Art & Ethics under Late Capitalism
Ok, here’s the thing. I don’t know much. This is my attempt to figure things out, to reevaluate where I’m at and how I feel about the following question.
How can you consume (art) ethically under late capitalism?
Because, yeah, that system informs our every thought and action. Sure. Something we all have to come to terms with. You gotta have an iPhone or Android, and unless you have the money to do better, you gotta get your underwear from H&M, or in cheap online bundles. All the power to you if you have the time, energy, dedication, averagely normative body shape to get most of your clothes from secondhand stores that are definitely accessible by quick commute. You also sometimes try to have fun, and, well, you have to pay your way into that, right? Restaurants, cafés, pools, saunas, gyms, yoga and sport courses, just about doing anything, anywhere, with anyone is going to cost you a buck or 47 of ‘em.
Anyhow, long story short, we live in a society.
As for me, well, I am an art slut. No shame. Adore the stuff. Any medium. No, really, try me. I mean, my definition is fairly loose, to me anything consciously made by humans (yes I am attacking you, dearest AI enjoyer, come off of it) to be experienced by others is art. Does this mean most things are art? Yeah, I’d say so. Food? Definitely. Even McDonald’s? Yeah, sure. There is bad art out there, believe you me. Now when I say I’m a slut for art, what I really mean is I’m a slut for Art. At least something made with an earnest attempt to appeal to higher aesthetic, intellectual, artistic criteria. Not just pure slop, that I still consume daily, don’t get me wrong. I tell myself that all the slop I’ve ingurgitated throughout my life was to better appreciate and elevate the Art I can compare it to. But also, who doesn’t love some sloppy goodness every now and then? Come on now, be real.
I have been reading, watching, appreciating art and Art quasi-non-ston for the past 30 some years. With some breaks here and there to experience the world and live a little, but honestly, it’s been mostly me and a book or a screen, for the majority of my days. Good fun, really. But now comes the important question:
How often have I paid for the art I have consumed, for the Art I have so adored?
Because that’s the thing, right? You gotta support the arts and their artists. I mean, please do. Seriously. It’s more important than ever. I know you’d want to, who wouldn’t? When I love someone, I want to make sure they can keep on doing well, same when I love something. I want the thing to keep on existing, to make sure their creator(s) have enough liberty in their lives to keep doing what led them to produce this thing that gave me so much joy. Or even better than that, I want to send my favourite authors to that place they always wanted to visit, that will inspire them so much to create even larger, better, bolder works of art.
It’s just… I can’t do it by myself. I’m not in a position to send Uoto (mangaka, author of ‘Orb: On the Movements of the Earth’, 28, Tokyoite) to have a transcendent experience at the villa Borghese that will feed his art for decades to come. Or better yet scout out that unnamed kid somewhere in the world, that would, given a smidge of security and inspiration, create the next transcendent work of Art that would shake my world to its core.
Also maybe, just maybe, that responsibility shouldn’t fall on my frail little shoulders, or any other individual’s for that matter, no matter their goodwill. We should dedicate our limited resources on this planet to ensure good material living conditions for all, to encourage everyone to pursue the arts (again, in whichever shape best suits needs, preferences and fancies) after having fulfilled their basic work duties to their community.
But as long as we live in this capitalist system, artists gotta get paid. They have bills to pay, mouths to feed, ain’t nothing in this world for free, et caetera.
I wish I could pay all of my artists. Every single one of them. Throughout my childhood to today. Even the bad ones, especially the bad ones. They need more help, more freedom, in order to get there, and that’s ok. I am also that bad artist, in dire need of a push, financial, intellectual, and artistic.
And I did pay quite a lot of them. Growing up, my parents spared me from having to pay rent or bills, even gave me a small allowance plus birthday and Christmas liberties. They were nice like that. So yeah, ages 6 to 18, I spent a lot of my savings on books, magazines, manga, comics, figurines, video games, and whatnot. I really enjoyed it too, watching my collection grow like that, being able to revisit at will my favourite manga series whenever I please (Bleach, Naruto, Berserk, Slam Dunk, Samurai Deeper Kyo, Blade of the Immortal, to name but a very few), alongside a slew of other collections in different mediums that I won’t mention much moving forward, as I opt to focus on manga here.
Those were the days… I also did discover a lot of art at my local public library, spent hundreds of hours there, reading and borrowing tons of new, varied stuff I’d never have found on my own. Heaps I would have never dreamt of reading had I had to buy them first. Over the years I ended up buying my favourites from that new bunch, but most, while they greatly shaped my taste, were crucial in laying an artistic, aesthetic foundation to my budding sensibilities, remained unpurchased, their creators seeing no direct monetary benefit from my enjoyment, consumption of the work. A lot of said artists probably could have used my money A LOT more than Kentaro Miura, Akira Toriyama, David Gemmell, or Stephen King, but hey, those considerations weren’t at the forefront of my ten-year-old mind.
