You Don’t Have to Monetize Everything
You can make art for art’s sake
Remember when people made art just because they wanted to? When people wrote stories because they wanted to tell them? When people cooked because they enjoyed it?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
And so do I. Along with a few elder millennials, Gen-X might be the last generation to have experienced the pureness of creation simply for creation’s sake.
I recently caught a documentary called Shut Up, Little Man! about two recent college grads in the early 80s who recorded their elderly neighbors drunkenly screaming at each other for hours on end every night.
The tapes were hilarious and they made copies for friends who made copies for friends who made copies for friends. The analog method of going viral.
They had comic book artists contact them asking if they could draw what they thought the old neighbors looked like. An enthusiastic yes was always the reply.
They reveled in how these recordings brought people together, inspired artists, and brought such unbridled joy and laughter to so many.
Share it! Spread it! Go!
They didn’t start recording their neighbors thinking, “Hey, we could sell this!” or “We could become…
