story from Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution about rice farmers in Japan. Tuomas now runs a public sauna with his family at the edge of the Baltic Sea. It took them a few years to learn the rhythm of tending to the establishment and a business of fair exchange—where guests are considerate and hosts are attentive. If the entry price is too high, it becomes prohibitive for regular folks; too low, and the establishment packs guests like sardines trying to make ends meet. Money here mediates supply and demand. The daily ritual of feeding the fire and folding towels becomes a way of keeping time. At the same time, occasional gatherings around field recording sessions, music, tea, and conversation occur after closing or on holidays. I sense that running a public sauna follows a rhythm or balance quite different from the world of architecture that often prioritizes "the grind" under financialization, and perhaps taking a life lesson from the rice farmers who lost their poems as a reminder to not fall for the lies of growth and scaling up.
Here’s the gist of the story: Before industrialized agriculture took over Japan, rice farmers cultivated one crop of rice a year and, in the less demanding seasons, tended to everything else in life. With ample off-season time, they wrote poems and offered them to the village shrine in gratitude for a good harvest and a fulfilling life. Industrialization then allowed farmers to grow two crops a year. While more efficient, the poetry soon stopped. There’s no more off-season from farming, and the time traditionally devoted to living was replaced by managing machines that sustain increased production efficiency. Rice became cheaper because of more supply, and growing two crops became mandatory to make enough income for the year. Eventually, people left farming to pursue other higher-paying jobs in the city—why continue farming when more lucrative ways to make a living existed? Furthermore, modern agriculture, by contrast, allows one person to control several machines to do the same work. There's no need for a whole community to be a part of this operation. This leap in automation drives the cost of production down and simultaneously lowers the cost of the work involved.
Many essential or quotidian products we use or consume in life are attainable at a significantly lower cost than prior decades for this reason. Value is extracted through optimizing the production of goods for speed and quantity, and we face more chances of accumulating excess that will further drive down the value of work and the goods produced. Festivities, art, and rituals served as a means of releasing excess—poetry in the village shrine was a way of devoting "excess" time to pursuits larger than life; medieval Carnivals were a spectacular and spiritual farewell to meat before the accumulated goods spoiled; Lent requires a sacrifice of precious things like money and sweets. I put "excess" in quotations because it is only considered excess or waste within a social structure that devalues anything beyond the human ego and more than mere production.
Art appears excessive and wasteful when viewed through the lens of industrial efficiency. When labour is often priced by the hour, idleness must be justified. The dream would be to generate an income while freed from trading time for money. This has fueled the myth of passive income, shifting focus from creation to sustaining monetization from what's already made. Increasingly, artists handle all aspects of their practice, aided by available tools and infrastructure. Business skills or relatively reliable jobs become essential. However, not without sacrifices, working with large brands risks compromising artistic integrity, pitching to investors and clients consumes energy, and traditional employment might mean that you live a double life. Either way, generosity becomes difficult when every moment is accounted for with its associated value and truly “free” time is scarce. The value we assign to time can be a speculative hourly rate as a marker of what’s worth the time commitment, or alternatively, as it seems, many also employ the vibe-based approach to whether the time commitment leads to something that feels good.