But I simply couldn’t support all of them in that way. It’d have either bankrupted my parents, or, more realistically, I would only have read a fraction of what ended up making me me. Experiences, knowledge, gatekept behind income. Just the way it was intended. Another reason to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, right?
Things have gotten unquestionably worse since I was a child, even for a sheltered West. Both personally (now I picked up a rent and some obligations for myself) and just generally (disposable income is oxymoronic in -current year-). I’m buying fewer superfluous things, and as much as I love it, I can’t take shelter under Art or munch on its juicy bits to sustain myself (so good you could Scream? Ok, giving up on that pun…).
And well, let’s take it beyond me, little privileged white boy who could sort of, actually afford to buy some of the Art he consumed. Are we fine preventing over 90% of the world from seeing and being inspired by Art, from being able to follow their nourished imagination and craft new realities? Don’t answer this. Of course They are. And We shouldn’t be.
Even for the works I bought, and for the hypothetical situation where I could have paid for every volume, book I ever read (I’d be curious to know the total cost, and storage space required), what would it have gotten all these artists? Publishing houses, while handling a lot of the work ensuring art is distributed and sold, are still large corporations taking up the lion’s share of revenues. All I’m saying is that excluding heavy hitters, for most artists, living off your art is impossible, even if some of your work is bought by some of your readers. Which is not to say it wouldn’t be better if more people paid their artists more, but bear with me.
Additionally, I grew up in a peaceful suburb of Paris. Woe is me, I know. As much as France already loved manga in the mid-90s (undisputed #2 market behind Japan since the early 2000s), official translations only existed for the most successful series, the delay between a non-Jump (Shonen Jump is the most popular weekly manga magazines, aimed at teenage boys, which I very much once was) new work publication in Japan and its French translation could easily take years, and a lot of it simply never left the island. I’m not alone in that struggle, millions of us the world over have had that love for manga tied to the chaotic, legally gray digital landscapes of unofficial rogue scans and translations where it first blossomed.
To make things worse, I was already a special snowflake early on, and started reading, watching art in English around the age of 13, which gave me a larger playground to hunt for new works, and even more so to discuss it online, while simultaneously alienating myself more and more from my local, French environment and culture. Once more, a plight common to a great many having been subjected to this form of cultural colonialism, even when it comes to works originating from outside the Anglosphere, mediated through a language native to very few. So yeah, manga is one thing, but my local public library didn’t have much in the way of English novels, and I simply refused to read Nabokov, or anyone not writing in a romance language, in French. A lot of my money went into trips to Paris from my little town, buying second-hand English books from the lovely Canadian owner of the Abbey Bookshop, at Shakespeare & Company, or the occasional find at Gibert Jeune Saint Michel.
But back to manga and fan scanlations. I am eternally grateful to the shadow work of those saintly thousands, picking up (often buying) scans of both known and yet obscure Japanese works, cleaning them up, and translating them into English or French, Portuguese, Italian, and dozen other languages, forming thousands of online communities, a whole archipelago of passionate little islands working together, simply for the love of the game. I have yet to hear of a team turning up a profit, let alone get rich off scanlation, but it’d have been well deserved given the required skill and consistent work, oft over decades.
I should have given a lot more money to a lot more people than the few meager donations I have made over the years. Obviously, that monetary support is also ethically questionable, taking the work of other artists to distribute to people who couldn’t have accessed it otherwise. Nothing’s ever that simple. No pure saints nor unredeemable sinners. Same goes for those brave souls running the various aggregating websites I’ve used over the years, let alone the Swedish heroes of the high seas running a safe bay for “pirates” to anchor their ships. Thank you for your services and sacrifices, for the risks you have taken and our fallen comrades. The world owes you more than anyone will ever know.
Well, this little piece has ran on long enough. Time to wrap things up.
This is what goes on when I talk about manga, manhwa and comic books. I am immensely indebted to a myriad anonymous souls I will never be able to properly thank, let alone compensate. Standing on the shoulders of giants, be they famous or relatively unknown authors and artists, or quiet, assiduous workers that will never be more than a footnote in a forgotten article of history, very much also artists in their own rights.
Neither awareness nor the evils of capitalism will absolve me of my sins. This is not what I’m aiming for here. I am merely trying to put words on a tension that has lived with me for as long as I can recall. The systemic impossibility to take proper responsibility for one’s own participation in this world. This time when it comes to my debt towards the Arts and their artists. Not quite merely an iceberg tip, but also far from the story whole. The other sources of tension will be discussed in time, probably in shapes different from this confession.
As I strive for more stability, mental, emotional, and financial, I will do my best to better support those I can, near and far. I encourage you to do the same, within your shifting capacities. Engage with Art, with the world, with however much responsibility you can muster. These are difficult times to be ethical. Best of luck wading through these waters, and thank you for being a part of this with me.
Here’s to a future with more public, communal libraries, sturdier financial, material foundations for all, more “free time” for more artists to express themselves more freely with more resources and fewer asinine responsibilities and stress, fabricated by a cannibalistic system that stifles creativity and snuffs out anything that makes life worth living. Together we will overcome.
