Seven Models of the Artist

(a) Labourer

The artist is a worker. They work in art-factories, also known as theatres, studios, galleries, &c. They produce art for the bosses of the art-factories, which the bosses then sell for a profit. Artists deserve to be paid a wage for their labour as soon as they begin working as artists, or perhaps once they’ve completed their training or apprenticeship. The bosses and the workers are inevitably in conflict: the former wants to drive productivity up and wages down, while the latter wants to drive wages up. (Unusually for workers, artists are also often invested in increasing their own productivity.) This condition will persist until the capitalist system is overthrown by the workers’ revolution, and artists along with all other workers will be paid a living wage for their contribution to society.

(b) Entrepeneur

The artist is a self-organised business. They produce artworks, but they also develop their brand, negotiate their contracts, and promote their work and their wares to other businesses. The successful artist is one who is able to negotiate the best price for their work: this can occur through skilful self-management, through cleverly playing the art production market (e.g. being an early adopter of lucrative trends or the creator of those trends), and through producing better quality artworks. Artists are in constant competition with each other, competing for the same contracts and status. Because it is a competition, some artists will inevitably lose.

(c) Bard

The artist is the soul and memory of a society. In hierarchical societies, they will be engaged by a patron to produce artworks which commemorate great moments in the society’s or patron’s history. They may also be supported in producing unrelated artworks in order to generally enhance the reputation of the society or patron. In more egalitarian societies (or in peasant groups within a hierarchical society), an artist may be supported by the whole community: workers might feed a bard in return for entertainment, for example. The better the artworks the artist produces, the more likely they are to be supported by a patron or community. The artist may also have a mystical, spiritual or shamanistic role, with the creation of artworks enacting a connection to deeper community values.

(d) Hobbyist

The artist is an amateur. They produce artworks in their spare time. Most people are artists of some form. Some artists are lucky enough to be able to sell or trade their artworks, sometimes for quite high prices or high-value goods. This may be because the artworks they produce are particularly good, or, given that artistic quality is entirely subjective, it may be due to more complex interactions with the market of production and desire. In any case, art is a kind of ancillary economy, and producing it does not consist of work proper. Sometimes, groups of artists within a community of geography or ideology will get together to produce more large-scale artworks, like community theatre or radical zines. Sometimes artists who enjoy their work get a proper job as entertainers.

(e) Commodity

The artist is a good to be traded on the open market. Their value consists in their reputation, their portfolio, their rarity, and their ability to produce future goods. Producers, artistic directors, talent scouts and other business-people compete with each other to identify and purchase the best artists. Some business-people invest in their artists through training and professional development opportunities in order to increase their value as a commodity, on the assumption that they will get preferential treatment when purchasing the artist in future. The artist is technically in charge of to whom they are sold, but in reality this is usually dictated by the whims of the market.

(f) Self-facilitating media node

The artist is a conduit for ideas. Their role in society is not just to find out what’s happening and to tell other people about it: it’s to be what’s happening. The artist does this through making artworks, but also through expertly using social media, old media, networking events, parties, housemates, partners and so on. Maybe all of those things are artworks too. Maybe everything they do is art. The artist is both a producer and a consumer of art. They artistic practice is being really good at producing and consuming. They get paid any way they can.

(g) Scrounger

The artist is lazy. They do not want to do a fair day’s work. The artist is cunning and cons people into giving them food or money for their artworks. They spend more time thinking about ways to trick people into liking their art than they do producing art. The artist is always looking for ways to produce artworks that will trick people as quickly as they can. Their dream is to be able to do this without having to make any artworks at all. The artist does not believe in what they do. They get fed any way they can.

Storytelling and Games

Poetry, Rambles, Theatre

Yesterday I ran a new storytelling game of my design as part of Book Week Scotland’s “CallooCallay” scavenger hunt. It was a game-within-a-game: at my station, teams had to co-operate (and compete!) to tell a fairytale-type story together, which they could then relate to the event judges for points. This is a wee reflection on games and storytelling as a result.

