Epigram Crackers
  • Roberta Mann
    June 24, 2010

    Necessity is the mother of invention, creativity is impossible in comfort, movies want to be stolen too.

  • Doc
    June 24, 2010

    Ah how sweet. Some people actually believe that payment for music goes to the artists.

  • RichterShale
    June 24, 2010

    Animal crackers want to be free.

  • Jonathan
    June 24, 2010

    You ate all the Good’n’Plentys.

  • Nadine
    June 24, 2010

    Animal crackers know that the only freedom is death; in my stomach. They were very clear that it had to be MY stomach.

  • Esn
    June 24, 2010

    I like the Swedish Pirate Party’s idea of having different copyright lengths depending on how restricting of a license is put on a work. So a work licensed under a liberal CC license would stay copyrighted for a long time, another work under a more restrictive CC (i.e. “no derivative works”) would be for fewer years, and a third work licensed under “normal” copyright (which allows for no other usage at all except sometimes for fair use) would stay copyrighted for a much shorter time, like 5-10 years.

    You can’t have laws which make criminals out of most of the population – this lessens people’s overall respect for the law, and radicalizes everyone into two opposing camps that have zero trust for the other side and aim to destroy it (media companies vs. Pirate Bay etc.). Regular artists are caught in the crossfire in this chaos.

  • Yamara
    June 24, 2010

    Frozen treats want to be self-replicating.

    No wait, that’s mammals.

    Abstract concepts and inanimate objects merely use desire as a camouflage.

  • Yamara
    June 24, 2010

    And TV shows prefer to be stolen while accompanied by commercials.

  • nine
    June 24, 2010

    Doc might be surprised to learn that artists do make money from album sales:
    http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/

  • sam
    June 24, 2010

    Considering that ‘artists’ only arise in societies complex enough to develop excess food; and that ‘artists’ are by definition NOT doing anything ‘productive’ ([subsistence] farming, making weapons, working in factories/offices, &c), when they could be, the proposition “artists want to be poor” seems true enough to me.

  • Jacob Adam
    June 24, 2010

    Last week at a conference I saw a live debate between Chris Anderson (editor of Wired and author of “Free”) and Malcolm Gladwell (who wrote a scathing rebutal of “Free” in The NewYorker). Gladwell got the better of it, in my opinion. Both of them would laugh to cry over this comic.

  • jane
    June 24, 2010

    sam, you raise some important points, but I am not convinced about the conclusions you draw.

    have you ever seen any images of cave paintings or visual art produced by contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, or thought about the fact that music and dance are/were as crucial to those ways of life as they are to ours? it seems clear that artists do NOT only arise in societies ‘complex’ enough to develop excess food.

    professional artists, maybe. artists who derive their subsistence from their art and not some other form of more directly productive labor. but even in today’s most hypermodern societies the percentage of artists who derive their subsistence solely from their art is astoundingly small. most musicians, painters, and poets are also janitors, teachers, bartenders, farmers, etc.

    you also imply that doing ‘productive’ labor helps one to not be poor, yet most of the people actually actively producing things in this world are in fact extremely poor (young women working 12 hour shifts in a computer factory in china, etc).

    so. not to be polemic, but… I’m also not sure this helps understand today’s comic, but… I guess I am compelled by some impulse to strive for whatever small degree of accuracy is available to us, ‘cheap’ as all talk, accurate or otherwise, may be.

  • kimme
    June 24, 2010

    People want their artists poor because it makes the art more ‘authentic’

  • Halo_Override
    June 24, 2010

    People want their artists poor because it keeps them out of the higher-end restaurants.

  • Met a Lad
    June 24, 2010

    Everyone wants to be that cool poor hipster, not just artists.
    Although they’d rather be a rich hipster

  • King AdBeck
    June 24, 2010

    Dorothy,
    This has nothing to do with the discussions above, but I just wanted applaud this strip. It functioned on so many levels, putting me in mind of Walt Kelly’s best Pogo strips where the characters’ actions provide the subtextual one-two punch. Nothing new around here, I know. You do it all the time. But, nevertheless, outstanding!

  • yachris
    June 24, 2010

    Guess you’d know, eh, Dorothy?

    And Mr. AdBeck nailed it — you’re awesome, at any price (as long as it’s free).

  • Zack
    June 24, 2010

    I’m an artist; I fear for my future.

    Either homo sapiens sapiens is a really malicious species, or artists are subconsciously insulting to everyone who isn’t an artist.

  • Yamara
    June 24, 2010

    Whaddaya mean _sub_consciously, fellow primate?

  • Esn
    June 25, 2010

    sam, seems to me that “making weapons” should be classified as “destructive” rather than “productive”.

    Also, there’s a point of view that artists can be classified in the same category as teachers. They simplify a complex world. This point of view is relatively widespread in Russia…

  • Howlin' Hobbit
    August 6, 2010

    hmmmm… for such a collection of post-modernists y’all are pitifully behind the times re: the music biz.

    I give you:

    Amanda Palmer
    http://www.amandapalmer.net/

    and…

    Solo Bass Steve
    http://www.stevelawson.net/

    there are lots of others but those two are high on my heroes list.

    the reader’s digest condensed version is: gather ye a fanbase. treat ’em nice. give ’em a reason to support you. they will.

    even I am experiencing flashes of this and I’m just getting my groove on.

    yeah, it ain’t easy. you might have to — *gasp* — work at it or something. but it’s out there, it’s possible and it only takes more effort and less whining.

  • Antsan
    November 10, 2011

    As if enforcement of copyright laws was the only way of ensuring that the artists are fed. Narrowminded I call that.

  • terry
    March 15, 2013

    hello !

  • herry
    March 15, 2013

    marray Glorious info here. This attention-grabbing put up made me smile. Maybe for those who throw in a couple of pictures it’s going to make the whole thing more interesting. Anyway, in my language, there are usually not a lot good supply like this.

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