Given that it was never easy to be an artist or to succeed as an artist, and given that AI and world circumstances are not going to make that any easier, what is an artist to do?
I think the answer begins by giving up two comforting ideas: that the world will eventually become friendlier to artists, and that if an artist does sufficiently good work, the marketplace will somehow notice. Neither has ever been reliably true, and AI makes the second proposition shakier still.
What, then, is an artist to do?
The artist has to become more intentional about having an artist’s life. Not merely about making art, and not merely about trying to sell art, but about constructing a life in which making, meaning, livelihood, visibility, community, and psychological survival reinforce one another.
That suggests several shifts.
- Make because making matters. If the marketplace becomes flooded with competent, attractive, instantly generated images, songs, stories, and designs, the marketplace becomes an even poorer source of validation. An artist needs a reason for creating that precedes applause, sales, reviews, likes, and recognition. “This is one of the things I do with my life” may become the essential stance.
- Stop expecting one activity to do everything. Making art, earning money, building an audience, finding meaning, and establishing a reputation are different jobs. Sometimes they overlap beautifully. Often, they do not. The painter may paint what matters deeply and teach workshops for income. The musician may perform, coach, license music, cultivate patrons, and make experimental work nobody buys. That is not artistic failure. It is artistic ecology.
- Become unmistakably yourself. AI is exceptionally good at producing the plausible, polished, familiar, derivative, and “good enough.” That makes generic competence less valuable. The artist’s answer is not necessarily greater technical virtuosity. It is greater particularity: my obsessions, my eye, my history, my peculiarities, my argument with the world, my sense of beauty, my wounds, my humor, my refusals. The harder you are to average, the harder you are to replace.
- Build relationships rather than merely an audience. Ten thousand anonymous followers may prove less useful than 200 people who genuinely care about your work. Artists will increasingly need communities of supporters, collectors, readers, listeners, students, colleagues, patrons, and fellow travelers. The future may paradoxically become more personal as the cultural environment becomes more artificial.
- Own something. Own your mailing list. Own your website. Own your intellectual property when you can. Own your relationship with collectors and readers. Own products, workshops, archives, editions, memberships, subscriptions, or other things that cannot disappear because an algorithm changes. Renting attention from platforms has always been dangerous; it is becoming more so.
- Create multiple doors into your creative world. A $5,000 painting and a $25 print can coexist. So can a novel and a workshop, a concert and a Patreon-like community, an original artwork and a book about the artist’s process. Artists have sometimes regarded such diversification as commercial contamination. Increasingly, it may simply be intelligent survival.
- Use AI without allowing AI to define the terms. Some artists will refuse it entirely. Others will use it for administration, research, marketing, experimentation, brainstorming, or even art-making. The important distinction is between using a tool and gradually surrendering the activities that constituted your creative identity. Every artist may need to decide: What parts of my creative process do I regard as sacred enough that I do not want to outsource them?
- Become harder to demoralize. This may be the most important skill of all. Artists already contend with rejection, invisibility, financial uncertainty, comparison, self-doubt, gatekeepers, changing tastes, and long stretches without external reinforcement. Add AI-generated competition and an unstable world and the psychological burden increases. Artists will need practices for returning to work without requiring circumstances to reassure them first.
- Band together. The mythology of the solitary artist has never served artists particularly well. Artists need advocacy organizations, professional associations, cooperatives, unions where appropriate, shared marketplaces, collective purchasing power, legal advocacy, standards around AI, and organizations capable of speaking politically and culturally on their behalf. Individual resilience is not an adequate response to structural problems.
- Defend the proposition that human-made art matters. Artists should not concede in advance that audiences do not care who or what made something. Some won’t care. Others will care enormously. Provenance, human intention, story, presence, performance, process, locality, relationship, imperfection, and the knowledge that a person did this may acquire greater rather than lesser value in an AI-saturated culture.
And there is a final, more existential answer.
Do not wait for the world to give you permission to be an artist.
It never really did.
There have always been too few grants, too few galleries, too few publishing slots, too few well-paid performances, too many competitors, too much indifference, and too many reasons to quit. AI changes the landscape dramatically, but it does not change the fundamental existential predicament of the artist: I have this one life. Making matters to me. How much of my life am I willing to give it, and how will I arrange my life so that I can keep giving it?
This also points toward an important role for the IACPA. Rather than promising artists that success is around the corner, an international artists’ organization can help answer exactly this question: How do we make sustainable, meaningful creative lives in a world that is not organized to make those lives easy?