Caveat: I am not a game-design expert. I am more like a very well-read amateur – I’ve been following games (LARP, tabletop and computer) for many years now as an avid reader and player, and occasionally designed them. But that means that I could easily have missed important texts, debates, progressions in the discourse, &c.

My game (download here) was heavily inspired by Victor Gijsbers’s “Stalin’s Story“. Both games take as their root a deck of cards based on Vladimir Propp’s “Morphology of the Folktale”, a seminal work of structuralist folklorism. It claims that Russian fairytales can be broken down into 31 distinct narrative moments, which (whether inverted or negated or otherwise distorted) are present in all Russian fairytales. The idea of the game is thus that a deck of cards based on these archetypes can generate an infinity of possible fairytale-type stories: the basic structure of events remains the same, but the protagonists change.

So yesterday, a Parisian sewer-rat adventured through Paris to find and eliminate a wicked Damien Hirst; a young girl from a southern trailer-park travelled to Las Vegas to earn her fortune and ended up taking out casino boss and cashing in on the insurance; and a milkman named Joey journeyed through a magical door and encountered a series of dangerous giant insects, all from the same series of cards.

Both Gijsbers’s and my game have two elements: co-operation between players to tell a story, and competition between players for a goal outside of the story. In my game, storytellers are trying to accumulate points, as the person with the most points at the end will win a prize; in his, storytellers are trying to curry the favour of a Stalin-type figure who holds the balance of their life and death. The result, of course, is two very different games.

In “Stalin’s Story”, the telling of a Propp-propped folktale is secondary to the real action. The game actually consists of a series of back-stabbings, realignments, toadyings and vicious manoeuvrings of courtiers in Stalin’s court. That is to say, there are two stories: the story the players are telling, and the story the players are enacting. Having played “Stalin’s Story” a few times, I can reliably say that the story players enact is far, far more satisfying than the story they tell. Because the game puts more at stake in the enacted story, its dynamics consistently interfere with the told story – the competition between authors tears the told story apart. But that competition is thrilling!

In my game, the point-scoring and competition between players is very light indeed, in fact almost arbitrary. Players have a modicum more control than they do in Snakes & Ladders, but only a little. The competitive element – the extra-diegetic narrative – is not satisfying. But the point-scoring and randomness does lead to very satisfying folktales: it makes what happens next feel unexpected, and supports the tellers in relating an interesting and enjoyable story. In other words, the type of narrative which the game produces is the exact inverse of Stalin’s story. In my game, the folktale is the focus; in Gijsbers’s game, the telling of the story is the real story.

There is no doubt which is the better-designed game! “Stalin’s Story” is rich, multi-dimensional, original and scary fun; my game is more of a parlour game, a diversion – a way of generating interesting stories, rather than an interesting way of telling them.

It’s worth explaining why I chose to include a fairly arbitrary point-scoring mechanic. My game had to be suitable for all ages – the people playing it would be a mix of parents, students, teenagers, children, and anyone else who might come along. That meant that the different mechanics had to entertain internally diverse teams.

My expectation, which was confirmed in the playing of it, was that younger children might struggle to maintain their focus if the game were just a series of story-telling cards. They wouldn’t necessarily see “the point” of playing a card to advance the next stage of the story. By attaching a simple point-scoring dynamic, I gave them an extra-diegetic reason for telling the story.

However, if the arbitrary element were too strong, adults might find it annoying. I don’t know any adults who enjoy playing Snakes & Ladders. Adults who aren’t hardcore (or even softcore) gamers were unlikely to be interested in complex dynamics like those of “Stalin’s Story” either. What they were most likely to enjoy was the storytelling itself. “Stalin’s Story” is a game for people who are comfortable with gaming; mine is a game for complete amateurs. Part of my purpose was thus to establish a structure in which adults who felt inhibited in telling stories were freed to be inventive – and this aspect was definitely a success. And, indeed, when playing with teams of only adults, they would often forget to take points or use the “special powers” each card conferred, so wrapped up in the story were they.

