TMI treating my art journal like a diary

I didn't immediately understand what this image was.

I've always hated artificial scarcity. But maybe I've never really sat down to put why, into words. (I dunno? Maybe there's an old post in my blogs or journals that I forgot about.)

I remember really enjoying the idea of printmaking, because I could make as many copies of my artwork as I wanted. I didn't have to be so scared and precious with a piece. Because I could make another one. I didn't have to hoard my artwork, if someone wanted it. I could keep my sentimental copy, and they could have a copy. (Which is why I didn't sell my painting scroll.) But then my cousin once said he'd like to buy a print from me, but only if I destroy the block. Now, I had taken printmaking classes, longer than anyone else in my class year. At one point, I was only one of 2 students in the advanced class, then the other student dropped the class. So I was very aware of how common a practice it was to destroy your block. Blockprinters wanted to create rarity and artificial scarcity, so their prints would feel more precious and more appealing to buyers. It was like marketing. They meticulously noted the number of each print and out of which total number of prints that they had planned or ended up with. I never liked the idea of that total number. I never liked the idea of limited print runs. And it all felt like for such arbitrary reasons. You want to limit the number of art, just so someone can feel it's "rare" and thus, "special"??? It should already be special because you ENJOY the subject matter, the art style,...It should speak to you on it's own! Not because it's rare! (I have the same problem with rare minerals.) What an unnecessary and status-motivated reason to buy art. It should be special because it speaks to you. Not because "no one else has this". That's just hoarding and basing one's self worth on the envy of others. And as someone who has such problems "letting go", that my room does look like a hoarder's room and I am definitionally a "craft supply hoarder" in that I can't even use my craft supplies unless I know I have a lot of extra of those supplies---I can't believe that's my reason for disliking "artificial scarcity". But breaking blocks and unnecessarily limited print runs, for the sake of envy, sales, profit, and the implication that those are the reasons for an artwork's value, feels very offensive to me.

Now I should mention that I've been a collector all my life. I was even a comic book collector at the time when speculators came into the market, in such numbers, that it changed how publishers made comic books. So maybe that effected me. After the speculation market burst for comics, I remember watching all these news reports and retrospectives about how speculation, buying for investment, treating comics as currency based on rarity, destroyed the industry. And it was so sad to me, that these people didn't treat comics as these stories that can emotionally effect you on such deep levels. I still remember the song I was listening to when Cloak of Cloak&Dagger died. But comics is an artform beyond just experiencing intense emotion. I, and a lot of people in the target audience, were effect by comics during our most formative years. There are psychologists who talk about how Batman has helped many people survive/recover from trauma. Children's hospital patients are often said to be wearing superhero costumes or holding onto superhero merch, to help get them through their experiences. Comics have such value besides artificial scarcity. But these speculators, treating comics as only investments, treat them like objects of scarcity---ARTIFICIAL scarcity, merely for financial rigging, instead of seeing the value in these stories, characters, and as an artwork about human experience. It's shallow on an offensive level.

When I was young, I was a bookworm, but didn't have an allowance, so I couldn't buy the books that I felt so attached to. I'm extremely sentimental, strongly attached to things, and I can't let go. So being unable to buy the books I loved, was a very tough thing for young-me, who could only repeatedly renew my books loaned from libraries. But I convinced myself that it wasn't that important to have the physical object in my hands, because the real value of books was in the ideas they conveyed to me. Once I realized that, it was no longer painful that I couldn't keep my own copies of my favorite books with me. Even when I grew up and shifted to collecting manga instead, the thing that is important to me, are the stories, the characters, the emotions, the experiences, and most of all, THE IDEAS that the stories within the books are able to convey to me.

So, treating books---comics, manga, novels---as something whose only value was in the speculation market, artificial scarcity, with negligence over the worth of the experience of those ideas INSIDE the books, is just so crazy to me. It's just greed and desperation...It just highlights the desperation created by our type of society, and how terrible our society is that we can't just enjoy artwork, be effected by art, and instead have to focus on what has financial worth, by way of artificial scarcity. While just completely overlooking the value of experiencing the art inside the books.

Today, I still collect. These days, it's Nendoroids and some other types of anime figurines. And sometimes I am hit with the pain of limited stock. But I understand. Figurines, especially in high-end collecting, is very difficult to make. There are so many sculptors, painters, character designers, etc. that have to work on each of their intensely meticulous crafts, in order to make just one figurine. And then someone has to figure out how to manufacture that at large scales, and yet, they still need lots and LOTS of human-made work at the factories. Even if sculpting has gone from hand-crafting dental putty and making molds from prototypes, like from the era when I started collecting a decade ago, to Blender digital sculptures and 3-D printed prototypes, as it is now, the actual production still gets so much hand-painting and clean-up of molded flashing. So I understand, that an unlimited number of figures can't be created for my favorite characters. But they're still my favorite characters. I urgently need momentoes of them, what they mean to me, and how they inspired me, or just bring me joy through their beauty. It hurts when I miss a preorder and the limited preorder window closes down on me. I've had to hunt down figures and give up on figures, because of their rarity. But that rarity is understandable. They can't just make the same character forever, when there are so many other characters to make. Rarity hurts, so I'd prefer for the reasons to be more understandable, like "the art is difficult to make!", rather than "we could make more, but we want to appeal to the speculators and investors, more than the fans who love these characters".

By the way, thank you to Pokémon for seeing all the scalpers and speculators buying up all the stocks of Pokémon cards, leaving nothing for kids to collect, and taking steps to ramp up card production, resist the financial lure of artificial scarcity, and even try to stop people from grabbing all the exclusive Pokémon merch from their special events and collaborations.

Please don't buy my art because it's rare. Please don't buy any art because it's rare. Buy it because you love it. Buy it because it effected you and continues to do so whenever you revisit it. Whether it's a painting, a book, a comic, or whatever. Don't be like these rich weirdos buying art as "investments" then just storing them, locked up in warehouses, just so they can add to numbers on their financial spreadsheets. Please enjoy the art. Don't just ascribe artificial value to it out of rarity, especially "artificial scarcity". The value should come from inside, from your internal experiences with the art.