Live Like an Artist – Thinking about The Gift
Several years ago in Rome, I took a photograph of a piece by Joseph Kosuth, titled, The Gift. In other places it’s titled Ex-Libris (Wittgenstein’s Gift). As someone who has been reading, thinking about, writing about, (in my book Calm Things for example) returning to The Gift by Lewis Hyde almost my entire life or so it feels these days (well since my undergrad days) my eye was immediately caught by the art work. I’m glad I thought to take a photo of it, however poor and off kilter it is. I was just wanting a record of the art work so that I could look up more about it and the quotation.
As Margaret Atwood says in the intro to the latest re-issue of the Hyde book: “A gift is a gift when the giver exercises their choice; if something is taken against an owner’s will or without their knowledge, that’s called “theft.””
And then, the Wittgenstein quotation: “What you are regarding as a gift is a problem for you to solve.” As an art piece on glass, the reflections of those passing by add another layer to the situation. I’m regarding reflections of others regarding the art in the museum.
In the Hyde book he quotes two writers that I have also read for years, perhaps thanks to him.
May Sarton: “There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gift to those one loves most…The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.”
And Hyde talks about how “so long as the gift is not withheld, the creative spirit will remain a stranger to the economics of scarcity.”
Pablo Neruda: “ I have attempted to give something resiny, earthlike, and fragrant in exchange for human brotherhood.”
Doing the usual quick NOAIDuckDuckGo search before crashing out this post, I found a blog post by Sarah Walko on an exhibition in Savanna, Georgia that took the Wittgenstein quotation as its title. She says (which sounds like Hyde) “Works of art exist within two “economies”, a market economy and a gift economy.”
So where are we now with the gift economy as artists/writers/creatives? I remember when I started blogging 2000 years ago and it was very much an exchange of ideas, freely given. I remember when I saw blogs like Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian) monetize. It was the first blog I can remember doing that and it blew my mind. Like, jealous! A bit. But also, it seemed odd? And now I think, how my life would have been so much better if I’d figured all that out way back when. These days I still struggle with the whole Ko-fi thing :) And I’ve whined about how maybe I should move to Substack all the time and then never do.
And now the question, the problem of AI, stealing our gifts but also messing up the gift economy. And then the feeling that it’s foolish to be putting almost anything on the internet at all. I honestly don’t know what to do with all these thoughts currently. Because just the pure giving online has brought me a lot of goodness in this world. So anyway, I’m sitting with the Wittgenstein quotation, the gift as a problem to solve.
I’m regarding…