I making a few generalisations here. Obviously, some children get bored with arbitrary games quickly, and not all adults enjoy storytelling. But I do think there’s a broad a division which can be made — or, rather, a moment of change in our lives, where subjecting ourselves to chance is no longer satisfying. Could it be that children, whose lives are governed by rules imposed from outside, relish the opportunity to submit themselves to the whims of chance (which can reverse their parents’ fortunes as much as their own), whereas adults, who have been forced to come to terms with the essentially arbitrary nature of existence, enjoy rule-based games which re-establish an understandable and manipulatable order for an hour or two?

I’m a gamer. Dealing with the world is tough. Life’s rule-set is incomprehensibly massive – literally incomprehensibly – and it keeps changing, it’s like Nomic, the players are rewriting the rules all the time and you don’t always know when or why or how. Lots of us gamers – let’s be honest – are pretty socially awkward. I ran this game in Edinburgh GamesHub, a new business providing a café, space and games to groups of players, and it’s clear that it’s being used as a refuge by people who don’t necessarily feel comfortable elsewhere. (Aside: many cafés have this function, the Forest not the least among them, it’s just that what the social group is and why it might feel uncomfortable changes from café to café.) I love games for the stories, for the intellectual richness of good game dynamics, for their metaphoric weight, but I also love spending a few hours in a world where I can just about grasp the rules and where, if I fail, I can at least understand why.

The chief interest of my game, though, was as a way to generate interesting stories. And so I might be pushing the chaos/order analysis too far, because, as I’ve said, part of the purpose of the game was to release creativity, to disinhibit performance. The game dynamics provided a safe, simple structure which supported good storytelling. And there is definite resistance in all games to too much order or too much chaos. Think, for example, of the child who perceives the violation of justice in even the most arbitrary game and shouts “That’s not fair!” Or the Game-Master who puts down a rulebook-consulting pedant of a player with “Stop spoiling the fun.”

I don’t think my game was as well-designed as Gijsbers’s, although they were working to different functions. The dynamics were not well-balanced, and it required GM-intervention a few times to prevent it breaking. But I would like to refine it. I’d like to design a fairytale storytelling game which:

is simple and accessible
supports creative storytelling in most players
has a satisfying point-scoring dynamic to hold interest
and allows for many inversions and diversions from the classic plot

The closest I know of is The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Münchhausen. It’s a brilliant game, with clever dynamics, and it generated excellent stories — the balance between the story told and the story enacted is struck very well. It is, however, a game for people who feel comfortable performing: it won’t release the storyteller in a recluse. No game can be for everyone, but I’d like to get as close as I can.

How to be Productive

Personal, Politics, Rambles

I do a lot of stuff. I organise at least an event a week, alongside keeping a regular half-week job and running a dual career in theatre and poetry. I spend a lot of time in meetings, doing online publicity, holding back the incoming tide of email, capering around event spaces, and cycling between those various things. All of this, coupled with the necessities of artistic self-promotion and the inanities of the endlessly networked, gives the (not unfounded) impression of ceaseless productive activity. One of the effects of looking like I am always busy, always juggling projects, is that I regularly get asked “How are you so productive?” or, sometimes less kindlily, “How the hell do you do so much stuff?” So I thought I’d put all the answers in one place, and next time somebody asks I can increase my productivity by eliminating the vague hand-waving and just sending them a link. A quick word before the unsolicited advice: The internet abounds in productivity guides, life-hacks, self-help manuals, and other capitalistic detritus. This is not one of those. Apart from offering some potentially useful advice, the main thing I want to do is to point out all the ways that productivity sucks, provides no answers to the actually meaningful problems of existence, and largely stems from anxiety, neurosis and internalised oppression. All of this advice is entirely serious, and entirely not.

