Selling Art At The End of an Empire
I’ve spent all week doing interviews, and I will spend all next week doing the same. I feel really grateful to do interviews, to talk to curious reporters who liked (or pretend to have liked) my book, to think critically about my own ideas and to be questioned on them. I did not do very many interviews for my first book because it was smaller and less sexy and fiction. This time there is a machine of press for me to be squeeze through.
Mostly, it feels weird to do interviews and promote a product to sell in a moment where making things feels like such a privilege, such a luxury. I have been writing very little else — which is rare for me — because everything is so, so bad. You don’t need me to take you through the vile executive orders and the evil people behind them and the plane crash and the god-only-knows-what-will-happen- tomorrow. You know all those things already. It is an endless firehouse to the face of exhausting problems created by the most obnoxious people alive and it is relentless.
I don’t know that right now is the time to worry about making art. I don’t know that you can expect yourself to make anything at all when you’re in the midst of an empire that sure seems like its about to fall, and that (if it’s not) is hellbent on hurting as many people as possible. And yet, I worry about it. I do deep down believe that making things matters, and that it is my job to make things that can help people either feel good or process how bad they feel.
But while it’s easy to justify making things, it’s much harder to justify selling them when you feel so bad. Selling your work is the hardest part for any working artist because selling is a different skillset entirely and it feels much, much less valuable (even though it is quite literally more valuable). The commercial endeavor is the main part of my job right now, and it doesn’t feel good. It feels exhausting and uninspiring and repetitive. It doesn’t feel like it’s helping anything at all.
I remember in the first Trump administration, how much energy and talk was given to “joy as resistance.” Almost ten years and two police tear gassings for me later, I’m exhausted by this kind of talk. Joy can only be resistance if you are also doing other forms of resisting. Art can be a form of resistance, certainly, but it is not a whole resistance on its own. A book takes so, so long to be written and edited and published. And sometimes you need to do something right now to help the people around you.
The thing I’m forcing myself to remember every moment of every day right now is that there is always something, in everything that we can do to help, even if it’s small. I decided this morning while reading the news, that for every preorder I get (in any format) I’m going to donate a dollar to the Attic Youth Center, which supports LGBTQ youth in Philadelphia. That, at least, I know, will matter a little bit. It’s something I can do right now.
xoxoxo,
Kelsey
P.S. Tomorrow is the last day to buy signed copies of my book from Lost City Books in D.C. lol! If you want one of those do it right now!
