There is a particular kind of freedom that is not in the least bit glamorous. Yet might be, from some’s perspective, the pinnacle of life’s achievement.
It belongs to the indie musician, self-employed artist, programmer, author, the sole proprietor. The person working inside the gig economy while still trying to build something meaningful, and authentic. It is a discipline, not a lifestyle. A way of choosing without waiting to be chosen.
For me, entrepreneurship has less to do with empire-building than with self-reliance. It is the ongoing act of taking responsibility for one’s own direction, craft, and uncertainty. The work may be creative, but the structure beneath it has to be rigorous. Drive, dedication, repetition. These are practical terms, not romantic words.
We inherit circumstances, temperaments, traumas, and limitations. We do not begin from nowhere. And yet, within our given parameters, there remains space enough where choice still matters. Not absolute freedom, perhaps, but enough freedom to act. Enough to shape a direction, and to become accountable to the person one claims to want to be.
I am less interested in alliance-building than some people are. I have learned that freedom and self-discovery can become a form of character-strengthening. An effective defence against anxiety, insecurity, and low self-esteem. A refusal to let that psychology govern the whole of a life.
The salve is responsibility, not validation.
But authorship becomes complicated when so much of what we desire is presented to us as aspirational examples for us to follow. We like to imagine taste as something private and native to our sensibilities. We believe we are moved sincerely, and with an internal transparency. Yet taste is very much a trained nature, with layered and guarded systems that drive, and protect organisations with independent motivations: cultural, political, and most powerfully, economic sustainability.
Through shared identity: museums, galleries, cultural institutions and nations are held together. Their tools of persuasion are installed through repetition, prestige, shame, aspiration, and fear. Their aesthetics come to us through recommended playlists, national gallery exhibitions, award lists, algorithmic feeds, and most insidiously the friend whose approval we secretly crave for. By the time we say, with confidence, “I like this,” part of the liking is already anticipated, and delivered to us.
Like most independent artists and entrepreneurs, I’ve always worked adjacent to advertising, through a lens of “necessary evil.” Sales and marketing have never been my forte, yet I implicitly understand the value of their mechanisms. Indeed the most persuasive executives I’ve worked with have often come up through sales. But marketing is not persuasion alone. It is more like environmental conditioning. It arranges the psychological room where one’s taste believes it is making a free decision.
Of course, this is not art. It changes what art becomes. That’s it’s magic.
In the 1990’s while I was working in Glueleg, I wrote songs called “Advertising is the Artform of the 20th Century” and “Cultural Faux Pas.” I didn’t yet have the language I might use now to explain it, but I was already circling the same problem. Advertising had become one of the dominant aesthetic systems of my generation: visual, musical, linguistic, psychological. MTV taught people what to desire, Nike showed us who to mock, Apple persuaded what to imitate, and to fear being seen without. Pop culture reenforced these lessons. Be seen and accepted, or indifferent and irrelevant.
These are powerfully effective persuaders with extraordinarily well-funded plans, employing our very kin to drive this: us, the trained and accredited armies of otherwise humble designers, writers, coders, that on any given day would forfeit the corporate lifestyle that leverages our talents for a life of self-discovery and artistic satisfaction.
Today’s artist has to participate in systems that often reward simplification: genre, branding, and legitimacy. Systems of the market say: make yourself recognisable, associate and alliance-build, make yourself purchasable, and algorithmically useful.
But artists know that the creative process may be strange, slow, formally awkward, or difficult to categorise. This is not “bad” art. It may be untrained, but what is training if not the indication of necessary preparation? Preparation for what: credibility, acceptance… marketability? It really is an old adage: that’s fine that you enjoy art, but how will you make a living?
The problem is not simply commodification. The problem is surrendering one’s inner compass to commercial feedback. You are not rejecting marketing. You are trying to use it without being owned by it.
Taste is rarely born in private. It is installed through repetition, prestige, social proof, and fear of exclusion. At this stage, no one is outside the system anymore, but some people become more conscious of it’s pressure.