Productivity Tips

1. Develop an incapacitating social anxiety

If you find spending time in noisy crowds difficult, and if small quantities of alcohol and other recreational drugs make your anxieties even more severe, you will be able to justifiably avoid wasting so much time having fun. Less parties = more time to be spent productively. If meeting new people or deepening relationships with acquaintances costs you rather than gains you energy, you’re better off avoiding situations where you might have to make friends. While all your peers are wasting time enjoying themselves, you can be at home writing emails. You can also cope with your fear of intimacy by replacing your need for deep relationships with regular, effective meetings. This will give you enough social contact that you won’t feel entirely isolated, but avoid the need to have lengthy conversations about your feelings with more than one or two highly trusted people. This is a great time-saving strategy. For even more productivity, make sure that you have several discrete projects on the go at once, each organised through a different social network. Having three meetings with different affinity groups in one day will make you feel very connected, without you having to spend time and energy actually connecting with people. As a bonus, this will make you seem even more productive than you actually are, because you can hasten your exit from each meeting with the words “I have to get to another meeting.”

2. Play video games

There is a toxic cycle which many potentially productive people find themselves trapped in. It goes something like this: You wake up seemingly full of energy, and knowing that you have half a dozen extremely important things to do during the day. You’re quite sure you’ll be able to do them. Better get started. You shower, breakfast, and maybe tidy your room a little. Then you feel a twinge of self-doubt: maybe you don’t have as much energy as you thought. You think, “I’ll just play half an hour of Railroad Tycoon, so that I can build up some energy to do that work.” An hour later, you’re angry with yourself for not having closed Railroad Tycoon yet, and, now that it’s 11.30am, anxious that you won’t be able to accomplish everything you wanted to do with your day. So you play a little more Railroad Tycoon, because there’s no way you can start work in that frame of mind. Now it’s 2 in the afternoon, and you realise you should probably go get some lunch. You successfully make your lunch, and think maybe you’re getting your energy back, so you reward yourself with a little more Railroad Tycoon. Rinse and repeat. By the end of the day you have accomplished nothing, and you feel absolutely terrible, and when you wake up the next morning you will have a weird sense of inevitable self-defeat and will deliberately play Railroad Tycoon as soon as the day begins so that you can prove to yourself that you’re just as much of a failure as you think you are. The trick to avoiding this is to give up right at the beginning. Here’s how: Most of the things you need to do will have a soft deadline (when you’d like to get it done by) and a hard deadline (when it absolutely has to be done by). You can safely ignore the soft deadline, and generally miss the hard deadline by a day, without anything bad happening. After applying those rules, if you have found at least a day’s leeway, then the moment you feel that twinge of doubt, that suspicion that you might not have the energy to do everything that you need to do, at that moment, give up, and give yourself permission to play Railroad Tycoon all day. You can replace “Railroad Tycoon” with whatever other repetitive, unproductive activity you enjoy – watching HBO drama series, updating internet meme generators, following Twitter gossip. Give yourself permission to do it. In the best case scenario, by 3pm you’ll have got bored of Railroad Tycoon and you’ll find yourself able to do maybe half an hour of emails before you feel the need to play it again – this is OK, you’ll still finish the day feeling not too shabby. A common variation is that you won’t do any work that day, but will wake up genuinely full of energy and able to get stuff done the next day. Unfortunately, it may sometimes take two or three days of playing Railroad Tycoon for this to happen. As long as you don’t go too far past a hard deadline, this is OK. Some important notes on this strategy:

It only works if you honestly give yourself permission. No tricks, no double-deals, especially of the “I can play two hours of Railroad Tycoon now in return for two hours work later in the day” variety.
This strategy is necessary because that initial twinge is your body/mind telling you that you have over-committed (see point 5) and need to take a break.
As a result, this strategy means you will sometimes turn in sub-standard work, or turn in work a little late. This is OK: the important thing is to stay productive.
This strategy does not work when you are well past a hard deadline. No amount of Railroad Tycoon will dismiss your over-arching sense of failure in this case. For what to do when this happens, see point 5.

