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Legend Val 💚

Love you brother 🥰

What I see is that the responsibility does not live in the conferences or the organizers. The responsibility lives in the artist who accepts to perform without compensation. No one is forced into that exchange. An artist enters it because they believe that is the value of their work at that moment. Value is subjective. If an artist wants to shift that, the shift begins with how they relate to their time, their attention, their work. The correction is internal. The moment an artist stands in their own value, the offers change, the terms change, the market changes. This is Austrian economics applied to creativity. I say this with a lot of care because I have been a professional artist for thirty years, living and working in New York, one of the most demanding environments for any creative person. If I had not placed value on my work, I would have fallen into the starving artist narrative, and I didn’t. I learned to value my time. I learned to negotiate. I learned to hold leverage.