The Unappreciated Artist

It is a cliché that artists feel unappreciated.

It is not cliché to point out why this is the case--namely that they feel unappreciated because they are, in fact, not appreciated.

They are told every single day in every single way that what they do is unimportant ("Get a real job"), and--especially if they are not rich and famous ("Don't quit your day job"), even more if they are only endeavoring to scratch out a living (they are just "amateurs," just "aspiring" artists rather than the real thing)--that their efforts are unworthy even by the standard of their unimportant activity. The ones who most need support are least likely to get it, and the people they meet endlessly justify that ("Nobody owes artists anything"), often using arguments so transparently self-serving ("The artist must suffer" "Comfort would only spoil you" "The true artist is only appreciated after their time") that they are an insult to the listener's intelligence, all as on those rather occasions when they may think they actually have a sympathizer out there they are apt to find that the reality is something quite different. (They will hear someone speaking about how tough artists have it--and then find this is just a set-up for a lecture on the sacredness of intellectual property rights, with artists' problems raised only as an excuse rather than out of any real concern for their plight, the "victims" these people really care about the Bill Gateses of the world.)

One may argue over whether society, as presently constituted, with the result that so much of human effort is directed toward meeting basic material needs and in spite of that still leaving billions ill-nourished, housed and clothed, may be incapable of treating artists any more kindly than it is presently doing. But there seems no room to argue about the effect that all this has on artists' well-being--such that one does well to remember this when they seem less than gracious toward a public that ignored and insulted them--and if it ever stopped doing that, did so not because it appreciated them for what they did, but only because they had become rich and famous, and appreciates that rather than anything they may have actually done, such "the bourgeois valuation of a man."