Tom Waite

I think we got to see a version of this kind of during the pandemic in the early 2020s.

I don't know about your friends, but a lot of my friends were like, as soon as lockdown started, they were like, I'm going to learn to paint or I'm going to write more.

It took this kind of real creative path.

Actually, when I was working on this piece for days,

James Smith, who was an academic and an author of a book called Work Won't Work, kind of threw his banner in the works with this idea.

Because he mentioned that people at the beginning of the pandemic had all of these great ideas about what they were going to do, get fit, have new creative outlets.

And then his opinion was...

Which is like, it's a very harsh way of putting it maybe but I think yeah it does speak to the idea that like the fantasies did not always kind of match reality.

I think we can still do the work that we are doing today without maybe the pressures of having to constantly monetize that work.

I certainly would still write if I wasn't paid to write and if it wasn't my way of kind of like paying my rent.

I would still write because I value communicating with people and having that kind of like relationship that you have or discussion with other writers or with readers.

And I find a lot of value in that work, enough to do it

without a financial incentive.

And I actually think I would have a lot more freedom as a writer if I didn't have to fit the specifications of the market.

And I think when I speak to a lot of artists, they say the same thing.

A lot of artists are stuck in this cycle of having to

Either create work that fits the market or even create content online that stops them from creating work in the studio because they have to do the work of marketing themselves constantly in order to sell what few paintings they then have time to kind of sell.

actually create and they would have so much more freedom and opportunity to do real meaningful work I think if they didn't have that like imperative to make money from it all of the time.

I think the problem here is that we have a really narrow definition of work.

And I think when we talk about work today, we're talking about things that generates money in order to, you know, put a roof over our head or put food on the table.