Various sources state, that about 10% of people worldwide are either not part of any religion or agnostic, and a big chunk of these people are full-blown atheists. But, while these numbers are about as precise as if the statisticians had gotten them from a local ultimate pub trivia night; the one thing that is absolutely for certain is that whatever the actual number of non-religious people is world-wide, it’s definitely growing.

Religions have defined cultures and people since the beginning of time; man time, not time time — unless you ask a theologian. They will tell you that both are pretty much the same and that ancient man rode dinosaurs and made babies the same way sponges do; asexually through budding. This is when a small piece of sponge is broken off but is still able to survive and grow into another sponge, and surprisingly this fact is able to explain the genesis story quite effectively if you really think about it.

Jokes aside though, today’s blunder is focused on the essential functions of religion — especially its ability to placate the basic fear, that all of us humans carry inside ourselves, but rarely speak of. The fear of death.

Contrary to common belief, art is not a material thing. There are no traits that an object has to posses to be deemed a work of art. But, that doesn’t mean that art does not need to be embodied in an object.

At its core, art is an experience. And like all human experiences, it’s created through perspectives — so the idea that 100 people will see 100 different things in the same work of art, probably doesn’t come as a shocker to any one of us.

This is not a social commentary folks, so for anyone expecting a rant on all the junk that gets sold off as artistic masterpieces; I’m sorry to disappoint you, this is not the point of today’s blog. But that’s not to say I don’t have a book’s worth of it, waiting patiently to be distributed over time on various social channels, preferably in text-based format on any platform that rhymes with bitter.

To get to today’s point though, enormous amounts of texts have been written on the topic of art, especially the question of: “What makes something become art?”

Link to the book: “The Concept and Phenomenon of Art”. Enjoy.

The tag word today is ideology; every piece of art has its own story and thus its own bit of ideology infused into it. And the main question for all of us artists is: “How can we either become part of an already established ideology, or even how to make our own?”

The point of this is quite straightforward and based upon an interesting phenomenon that pertains to objects in general, but especially artistic object in particular. So, before we venture into the how, let’s try to explore the why fist:

The kind of art we produce has an enormous effect on the end customer we attract; pretty flower paintings will attract people that like flowers. 

But this does not translate directly; some of them are much fonder of pretty flowers and may be specific about which kind of flower is deemed pretty and which isn’t. And even when getting the type, colour, and other factors right, only a few of those people might actually want their pretty flowers to be presented via paintings (the more specific our work, the less of a target group we are aiming at effectively).

There are a few companies that really know what they’re doing — even if we don’t agree with their products, their models of how to sell said products are the best in the world — and we artists can really learn a lot from studying them.

I guess most of us don’t become artists, but end up artists. What I mean by this is that as the kids that grow up in an engineer household, filled with technical models, equations and maths, can end up loving physics as much — if not more — than their parents, they ultimately have no control over the fact that they were born into such an environment. No-one does.

We could’ve just as easily been born a carpenter’s son or a lawyer’s daughter — or even not at all for that matter — the chances of us being who we are because of where we started out are almost ineffable in the grander scheme of things.

The internet, especially social media, have given us an incredible tool — we can now potentially reach anyone in the world. If before you had to go through all the gatekeepers of the art world, now you can do everything yourself and have full control over every aspect of your art, including profits. 

But it does come with a price and it’s probably not what most of us think it is, when confronted with the myriad of things we have to set-up to get our art business started.