Reclaiming time is an act of generosity. The wealthy—those who do not trade their own time for money—glorify extreme work hours as a virtue and source of their success, yet this is a trap. Countless workers trade their time for an hourly wage working at companies owned by the wealthy. The more entrepreneurial aim is towards the success of “self-made” billionaires, dreaming of becoming one themselves and finally being free. Stagnant incomes and rising expenses also force people to continue monetizing time they would very much love for leisure. The ultimate luxury is the ability to rest and engage in a creative outlet without financial incentive. Today, status is no longer defined by collecting rare artifacts or the finest artisanal craft but by engaging in activities requiring significant time and embodied effort that few can afford. Yet, this too is an illusion and fictional image of what wealth looks like. The ever-popular tradwife aesthetic, with or without religious undertones, romanticizes homemade goods while subtly directing viewers to affiliate shops, more videos in meticulously staged homes, and "effortless" glamour—all linked in bio.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, a short book by Robert M. Pirsig, the story highlights that while we all recognize quality, we struggle to define it. To define it is to quantify and measure it, making it easier to manipulate the definitions. Businesses have bypassed the strict guidelines of B Corp with enough money to bend the rules. Similarly, with free-range eggs and carbon-neutral flights. We live in a time where marketing and brand images mask the absence of quality. We settle for cheaper alternatives that are costly in ways we often overlook. We settle for less beautiful objects because a mug that holds water is a good enough mug. We recognize when quality is absent, but better options cost more money to buy or cost more effort should we choose to produce our own. Celebrities launch pottery lines, art shows, and art spaces and sell branded wellness products they crafted, designed, or hand-curated. Does Seth Rogen make every single one of his branded ashtrays? Nope. The ashtrays are produced in places where labour and materials are significantly cheaper than sourcing in Canada. If celebrities monetize their hobbies, you should, too.
Art requires time and energy. Craft also demands time and energy. The lighthearted joke about not wanting to buy a dress from the fast fashion store and instead spending $800 on equipment and materials to make a similar dress over the course of many weeks highlights not only our desire to engage in a craft but also the strange realization that hiring a tailor would cost even more if paid a fair price for their labour and skills. We can easily buy clothes at stores even if they don't fit perfectly. They are good enough. When production is outsourced to lower-paid workers in countries with questionable labour laws, making things ourselves feels like a waste of time but ultimately reveals the real cost of quotidian items that aren't considered precious anymore. Anyone who has attempted to sew a dress knows even a $80 dress isn't "mathing." Anyone who has attempted to make a mug on the pottery wheel knows that a $2 mug should absolutely be impossible, but they line the aisles of stores. We have access to a lot more things: content, tools, and trinkets, but more than often, they are things to be thrown away (or double the guilt and give it to the next person.)
We live in an illusion where time spent staring at screens, typing reports, or rushing from one place to another on an Uber appears more valuable than the labour of those who make our clothes, bowls, computers or drive the Uber. We see that a vet charges a few hundred for looking at your cat's tummy ache, and a 15-minute chat with a dentist results in a bill and a massive quote for actually addressing your pain. Life feels overwhelming but no longer seems that bad when we spend hours indulging in an endless scroll of social media, witnessing upsetting news, and sharing relatable memes for self-soothing. Yet time slips away. Wake up, another day. Another day. Most of us are forced into scripted ideas of how to spend our free time: services Netflix and Spotify grant us more choices to browse endlessly, unable to commit; vacations are meticulously planned with itineraries packed to the brim, but more than ever, yet me even more exhausting than chipping away at a job. Art, whether engaged in consumption or making, is an extracurricular activity and an escape. Other times, we resent the need to monetize hobbies to justify the costly nature of creative pursuits. If you are one of the lucky few able to sustain a living through art practice, you are probably also the lucky few who receive the greeting: “It’s nice that you do art. Is that a real job?”
On the other hand, artists and organizers frequently offer lower prices or adopt pay-what-you-can models to ensure accessibility. However, the aesthetic entry point remains niche, understood mainly by those within the artistic community—who often sustain their practice within the same highly volatile financial ecosystem. This cycle becomes one that eats away at itself. While low-cost access seems democratizing, it dims the value of an experience, much like accepting the norm of buying a $2 mug from IKEA, where you know workers are poorly paid. Still, hey, you also needed the $28 you theoretically saved when you gave up buying the $30 mug from your local pottery studio. The common cost recovery models remain suggested donations, selling drinks at the vernissage, merchandise (a whole living room worth of inventory), or more grant applications. They all add more work to the "art" just so "art" can be sustained. That sounds like bad math, but it has been working the way it does, even when it is indeed digging bigger holes that get harder to fill.
