Buy Local or Buy Creative

9. July 2009 by Gennyfer.

I love the idea of supporting local businesses, thereby more directly filling the pockets of my friends and neighbors. Portland, Maine has an impressive group that encourages this kind of shopping Portland Independent Business & Community Alliance. It’s hard to miss one of their Buy Local signs around this small city. The benefit your community receives from your local purchases is impossible to deny. Whenever I can I purchase locally.

What I’d like to see happen is a spin-off of this idea. Many artists are starving. It’s sad, really. There is so much freely obtained art available to us these days even if you’re following the law you could probably keep yourself completely educated and entertained without spending any money. Is it right to read your favorite writer, listen to “the best” band, or view countless pictures from your favorite artists without ever spending our hard earned cash, to show them, that we value their creative work?

Before the Internet, back even before motion pictures, art was much more directly supported by individuals. Traveling minstrels, street buskers, live theater: without technology we had to pay to be entertained. Now we spend our entertainment dollars in a less thoughtful way. I can’t count how many times I’ve wasted time and money on a movie I figured would not be good just because I thought I needed to do something and that was the venue with the least effort. Hollywood puts out so much pointless drivel and mindless fluff. Movies like Transformers II garner the worst reviews imaginable yet rake in ticket prices hand over fist. I’m as guilty as the next person of feeding this orgy of bad taste, but I wish I wasn’t.

What can we do to change this? Buy local for entertainment and if you can’t find local performances that  fit your personality let’s at least start to Buy Creative online. So many creative types are promoting and marketing their work all on their own. This is not because they aren’t worthy of wider distribution. So many of them are. Publishing companies, and other traditional venues for creative types to make a living from their artistic endeavors, are hard to break in to and once an artist does become attached to a large company they often have to compromise their work.

One particular niche that has many gifted artists entertaining us, gifting us with their time and the fruit of their imaginations are cartoonists.  Becoming a syndicated cartoonist is nearly impossible. Staying syndicated and making a living as a cartoonist is not easy. Newspapers are closing and cutting back. The dream of making it big like Snoopy is farther out of reach than ever before. Yet go online, on any day, and you will find amazing comics. Some are so well written readers are drawn back over and over, even if the drawings are only stick figures. Some are masterpieces worthy of the Sunday pages whose writers struggle to fulfill their dreams while honoring their muse that calls them to draw whether they are starving or not. One such comic artist is Corey Pandolph, the Fake Rock Star genius behind Green with Envy , Toby Robot Satan , and the more widely known, Barkeater Lake.

If you read these, or any other comic strips, all the time then why not Buy Creative and order a copy of a book, or a T-shirt (or socks even) and tell your friends. If your favorite artist disappears because they had to get a cubicle job, don’t let it be because you didn’t care enough to keep them around. Let’s all make where we choose to spend our money mean something about what we’d really like to see stick around. Buy Local. Buy Creative.

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