A Festival, A House Party, and An Unreasonable Number of Metaphors

The Artist in the Machine: Part III

This is the third and final essay in this series on my musings about the troubled marriage of art and commerce. I promise, no more musing after this— at least for a while. If you missed the first two, you’ll find them linked below. Enjoy!

It's About Time, I Think

Everything's Gonna Be Alright

This past weekend was the Dogwood Festival here in Atlanta, Georgia where hundreds of artists from all over the country set up stalls to sell their work. My 24-year-old daughter and I pushed our way through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of people of all kinds browsing thoughtfully from stall to stall, pointing, commenting, and sometimes buying art. I studied them in the same way I studied the audience at the concert I wrote about in the first essay in this series. I was more curious about the patrons than the artists who hovered nearby, hoping to sell enough canvases, prints, jewelry, or miniature sculptures to balance a ledger that will likely never balance.

There’s no better way to dramatize this tension between art and commerce that I’ve been wittering on about. Most of the artists at the festival have spent a lifetime studying, practicing, failing, giving up, and reinventing themselves so they could show up for this singular chance a few times a year to be seen. Some skulk in the back corners of their stalls, wringing their hands while others post up right out front like carnival barkers shouting “step right up!” In contrast, most of the people who turned up for the festival made a vague, last-minute decision to show up because the weather was nice and they could indulge in a funnel cake or maybe one of those caveman-style turkey legs.

The stakes for the artist are enormous by comparison. They’ve spent thousands of dollars to be there and countless hours preparing. There must be a transaction, otherwise how can they justify their existence? How can they keep going? To make matters worse, they’re here, pitted against other artists for the attention of a fickle buyer who might be just as happy to purchase an AI-generated print of dogs playing poker the next time they pop into Target for laundry detergent. As we visit each stall and look at the work, I feel uncomfortable. I want to buy a piece from every artist we visit even if their art does nothing for me but I can’t afford to do that so I don’t engage them, don’t want to lead them on or waste their time. I don’t buy anything out of some bizarre sense of fairness.

After we had visited a few stalls, my daughter stopped mid-stroll and said: “I really liked that one piece. I’m going to go back and tell her.” You should know my daughter is shy and on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. She also happens to be trans, which in these times, gives her plenty of reason to retreat from any social interaction. When she caught up with me a few minutes later, I asked her why she bothered to go back. “I wanted her to know that I would have bought the painting if I had the money. It felt wrong not to show my appreciation.”

For the rest of the afternoon, I removed my cynical spectacles and closely observed the exchanges between artists and patrons and I began to see it– the connection. The electric charge that passed between them in those small interactions, most of which didn’t end with a financial transaction. When the exchange did result in a sale, I imagine it was because of that connection. The patron saw a glimpse of something in the artist, in their story that moved some forgotten, perhaps previously unmovable part of themselves.

The money is the means that gives the artist the space and time to create, but it’s not and never has been the point.

Looking back on every creative artifact I’ve ever published in the world, I never truly understood my motivations though I’ve often questioned them. When I’m writing, I feel like an archaeologist with one of those fine, horse-hair brushes, trying to excavate something mammoth and abstract beyond my comprehension. I will never see the whole thing. It will never be assembled in a museum. It’s not that kind of discovery. The discovery is the small bones of a story that spark the imagination and surface questions like what does this belong to and how does it connect to everything else?

I’m not sure what’s next for me creatively. After completing Departures last month, I’m floating in that liminal space between. I feel the itch to shove off from the shore toward the open horizon of another novel, but I have reservations. I’m scared I don’t have the juice I had in my youth when I could spend nine hours in the machine of the day job and still have the energy to create late into the evening after the kids were sleeping. I’m scared I’ll reach for the lever that throws the switch that propels the story in my brain and the lightbulb in the projector won’t come on.¹ But maybe the most dreaded reservation is the one voiced by that miserly accountant who sits behind a stack of unsold “product” peering into the ledger. “You’re not moving any units, friendo. I’m not hearing a single.”

*Legal disclaimer²

The problem is, he’s not wrong. He’s never wrong. When I reduce the value of my work to a hard metric: subscribers, followers, likes, star ratings, or books sold, it’s easy to feel defeated. The world is not clamoring for another Ben Wakeman novel. The odds of the next book being the one that will allow me to quit my day job are as good as if I bought a lottery ticket at the gas station. By this point, I’ve nearly talked myself out of it.

Then I stop and I think about a room filled with people, far more people than would comfortably fit in my apartment for a cocktail party. These lovely humans, all of them strangers at first, found me on Substack and somehow, against all odds and better judgement, chose to show up week after week for more than six months to read and listen to me narrate three novels - more than 300,000 words. This raucous house party of generous readers each pushed aside everything that competes for their headspace and made room for my stories to play there.

Damn. When I look at it through this lens, who could possibly be more successful, more lucky than me? So, I can’t quit. How could I? Who’s going to throw the next house party if I don’t?

Here’s a numbers view of the “house party” we had for Departures. Imagine if 80 folks showed up early and bailed because they couldn’t dig the scene but 25 ride-or-die readers stuck until the last song played and the last toast was made. That’s a pretty great fucking party— minus the host’s mental distress.

This morning I woke up with the bright, twisty sparks of a new story sputtering in my brain. It could be nothing. It could fizzle out the moment I blow on it. I could smother it with too much attention. There are so many ways to fail, especially with a serial novel, the mother of all trust-falls.

I’m still in the wool-gathering stage for a while, but soon I’ll make a run at this new idea and see how much there is there. Fingers crossed you’ll get an invite to another house party in the next couple of months. Thanks for being here and for supporting my work.

Your Turn! Yes you, in the back.

I’ve talked at you for three essays now so I’ll shut up and give you the floor. If you’re an artist type, I’d love to know how you navigate some of these questions I’ve been mud wrestling with for your entertainment.

• How do you manage/temper your expectations for your art?

• When have you really felt like a success with your your art?

• Did you ever give up on your art? If so, why?

1. Okay, okay. I know, enough with the goddamned metaphors already. We’re drowning in metaphors here. This is a serious essay not some hippy-dippy free writing horseshit. Sorry, as you were.

2. Your mileage may very based on exclusions, black-out dates, memory gaps, acts of God, and disturbances in the force. Catch & Release Enterprises is in no way liable for the absolute fruition of your dreams, but in the event, they do come true, we will take 100% of the credit.