3. Consistently subject yourself to the judgement of others

You are far more likely to do something if somebody else expects you to do it than if you merely expect yourself to do it. To put this another way, you are more scared of other people thinking you are a failure than of thinking yourself to be a failure, because all of your work is predicated on the assumption that you are already a failure anyway (see point 4). The friendlier title for this section is thus “do everything collaboratively”. If, in a meeting, you commit in front of other people to completing a task, you are again more likely to actually do it than if you vaguely will it so in your mind, or even than if you write it on a to do list by yourself. Moreover, you’ll find your collaborators actively suggesting more things for you to do, or you’ll find yourself coming up with more things to do to impress them, thereby increasing your productivity again. The effect may be exponential – two people do more than twice the work of one person, four people more than twice the work again, and so on – or it may be logarithmic, with great initial gains as more people are added, but with diminishing returns and eventual asymptotic impediments. There is another productivity bonus here. If you are working with a supportive group of collaborators, you will eventually have other people to rely on. Thus, when you are exhausted, depleted, and spend whole weeks at home playing Railroad Tycoon, other people will be continuing your project. This gives everything you instigate greater longevity and resilience, allowing you to remain obliged for longer, and preventing you from giving up on your great projects. Even when you are better off giving up the ghost, you will find yourself drawing out your project’s demise in order to please all your collaborators, who are themselves wishing it could all be over, themselves unable to fail in the eyes of others, or in yours.

4. Allow your mind to be colonised by late capitalist conceptions of self-worth

Why do you want to be productive, anyway? It is because in late capitalism your measure of worth as a human being is how much you produce. This may be income, artistic success, strategic outcomes, or something else entirely – whatever the precise measure, it is always a measure of productivity. Late capitalism requires this measure because the basic economic operation of capital is to increase the efficiency of capital’s self-reproduction – which is to say, to drive down the cost of labour and to drive up the rate of productivity. In order for your boss to make a profit, the process of production needs to get more efficient (cheaper and more productive), so that your boss can compete successfully with other bosses. (N.B. Sometimes your boss is obviously a boss, but sometimes it is your friend, and sometimes it is you.) As capitalism grew into late capitalism, the insistence on being a productive member of society became increasingly internalised, shifting from an enforced rule to a social imperative to a personal neurosis. This is because it is far more efficient to install whips in your mind than to pay somebody else to whip you. It is because you are guilty. You are privileged. (You are reading this on the internet, and you have the time to spare to read a 3000-word essay on productivity, so I feel this generalisation is reasonable.) You feel the need to make up for your privilege – to give something back. Perhaps you feel you owe it to your parents, perhaps to society at large, perhaps to the oppressed of the world off whose backs you have profited, perhaps to the greater good, perhaps just to yourself, if you are an Objectivist. (If you are an Objectivist, please go and read some grown-up books now.) Whatever way, you are in debt, and you are working frantically to make it up. You feel that maybe if you do enough work Nobodaddy will not punish you. It is because you are already a failure. You can never do enough work. The more work you do, the more you will perceive the abyss between your accomplishments and your potential for redemption. This is especially the case in post-Christian societies in which the myths of delayed gratification and redemption are still extant, without the theology required to resolve the personal crisis. You are a sinner without a confessional, and so you work. If you ensure that at least one of these systems of neuroses is firmly embedded in your psyche, you will be a far more productive person.

