As an artist, you draw fresh perceptions of beauty from old wounds.

Your pain is transformed through the creative chokehold, and you come back into consciousness with a new perception. A light you didn’t have before you were momentarily suspended from the physical plane. In that metamorphosis lies beauty through pain. You are reawakened through an abundance (or maybe a trickle) of meaning after loss, of love after indifference, of forgiveness after rage, and ultimately, of life after death.

The privilege of sharing your perception and work in the art industry and a gallery setting is your breath into the market, and comically, your death outside of it. The market may echo your work with the oohs and aahs, and hand you the applause, but - with much cunning artistry of its own - it defecates on that perception.

The market shifts the spiritual struggle of creation to a physical gain of production. The ego then is faced to grapple with its new state. One that is alien from the inherent acts of love and giving in creativity, but ostensibly contagious through a take take take reactionary allure. It is an unforgiving struggle purposefully not aligned with the natural act of creating. It is not rooted in humanities but a consequence of market mechanics, where your optimal sanity as an artist lies in disassociating from your spiritual inclination to create, and towards a requirement and a material obligation to produce. Matter-of-factly, increasing your want and mortal need for money and exposure, to the extent that they may become the drive for your production and demise of your creation.

The mere construction of the art market is built to alter your creative alchemy, yet you come back for more, and on its own terms. Or maybe you rage-quit and sulk in your attempt to heal from its inadequacies. It’s not personal though it could be at times. It will take your perception out of context no matter how grassroots or genuine the intention and effort running through it is. It is the way it is, and that should not dissuade current ventures or future attempts to diversify the art market. If anything, it should encourage more, as it will and it does make a difference on a community level, all the while knowing that a purely creative field is not fully attainable.

The reality is, the market will dim the light you come back carrying from your darkness as an artist.

Then again, is it really a surprise when you contractually sign with a gallery in a market made to fabricate both artists’ and visitors’ experiences of perception with light fixtures on freshly painted white walls and amidst swarms of VIP lists competing with your work for the spotlight? You do in fact sign a binding material contract, a consignment agreement, where you basically forsake any emanating purity - you repurposed from pain, harsh truths, and our universally wired existence - of which the market then commodifies.

Creation is a divine right, induced by friction, generating harmony.

A gallery participation is a man-made privilege, reduced to your partial epitaph as an artist in the misleading artwork label next to your work.

And maybe that’s not a bad thing. A part of you had to die for an artwork to be born. Quid pro quo - but not really. The gallery still taxes you for your creation’s cenotaph in its worldly mausoleum.

As an artist destined to prevail over my cyclical epitaphs, or perish, sign my final one with, did any of it make sense?