Thanks for the conversation.

The question I’m left with after all this is: does the network increase the size of this rarefied position? Can their be more Brian Enos BECAUSE of the network, or is that simply a choice that was always available for those who could figure it out?

In an online era where movie houses have transitioned to digital projectors with cables sticking out the back, to fund a dinosaur studio system does not make sense.

This is a huge point. Previous revolutions in art/media were about making cheap copies. The printing press, recorded music, film, etc…. These things brought about the need for a publisher, a distributor, because getting all that stuff moved around was difficult and expensive. This is the role of movie studios, record companies, book publishers, newspapers.

The current revolution is about universal, instant access to free, perfect copies. The publisher/distributor has no role to play in this drama. This is why newspapers are dying. This is why record companies are going to drastic lengths to turn their customers – the people who desperately want their products – into criminals. They know that if they give up their stranglehold on publishing and distribution that their money making machine vanishes.

These are the middlemen of the past, and we are witnessing their death throes. Who are the new middlemen? I don’t know, but it’s going to be a fun ride finding out.

If an artist “scales up,” at some point that scale hits a tipping point and the talent (the artist) starts to become a manager of talent (in order to support scale). They start to make decisions that resemble a middleman: defining what’s in or out, ensuring consistency, hiring and firing, and the like. This isn’t necessarily bad or undesirable, but it is a shift in the artist’s behavior and, possibly, their initial goals.

I suspect, though, that the form factor your describing sits just below that tipping point: an artist, drawing on the support of her community, possibly employing one or two others to advance the cause, but where the demands of coordination have not conquered her output. She’s still “an artist” and finding time to create her world, but now able to extend it further than she could before the internet and certainly without a middleman around.

Time with tell, but the new world order is precisely that, new, and what is achievable is largely yet to be seen. I have a strong feeling that employing people on our own terms to lighten the load as we scale up our efforts will mean the sky can be the limit for those that want it to be. Things really are changing, now is the time to change with them.

If your goal is to make a small patch for yourself, produce great work, and keep your needs modest, then the new order seems well calibrated to this (ie. you can produce, sell, and manage without too much pain). Yes, your community replaces the original middleman, as @sara points out, but if you manage the process carefully, that community can boost you more often than wear you down. And, as @michael notes, simply not having a singular intermediary can be very liberating.

However, if your goals are more aggressive—if you want international acclaim and a good chunk of money in the bank—you’re going to need “agents” to help you manage. Some of these agents, as @adam and @juan notes, are software. And some of them will have to be other people—possibly even niche specialists that we might have included in our list of “middlemen.” But that’s not altogether different than what you would have experienced before the internet. And that’s certainly the theme @zeitguy is speaking to: it will cost you, in some shape or form, to want more.

So, the biggest change is for the former category: the little guy. I guess their issue now is to discover if there is some middle ground. Not quite big, but not too small. Interestingly, there’s very little of that space in the long tail.

The result is a peculiar mix of provincialism and riot-chic on Twitter, while sincerity seems to be emerging as the pose of the decade. I like it, of course. But Reality plummets past the condo’s picture window, obeying entropy and gravity with the graceless mask of a mouth frozen open mid-scream, spread eagle against the relentless updrafts of pedestrian optimism, the whites of her eyes glowing surreal purity in contrast to the dilated black pupils, into which the vision of foolish peddlers and roaming bands of motley youthful pariahs falls, victim of moibus reflections from one-sided surfaces, vengeful chrome…

Yes you can be an artist. Yes you can sell your own work on the web. But it is going to cost you the dearness.

Are you sure you wanna go there?

Art puts the artist into a form of self-exile. That is the first lesson to learn for the fledgling fled the starbucks/moleskine bonhomie. The word of consequence is “pariah.” If you think you can establish an art cottage on the Internet on which polite interest in your work will rain like manna, go for it.

If you do, save a chair by the window for me. I want to finish this drawing I am working on. See ya there.

Now that may well increase our workload, but the upside is that we don’t have to wait for any of these middle-folks to agree to work with us (how many young artists out of art school are going to find a gallery to represent them, or a publisher to agree to publish them?). Instead we can sidestep the often demoralising process of trying to find an agent, publisher or gallery, and just get on with being remarkable artists making remarkable work.

The internet gives us all a largely level playing field to get ourselves noticed, and whilst that may involve full inboxes, and lots of tweets to read, I personally wouldn’t swap that for the alternative – and of course, I’m perfectly at liberty to hire great people to work with to help with my workload (on my terms, with no need to compromise my unique voice).

I love the way the world is changing.