5. Regularly over-commit, but never by more than 10-15%

There are physical limits, and temporal limits, and emotional limits. If you are anything like me, you will want to do far more work, perhaps infinitely more work, than you can actually do. This makes over-commitment – where you have promised yourself (or, if you follow my advice, others) that you will do more work than is actually possible – extremely likely. Over-commitment is not in itself an impediment to productivity. You can’t bend time, but you can work your body and your mind harder than they can take. This is called “pushing your limits”, or, if your boss (again, sometimes your boss is you) is particularly cunning/brutal/disingenuous, “pushing your boundaries”. Your initial judgement of your limits is probably correct, and so pushing your limits will make you ill, but it will also make you more productive. If you’re smart or lucky, you can time your illness, which may manifest itself as anything from a head cold to a nervous breakdown, to coincide with your holiday; or, if you do not take holidays, then with your period of least commitment. In addition, over time you will become accustomed to these bouts of productivity-induced illness, and you will have pushed your limits back; the down-side here is that you will then need to be even more productive in order to satisfy yourself and your boss, in much the same way as regular ecstasy users have to take stronger and larger doses in order to reach the same level of euphoria, thereby always pushing up their threshold. One trick to managing all this is not to push things too far too quickly. I find that an over-commitment level of 10-15% above capacity is enough to avoid the illness ever being a nervous breakdown, but you are likely to find your own level, partly dependent on how many other coping strategies you have. The other trick, again, is to know when to give up. If you regularly over-commit to increase your productivity, you will occasionally totally fail, you will occasionally have to pull the plug on a project – or, at least, pull yourself out of it. This is OK. Sometimes your projects will fail: the important thing is to stay productive. Collaborators are often helpful here, in that they can keep the project going without you, but occasionally a hindrance, in that they delay the plug-pulling (see point 3). The best way to kill a project is to kill it before you make yourself ill through over-commitment. That way you can keep going on the catastrophe curve for longer. If you let yourself get ill first, especially if it’s a particularly serious illness, you’ll find yourself having to kill more projects than you would otherwise have needed to. The more regularly you over-commit, the easier it will get to see the crash coming and to throw out the ballast before it happens. You will hurt people doing this, and you will fail them. This, of course, is the price of productivity. A final piece of advice on this subject, then: make your apology as soon as possible, and make it short and simple. The people you failed do not need a lengthy explanation, because the longer the explanation the more it seems like an excuse, and nobody wants your excuses. Just say, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this, because I over-committed”, and leave it at that. They will then forgive you quicker, which helps, because you’re probably pretty terrible at forgiving yourself (see point 4). The quicker you make your apology, and the simpler you make it, the sooner you can pick yourself up and start being productive again.

6. Get a bike

Really. It’s the quickest way to get around most towns, so that you can fit more in the day; it gives you regular exercise, which is good for consistent work-flow and supports enough emotional well-being to keep all those productivity anxieties at bay; and it will probably make you sexier.

Last Words

You may have found the self-loathing in this essay a little repellent. That’s fine: self-loathing finds itself repellent; that’s the whole deal. But here’s the thing: I know almost no-one in my society who has successfully entirely beaten off the internalised oppression that is the productivity drive. Some people get there by smoking a lot of weed, but there’s often a certain desperation and self-delusion there. Some people get there through lots of practise in meditation, which is less prone to the same self-delusion, but at the same time is often used reprehensibly as a “retreat” or a “detox” designed to increase year-round productivity rather than as a daily practise. Some people get there just by being really awesome anti-capitalists, and I love them for it, especially because anti-capitalist movements are some of the social circles most prone to burnout I’ve ever encountered – even more than poetry. But very few people get there, and you are unlikely to. This is OK. This is OK, because in many ways the quest for self-improvement is just another thing to be productive about (fitter, happier, more productive, &c.) Anxiety reproduces itself like capital: the most pernicious anxiety is the guilt you have for feeling anxious. The last thing I want you to feel is “Oh great, now I get to feel bad for wanting to be productive, on top of feeling bad about not being productive enough”. You are what your society has made you, and you are not obliged to struggle against this any more than you can. It’s healthy to be an anti-capitalist, but it’s also tough, so you don’t need to push your struggle harder than you can take. Or, at least, not more than 10-15% harder. Besides, there’s a world that needs fixing outside yourself, and for all that I once wrote a dissertation on a Daoist theory of political practise, it’s pretty reasonable to want to work hard to fix it.