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The Cheapening of Writing and Other Art

Wednesday, January 23, 2019 9:21 AM

A great piece by Carrie V Mullins that not only hits the nail on the head but drives that puppy right through the wall of every going-out-of-business bookstore into the keyboad of every struggling writer. While she perceptively elucidates “The Distrasious Decline in Author Incomes Isn’t Just Amazon’s Fault,” she doesn’t let them off the hook in their played part in fleecing authors’ income. With their saddling of publishers with excessive costs that then are passed on to writers, and their pickpocketing of authors by inequitably reselling the fruit of their labor as “almost new” or “used” – minus royalty kickback – is thievery of the highest sort.


That being said, where Mullings’ truth telling really gets to the root of the blame is the consumers themselves. In the age of the internet, digital devices and ubiquitous accessibility of all matter of entertainment, art has become just another recreational drug for cheap to free acquisition. One in which the puissance of instant downloading has eroded art appreciation to a simple killing time exercise. But even worse, she suggests, the ease of such procurement has become internalized by the masses as a right to critique, based on mood rather than content. This cheapening of art to just another object to own rather than acquire as a gift of its creator, Mullins argues is where we are these days. In my words, a wasteland of thrills and frills, where writers must suffer undervalue and poverty. 


— Carl

https://electricliterature.com/the-disastrous-decline-in-author-incomes-isnt-just-amazon-s-fault-c58468492b17