More Experiments, More Learning Together
It’s been about a year since this project hit the ground. I’m so grateful to have seen it go from a mere hunch that the funding system would give out under forces larger than we, artists and small arts organizations, can brace for, to acting on an experiment so that we can learn new ways of working together when old models no longer serve us. You can read the first post here: https://goblin-market.ghost.io/research-driven-prototyping-pilot-alt-economic-art/
I'm ready to dig into the next stage of this project, and, like last year, I can feel the waves pushing things into adventurous and interesting places. I don't really have the energy right now to write another grant and wait for its results, but it might also be a sign from the universe that it's time to experiment with something unfamiliar. I'm reaching out to people for insights, for case studies, and for knowledge. I've been learning new things and fixing the things I totally suck at.
Funny that the grant-funding world is probably getting more hostile. I’ve written and received (and delivered on) enough grants to know it’s a well-intentioned system that often pits people against one another over scarce resources. It fosters a very specific kind of competition that divides winners from losers. It’s a strange kind of rejection therapy that is both too personal and too impersonal at the same time. The camaraderie we are holding on to is hanging by a thread, sustained by strong-willed people who have not let this destroy their hopes for a better common ground. How long can you stay cheering for others when your well is running low? There’s definitely an element of the Slop-ification at play, but overall, I think the various ways people use technology to try to game the system are telling of just how broken this system is.
In a perfect world, I wouldn’t keep writing grants for the money rather than the things I want to do. 8 months is a long time for good ideas to die. The disgust of answering multiple questions, picking at the scabs of being an immigrant to this country or of feeling somehow different from “normal” people. This is a small price to pay in exchange for the funding you can get, until it erodes your dreams and whimsy. There must be a better way for artists and cultural producers to act swiftly when necessary (or take the time to develop ideas in depth). Many of the crises are not new, but the conditions continue to unfold—they interrupt our known patterns and cycles.
Still, go and apply for your first art grant—it's a good exercise to try it for yourself if you are an artist. You will then know how it feels to work with the forces that perhaps you've heard about but don't know how to make sense of yet.
I believe the generation raised in the hypersaturation of digital interactions is losing the opportunity to develop a sense of either a personal or a shared cosmology that, in the past, likely came with age and experience. “Losing” might be the wrong phrase: plenty of people simply never developed it as they aged, before doomscrolling, widespread misinformation, or AI. I forgot many grew up in stories that framed being an asshole as heroic and honourable.
It’s taking me weeks to write this post because every time I reopen the file, I end up writing something cynical. So I close it and turn my mind to something else.
I want to be hopeful. I want to be sincere.
As much as I want to say that arts and culture can provide fertile ground for developing a fulfilling sense of self, even a cosmology, I'm skeptical that we even have that mental capacity now, with everything packed with bureaucratic sludge or brainrot.
It takes 50% of my willpower to just get off the brainrot feed, and the other 50% to open QuickBooks to face reality.
I’ve been through multiple iterations of what business looks like in my short stint in entrepreneurial endeavours (the past 10-some odd years), and the most valuable lesson is that now I no longer want to sell work I don’t want to do, nor do I want to do work I can’t commit to with full sincerity. I’ve learned from many who are adept at multitasking, doing everything stacked on top of one another, or being able to isolate themselves when doing work that doesn’t truly inspire them. I am now figuring out the plan for the next stage of Goblin Market. The vision for a marketplace structure still stands. I still have the blind faith that this will turn into something substantial. I know that scale and efficiency are good business, but I want a small-cohort, high-intensity, high-trust way of organizing what comes next because I prioritize the exhilarating energy that comes with this closeness.
Extensive notes were kept from past iterations of Goblin Market on the economic realities of the arts from artists’ perspectives. The best thing I’ve allowed myself to do is stay true to the intention of leading through curiosity rather than avoidance or withdrawal in the face of discomfort. I was challenged by questions I don’t yet have answers to, and I’ve been called out (in a gentle, supportive way) for my own bullshit. Some of the best project developments came from it. For example, the power imbalance of being the one issuing an open call, demanding people’s presence, and spreading too thin a pool of funding across many people, so none of us are meaningfully compensated. We ended up doing the market(s) knowing all this because we all wanted to do more with less. Perhaps this self-serving went against the idealism of being in community. But this reality became the main inspiration for what I’m planning right now. People need to be themselves before they can be part of a community. Otherwise, we'd be continuing to lick each other's wounds, not knowing that it doesn’t necessarily make things heal faster.
Some thinking around crowdsourcing platforms like Kickstarter or automatic splits like Metalabel: these models have been hard to justify for work that doesn’t rely on economies of scale. I’ve been sitting on a pile of tapes we planned to launch, which would give artists an equal split of the sales, but the most we can get from a run is $15 per person, even after selling 30 units. We are hand-recording to tape for each unit and hand-assembling all the accompanying material, which is a bad business move. We are still chipping away at these tedious tasks, from folding paper to sitting through hours and hours of audio. Getting a worthwhile return only works at scale when we aim for a few hundred to a few thousand units. We’d have no choice but to consider getting things made elsewhere, cheaper, less transparent, less personal.
