DJs have their USBs. What does a conceptual or experimental artist carry in their bag?
Luisa Ji | March 23, 2025 | Dispatch #5
If social media is a window into what culture looks like today, the most exciting arts experience is likely happening right now in someone’s living room. It’s small, elusive, and just secretive enough to avoid the legal and bureaucratic hurdles that arise when something isn’t quite a business, nor quite “art.” It resembles a gathering, a dinner party, where value is exchanged both out of necessity and appreciation for the experience.
Yes, you don’t always need much money to create art, despite the devotion of time and energy—especially for those who keep their practice private. However, for artists who share their work and seek responses from audiences, promoting it often requires far more resources than creating it. Sometimes, you discuss your project endlessly with different audiences. Showing up in various places to broaden your horizons can get expensive. Most project costs come from travel, lodging, venue fees, and installation of the works. Sometimes, a presenter pays your way, but opportunities like this are competitive, and most early-to-mid-career artists are shut out of accessing them.
Goblin Market explores ways to make artists' work portable—to carry your work with you, set up a shop, and share it in unconventional spaces. Sometimes, that means assessing what’s available where you're headed. Sometimes, it means asking friends for help. In Toronto and Montreal, we’ve decided to use more formal venues (which, honestly, are costly) to provide some structure and certainty amid the chaos of figuring things out. But ultimately, the vision is to show up with a suitcase (or pocket) full of tricks—or art—and let people know how to support your ephemeral, esoteric, and delightfully weird practice.
DJs have their USBs. What does a conceptual or experimental artist carry?
Hovering above every artist and arts worker is the ever-present anxiety of a limited runway—how long until you need to shut everything down and find a “normal” job? Ideally not in the arts, since arts-related jobs can be even more stressful than being an artist.
And yet, something always seems to arrive right when you needed it the most: a grant, a commission, or someone who wants to see you survive. So we keep going, making beautiful, absurd things for a little longer. But the anxiety doesn’t go away—it lingers like a slow burn.
That’s why I keep returning to the relationship between financial sustainability and artistic production. Many artists want to keep their work aligned with their values—which often means not thinking about money. But without some control over how your life and art are resourced, it becomes much harder to create the changes you want to see. You can’t pour from an empty cup. You can urge others to share from their overflow, but they are not obligated to comply.
This project began as strategic research and was funded to support planning and framework development. It’s now on track to become yet another document encouraging others to explore similar approaches. I’m familiar with this cycle in the cultural sector: research and planning often get funded, but implementing those ideas doesn’t—because it starts to look too much like businesses and startups. The funding streams suitable for businesses are different, and the business world rarely understands why making money isn’t the main priority in the arts.
So many transformative ideas in the arts get stuck as PDFs, diagrams, and reports in shared folders. By choosing to stage real encounters with the prototypes they imagined, the artists participating in Goblin Market have stepped into an awkward in-between: their activities which emerged from their art practices, are largely ineligible for funding because they exist somewhere between business and “not art.” Yet they don’t promise the financial success of the tried-and-true commercial art market either.
Goblin Market, at its beginning, hypothesizes an approach where artists can better understand the context of their work in a new locale while also enabling small-scale cost recovery—especially important when travel grants now take 2–4 months to process and some opportunities require getting on a plane next week. In the original outline of this project, a method to build trans-local networks for artistic production was also of interest, particularly in the opportunities of bringing research and material production outside of institutional or industrial networks and prioritizing working with craftspeople with intimate knowledge of the places and materials emerging from it. More than the aim of monetary exchanges, being mobile means artists can situate their works in new environments, share stories, and develop meaningful conversations that are more embedded than artworks that are locked away in formal venues.
As I write this, I’m also managing logistics for the Toronto edition of Goblin Market: cash flow, insurance, promotion—and whispering prayers to every deity I know for a decent turnout. It’s a costly endeavour with no certainty of return.
Goblin Market is an ongoing experiment in performing business.
Paying for spectacles is easy—it’s been optimized, and the rules are clear. Paying for art is a funny idea, especially art people don't totally get.
At Goblin Market, money is both a gesture and a game. Guests pay for ephemeral, strange, in-progress works, deciding with the artists what the experience is worth. Entry is free. Engagement is open-ended. Of course, we hope to be paid, and we hope our guests are generous. But you can also bring your art and entice us with a fair exchange.
