Practising Art in Obscurity
The last generation of creatives are closing up shop
I accompanied my partner to an opening at an art gallery late last year; one of his old friends was exhibiting his latest paintings. At one point in the evening I found myself at the edge of the crowd, looking on at the artist with his posse of friends. Like him, they’ve all had careers as creatives. A sober realisation dawned: This will be the last generation to make a living from the Arts.
Demise of the ‘commercial’ artist
This piece is not about the Fine Arts. It does not go into the trials that painters, sculptors or authors of literary fiction face. Their livelihoods have always been precarious.
I want to focus on the plight of the more commercially oriented careers in the arts: Illustrators, graphic designers, copywriters and the like, who in our capitalist society were once not only highly sought after, but also highly paid.
All that has now changed. Most of these folks are struggling to make a living from the craft, and those who still do, know that the end is near.
Death by a thousand cuts
So, what was it that killed the commercial arts? It wasn’t any one thing. Rather, a slow boil, as we transitioned from an analogue world to the digital.
The first major disruption was the personal computer which enabled everyone to put their pencils down and pick up the mouse. Desktop design and publishing was all the rage.
Then came the internet and with it stock image banks like Getty which compiled and sold tens and thousands of art work, photography and illustration at a minuscule cost. The said artists rarely saw a royalty cheque.
These were closely followed by platforms like Fiverr that enabled labour arbitrage on a mass scale. Small businesses that would have paid $50-$200 to the local graphic designer to do their logo could now use desperately poor artists in Pakistan and get it done for $5. (As an aside, the same gig would have cost $2,500 - $5,000 back in the 80s).
After that came Canva and other apps that commoditised the very process of design. Even the desperately poor artist in Pakistan was displaced.
The final nail in the coffin was the advent of generative AI. With the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the foundations of many careers in the creative arts started looking shaky.
‘Death by a thousand cuts’ is the phrase that comes to mind.
Closing up shop
Darren (my partner, also an artist and illustrator) caught up with old friends he had not seen for a long while that day. The stories were sobering.
Even the most established among them had closed up shop — closing the shutters on what used to be fulfilling jobs that paid the bills. Some are switching to menial jobs to get by.
Their stories are tinged with sadness and nostalgia but there is little regret: They all know that they are the lucky ones who got to live creatively rich lives, earning a living from doing work they loved.
I don’t think anyone there realised that they were amongst the last to have earned a living from the arts.
I could not help but wonder,
Is this a sign of times to come?
Are creatives the tip of the iceberg?
Will they be the only profession to suffer the fate of obsolescence?
Or will entire categories of profession follow?’
No one can say.
As historian Yuval Noah Harari often points out, this is the first time in human history that parents have no idea what jobs will be around by the time their children grow up.
Will there be no more artists?
If you ask people in the arts why they pursued a line of work that was amongst the lowest paid and came with the lowest job security, most would answer that they had no choice in the matter:
Practicing their art was something they had to do: It was as innate to them as breathing is to life.
This may sound a tad melodramatic but for a large number of creatives, it is true — and it is precisely this drive to create that will ensure that the artist never dies off, even as the creative profession does.
But what of their art?
Will there be an audience to appreciate what they create?
Does it even matter?
Reach has become monopolised
I switched from a lucrative corporate career into the arts in 2020 to pursue a dream to be a writer. Even then, making a living from books and publishing was next to impossible.
Like the graphic arts, all the value from books has been slowly but surely chipped away by the advent of the Internet, Amazon, big box retailers and poor strategic calls by big 5 publishers. Generative AI is just the latest nail on the coffin.
Unless you are a celebrity with a commanding platform and a legion of followers, this is not a space that will help you pay the bills ...
Why? Because celebrities have the one thing that ordinary folks like us don’t - Reach.
The chances of creating reach organically (eg by posting your works on instagram) is next to none — at least not on existing legacy platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.
If new platforms come along, then sure. But for now, you either pay Big Tech monopolies an extortionate economic rent to reach audiences or be confined to obscurity.
The point of practising art
I remember asking Darren this question when we first met,
'Why bother creating and posting all your art on Instagram when you get so little back from this platform?'
I could see the many hours of work that went into each of his pieces. Fresh from banking ... I could not fathom why he gave it away to these platforms, for nothing. By this stage, his works were not even reaching the audiences he had spent many years cultivating – None of it made any commercial sense.
Darren, as usual, took some time (and prompting) to provide an answer ...
Darren's illustration practice had always had a commercial bent: He was hired to create visuals to communicate a commercial message, to a specific target audience.
In the heyday of illustration (pre the advent of digital technologies) he got paid handsomely for his craft. Being competitive by nature, he also went for and won many local and international design and illustration awards.
None of these however, led to lasting fulfilment; he found himself mentally, physically and spiritually depleted at the end of it.
It took many years of deliberate study, practice and inner work to transform what had been an 'extrinsically motivated' illustration practice into an 'intrinsically motivated' art practice.
'I do my art because I have to. What drives me is a desire to push the boundaries of art, to innovate, to create marks and expressions that I have never been seen before, which invoke feelings I have never felt before.
Commercial return is not the point.
The point is to break new ground and find my inner voice.
I do my art for myself.
But when it does reach and speaks to another, that feels like a bonus.'
Practising art in obscurity
Darren's reply has stayed with me since.
As I transitioned into the Arts, I too found solace in writing, first and foremost, for myself. To the extent that it reaches and speaks to another, has always felt a bonus.
I cannot help but think that it is the right attitude for the times – and I know that many artists feel the same.
Confinement to an obscure corner of the internet will not stop them from doing this work: They will create their art, regardless — and the work will continue to enrich their lives.
The more pressing question is what will the rest of humanity turn towards to enrich theirs?
Audio and Video Recording Coming Soon.
Written by Reeta Dhar. Cover Art by Darren Pryce.
Written at The Cave in Coogee. Digitally crafted at The Shack in Nambucca.
Revised Edition first published by the Vitalis Magazine in July 2026
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