I’ve been hearing a few established voices in the arts calling for repayable loans for artists, but nothing came of it after the public funder promised not to cut funding over the next few years. Perhaps people are imagining something grander, more formal, or perhaps an institutional body will be the one making those loans available, backed by large sums of money from opaque sources. Surely, this “funding idea” is not something artists can hit the ground running and do themselves, right?
Until this came across my feed. (I built this algorithm by scrolling mindlessly, consistently, uncontrollably.) https://edm.com/gear-tech/net-30-seconds-atm-machine-lets-artists-withdraw-marketing-funds-instantly/
Small loans aren’t unheard of. Doing this within a close-knit group of collaborators feels too antiquated in a time when everything is outsourced. It’s blunt and playful at the same time, with no more poetic justifications and no dance around who is considered equity-deserving enough for this fund. There will be money circulated among people they already trust, with clear parameters for how it can be used. There’s no voting on who gets to take out the funds. Refreshing—you borrow, you put it back. No popularity contest (crowdsourcing, votes on projects). No nagging at a faceless institution about why you deserve a small sum for an exhibition. There’s money to be made together.
I mean, we have the library, we have banks, and we probably already know a bunch of people organizing mutual aid funds. But for some reason, we can’t organize for our own economic prosperity. Is it because money is gross (in the eyes of many artists trying to survive off very little)? Is it because caring for the people around us feels like flying too close to the sun that we feel more comfortable to buy things to feed our parasocial relationships? Maybe it is time that we experiment with treating “funding” as its own material. What can we make of it? How to approach it like an artist with our own curiosities and vulnerability?
This might be too idealistic in the face of the "everyone-for-themselves" norm spreading so quickly. Who’s going to be the admin person behind all this? Am I? Will you? What happens when it can’t be paid back for understandable reasons? Is there a failsafe? There’s much more to this than simply seeing it as a solution to our problems. It is a chance to pull on the threads of why nothing has really come out of it. The lack of trust, perhaps? How much suspicion is a healthy level? Though I do think we must maintain a constant level of suspicion, not for a lack of faith but because the world is moving and we must move with whatever lies beneath us. Always look at the best of intentions as if evil deeds are hidden within.
It’s an experiment. What’s the fun if we don’t try?
Replacing the good advice for a 5-year plan with a list of experiments to try has been delivering surprisingly good results—especially when all of us in the arts are a bunch of raccoons on 8 cups of coffee before lunch with short attention spans.
Is a gambler pessimistic or inherently hopeful? What difference does it make if putting in multiple late nights into the possibility of a grant coming through is, in and of itself, a gamble at this point? I think about all the artists who play with money as their material, and I feel like I could never have imagined that. It is too real. The win draws unwanted attention. The loss feels painful and all too personal. Countless relationships are soured by such material, and close family and friends are now estranged because of it. All too close. Greed always stands in the way of our finally having something good. Being one foot out the door and never making up one’s mind to commit to the myriad of responsibilities and obligations that come with managing common resources together also gets in the way of us FINALLY having something good. We are, after all, too used to offloading that to others, then turning around to blame the granting system’s inability to support the sector when we can’t win.
I’m hopeful about the possibility of building something bigger than myself, letting myself live in that world for a little while, making a nest, and hosting my friends when they come over. Architect and furniture designer, Eero Saarinen, imagined the chair in a room, the room in a house, and so on, in his design philosophy—that everything exists within a larger world.
My dear friend Prachi (https://prachikhandekar.com) and I are spending too much time in a Google doc, distilling our months-long conversation about home into “This body. This place. These people.” Hosting the people in our lives for dinner, a small art show, or a listening party in the living room… is already the prosperity we have longed for.
The next phase of Goblin Market is about making things and creating the conditions that cradle, hold, and love that creative energy. It is incredibly precious to know that people are working on beautiful things when everything feels like it is falling apart. We need to build real capacity and grow a resource pool that isn’t just “supporting artists” and "making things low cost." We need to model new ways of collaboration, drawing new boundaries for what close collaboration means. We need new structures that allow us to take the time we need, sprint when we feel ready to, perhaps pushed off the nest with the knowledge that we already have the capabilities to fly and pull ourselves back up. We need a circle of people we trust to ask for, give, and receive help. It’s all part of the rhythmic nature of work.
In a very roundabout and abstract way, I now understand why songs and dances were part of the gruesome work of harvesting crops or building houses. I now understand why items like hand-felted rugs or handwoven fabrics are among the most precious family heirlooms across cultures.