It’s a foolish idea to commit to. But some of the best ones are. Something something, and find out.
Because Goblin Market doesn’t revolve around typical crowd-pleasers like food or vintage clothes, I’ve worried its unfamiliar format might limit its appeal. I reached out to organizations with stated commitments to community support—groups that could offer very concrete forms of help. Some responded politely with versions of “good for you.” Others didn’t respond at all.
Maybe having more resources makes people more cautious. Maybe institutions are quietly struggling themselves. The only people who offered help without hesitation were other artists—many in precarious situations themselves.
To people outside the arts, spending money on art seems frivolous—especially when you’re struggling to meet basic needs. It feels responsible to invest only in things with predictable outcomes. But we’re at a point where even “stable” careers are collapsing under new pressures. In times of uncertainty, projecting confidence—pretending not to worry—becomes a survival strategy.
That’s why the fear of appearing foolish often becomes the guiding force behind how artists navigate the world. If you look calm and polished, people assume you’re in control—even if you’re not.
Imposter syndrome often stems from self-importance: the illusion that everyone’s watching you, picking apart your completely made-up inability to perform your craft. It’s a form of self-centeredness that resists the truth—we’re all just trying to make sense of the world and leave a mark. And sometimes, we deal with this by staying polite, quiet, and reluctant to take up space.
But that hesitation isn’t humility. It’s mistrust. We consume others’ work—on Pinterest, Are.na, Instagram—not out of genuine curiosity, but because we don’t trust our own instincts. We think others are doing it better. Kinder corners of the internet will tell you: your art isn’t bad, it just looks like you made it while wishing you were someone else.
But what is “bad” art, really?
Is it the kind that makes you say, “Even I could make that”—but you didn’t? Is it art that doesn’t match your aesthetic? Is it work that lacks classical training—training often inaccessible to those without money? Or is “bad” art simply art that’s too easily understood, too comfortably familiar?
We need less self-importance, less fear of looking foolish, and more curiosity about what’s possible.
Nobody cares about your art—until they see themselves in it. And when they do, it’s often for reasons outside your control.
Maybe your “worst” art becomes your bestseller—because it gives people permission to feel seen, without having to be visible themselves. Mimicry is the highest form of flattery. But in this economy, I prefer flattery in the form of payment: cash, debit, credit, direct deposit, or whatever the next shit coin about to blow.
This is why fashion, perfume, home goods, beverages, and beauty products have become viable income streams for creatives with the capital to scale. These products let people participate in an aesthetic, a vibe, without committing to living the life of an artist themselves. It’s symbolic consumption—signalling, not transformation.
I believe we’re experiencing slow, sustained grief—cultural fatigue from never acknowledging when things are ending. Production marches on as if nothing’s wrong. Culture regurgitates symbols from more optimistic times. And even as the ground shifts, the safest paths remain the most familiar ones. We often urge others to imagine bold new ideas about the future, but few are willing to test them in real life and bear the consequences. We learn from watching others succeed or fail and then decide whether to copy or critique them.
In recent years, art that appears effortless has dominated our feeds—work that doesn’t try too hard. But that’s starting to shift. Artists are making visible not just the effort of creation but also the labour of staying an artist and living a life committed to art.
Social media is turning domestic and intimate spaces into new venues for art both online and in-person. Artists host gatherings with as much care as large-scale events. They cultivate engaged communities through private accounts, newsletters, subscriptions, and informal, secretive exchanges. They no longer differentiate between those who fund the art and those who experience it. The size of the room dictates the size of the audience. It's easy to be unhappy about only having a few hundred followers on your art account, but sharing an experience with a group of 1o or 20 people who enjoy your art enough to pay for it is different. Unlike shouting into the social media void with no end in sight, these gatherings end. People go home. The intimacy gives artists more control over the exchange and the experience itself. It's not a lucrative business all the time, but it's better than being in a financial hole for every event. These networks don’t rely on elite access or institutional validation. Shapeshifting between a much better-paid branded event and a humble communal gathering is more manageable at this scale.
Artists bring their audiences into the spaces where their art is made—kitchens, living rooms, basements—with a sense of agency over how their art is seen and supported. These aren't conventional venues, especially for art forms that find their ideal homes in concert halls, museums, galleries, and the salons of wealthy families, but they are spaces where rules are not yet firm. Uncertainty sometimes means that you get to set the rules for your path in the arts.