Arts organizers struggle to bridge the gap between low-cost access and fair artist compensation without consistent funding and investment. They don't have enough staff or cashflow to sustain an operation that allows them to solicit and receive donations and issue tax receipts. They are also unlike commercial galleries, which directly facilitate sales of artifacts being showcased. Auctions are also not common as they seem sour the taste, especially when we are still recovering from the ridiculous ride of NFTs. Price discovery, such as auctions, is more than just jacking up an object's value; it has been a means to balance supply and demand. Of course, these mechanisms can be manipulated, and a high price doesn't always mean good quality. Meanwhile, the actual barrier to entry for the arts is often not cost but cultural fluency. It doesn't help that public spending on education, language, and cultural programs in schools and communities is rapidly declining. This barrier contrasts with art forms built on exclusivity under the guise of intellectual challenge. The withdrawal of funding for arts education hinders the development of fundamental skills needed to make sense of the world, exchange ideas, build relationships, and create new stories that do not generate the most money. Understanding what art means is useless in our current norms of measuring value unless it creates other impacts deemed worthy of funding by funders and investors.
Wealthy families can still afford arts education for their children, and many middle class families will squeeze in the investment to give their children better social upward mobility, but most people without such awareness lose access to cultural literacy and fluency. Consuming spectacles does not require an education in the arts, nor does it involve anything critical or philosophical. Paying thousands, if not tens of thousands, to go to Disneyland for a once-in-a-lifetime feel-good experience is worth the price when the alternative is something hard to understand and potentially reveals a sadder reality about the world we live in. In other words, I believe we are moving towards a social norm that devalues the essential knowledge we need to make sense of the world. Arts funding should not be seen as a mere safety net for artists. Universal basic income for artists doesn't solve the volatility in the sector beyond offering temporary relief from symptoms of broader issues. We should be concerned that the absence of arts and culture as central to our social fabric jeopardizes our society’s ability to challenge those who benefit from our failure to ask difficult questions.
Over the past few years, I've had the grace of working on multiple grant applications. Artists and cultural organizations are consistently asked to respond to extremely serious questions in our funding applications and fundraising campaigns because our funders socialize the idea that the arts have a purpose. Muscle memory also leads us to consistently apply the same approach we respond to grant applications in the creative process. Art has become too profound, sombre, and didactic, with a few outliers that are witty, emotional, and maybe not art. This makes sense—our social conditions demand serious conversations. The sector promotes playfulness so that more people can be drawn into conversations like climate, AI, policy, and the ever-widening wealth gap. Yet, the play area is designated and padded with cushions. It's so protected that so few lessons translate to life. Those who don't see themselves in the "serious" art world often prefer practicing an art form in their leisure and as a hobby that is stripped of any social context. Art or any embodiment of beauty produced by historically marginalized people is instantly politically charged without a choice—show the world your generational struggles, your heritage, but no joy and no future. (Did you grow up as a third-culture kid who did not fit in? Did you put that in your artist statement?)
If I end here, it’s sad and cynical.
Why does anything matter? Why make anything at all?
I think about Francisco Goya’s later works, particularly one painted on his dining room wall, never intended for public view. Later, it was transferred to canvas and given a speculative title: Saturn Devouring His Son. A man cannibalizing his own kind, seen from the artist’s dining table. Perhaps a sick joke. Perhaps a release from a world consuming itself. We will never know Goya’s intentions behind this painting.
The theme of cannibalizing persists through the recent good run of eat-the-rich movies and the modest investment of hundreds of millions into making and distributing movies like Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, and Saltburn. Maybe that’s a sick joke, too. Is investing in cultural production another meme format for those controlling capital to pass around and signal, “LOL. Relatable. Share.” Or, perhaps artists and cultural producers can have our cake and eat it, too? What about seeing business as an extracurricular activity? That slide deck you made? That's super cute. I wish I could do that. I could do that. I could wear a suit, and I clean up nicely.
Can intervening “business” be an art form itself?
Is it not art?
Is it not a performance?