Fuck artists!

2025-04-17

‘In a communist society there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint.' - Karl Marx in The German Ideology

The Artist is a landlord. They collect profit by extracting rent from their "intellectual property". The Artist has the opportunity not to be a landlord. They are free to allow their art to be free (as in freedom), by simply releasing their works to the public domain, or under a copyleft license. I know this is possible because I do this, all of my music is released as cc-by-sa. The Artist chooses not to do this. They instead, violently oppose any infringement upon their intellectual property rights.

The Artist will appear sympathetic to your cause, but this sympathy only extends to the boundaries of their private property. Once The Artist sees their private property rights threatened, their true colours are quickly revealed.

The Artist may complain, "how am I supposed to continue extracting rent, when internet technologies allow for the circumvention of intellectual property law?". In answer to this, one should always laugh in their faces and continue to pirate more.

So called "intellectual property", will likely be the cause of a global war, ultimately stemming from the refusal of TSMC to share their knowledge of particular production techniques in order to maintain a monopoly on on the production certain kinds of chips.

The Artist is not merely a particular subset of the petit bourgeoisie, it is also an ideology and identity. The Artist is in binary opposition to the "non-artist", and is considered the privileged position in this sign system. The Artist will resort to entrepreneurial propagandist rhetoric about how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and attained their position through hard work and meritocracy. One glimpse of their product will generally be enough to dissolution you from the idea that this system is meritocratic, but The Artist pathologises this realisation in themselves as "imposter syndrome". Since The Artist must retain their dominant position above the non-artist, they must enforce the maintaining of this distinction via ideology: The ideology of individual genius, celebrity, growth, and property. Most importantly, The Artist is invested in maintaining the distinction between the categories of "art" and "life". Without this distinction, their self-conception disintegrates, and so too does their capacity to continue extracting rent.

The ultimate goal of any truly radical art can only be the self-abolition of art. We maintain a distinction between "art" and "life". As it is now, the distinction comes ultimately to a matter of property relations. Art which does not meaningfully challenge these property relations should be seen as an enclosure of our collective commons. "Meaningfully challenge" in this instance means challenging in form, not merely in content. It's absurd that we allow artists to claim to be anti-capitalist one second, then turn around and enforce copyright on their product. Attempts to claim ownership over art are attempts to claim ownership over life. What really gets me is how easy it is to not perpetuate this system. Changing the license under which you release your work is trivially easy. The fact that almost no-one does it, should be your wake up call as to who these people really are.