The starving artist
Whose art couldn’t be made
Fast enough
Fore his dealer
Rejecting means
Except as accede
In awe but name groan
Poising as a plant
To the extant one can make cents
Putting the Monet in monetize
This poem goes out for awe of the artists successfully resist compromising their heart in order to achieve commercial success. Compromising our humanity to monetize our lives seems to be at the core of our capitalist culture. The stark choices between money and people often appear surreal due to the sheer omnipresence of selling out. 
When sickness becomes the norm, a healthy path seems insane. As Krishnamurti so aptly stated, “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Art serves a purpose far deeper than “making a living, ” by connecting and re-connecting us to our most primal and highest feelings and aspirations. Art can serve as an antidote to the societal sickness built on wanton conformity and shallow efficiency. Perhaps fortunately, art is often so undervalued that it serves as a ready vehicle for giving freely, de-linked from monetary ventures. Perhaps giving freely seems like an un-fiord-able luxury (perhaps privilege is a more apt word), but carving out spaces and places for that which cannot be bought is at the core of a healthy humanity, and hopefully not merely an afterthought. In perhaps the ultimate irony of artists and their art in a capitalistic culture, the most reliable way to increase the commercial value of your art is to die. Rather than the death by a thousand compromises suited to most modern jobs, artists may literally need to die to boost the commercial value of their work. The gods of supply and demand favor dead artists. Hopefully, artists will be better valued by their enlivening passion instilled in their art rather than the mortifyingly clammy calculus of the marketplace. Starve the beast, make art; and may you find it full, filling.
