Marketplaces sell finished goods. You go to a stall or a shop and you see neatly wrapped boxes of goods to peruse. These goods are ready to pick up and take home–just pay the price and be on your way. Seems like a great life.

These goods are, of course, the result of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of scheming, focus group tests, production, bikeshedding, and all the things that companies do to produce goods hoping you will purchase them. You are not looking at, judging, or paying in any way for all of the drafts that could have been along the way. You see whats been tested, polished, shipped, scalped back in all the ways to keep as profitable as possible.

But goods aren’t made that way and people aren’t themselvees finished goods. So when the art hobbyist sees drawings and goes to learn the craft they have a problem. Looking around all they see is finished art. They might trace a comic or try to immitate it freehand. It looks bad. They see that what they made doesn’t match the result of someone who has been drawing comic books professionally for twenty years and has an entire team of art critics and inking specialists and print shop workers colluding on color theory and sculping every fine line with an ink brush1.

This is made worse by the fact so many artists become art teachers2 who should not have done so. It’s one of the most straightforward ways to get paid doing art so everyone is doing it. This leads to such excellent pedagogy as “draw a circle, now draw the rest of the fucking owl.” The would-be artist is buried in useless to harmful advice on their way to navigate how to do what they set out to do.

Now there are in fact good art teachers throughout time. Nicholaides wrote what is considered one of the greatest textbooks of all time. Andrew Loomis wrote very casual, approachable drawing materials that essentially became a basis of industries. Marvel and DC created their own “Marvel method” to routinely train artists in a consistent style of human figures. But all of these are buried in an absolute mountain of shit. It’s by sheer luck alone–or good reference–that you find these teachings.

Why is this stuff harmful? Because people need to see where they are now and where they are going to understand what they are doing. The bad art book doesn’t show the shape decomposition and the wobbly lines the artist actually makes on the regular. It shows a circle, an owl, and leaves you to figure out and despair3 on your own why you can’t draw lines that look like this.

The secret is the lines don’t actually look like that. Professional artists make sketches that look sloppy. Not all of those sketches become something that gets sold. When you only see the hits–the marketplace–you don’t see the truth. People don’t make finished products from nothing. People fail and they fail all the time.

This “perfect product” marketplace has invaded every facet of modern living. You don’t have low-stakes contact with people and casually develop relationships, intimacy, and contacts. You have conditional and adversarial exchanges with employers to be allowed to exist in offices. The office is full of other people who won adversarial conditions to be here. You and your coworkers are products. You aren’t meeting the programmer who struggles to understand loops and stays up late nights to figure out all those funny math symbols are “Greek.” You meet the filtered results of having officialized credentials, survivor biased to enough social skills to pass HR shit tests, and so on.

This same disease reaches deep in to intimate relationships as well. You aren’t just playing games with some people on the internet that post funny things sometimes. You have ranked matchmaking that accounts for and assigns a value to every human passing through the system. Dating apps form a marketplace of finished products and create expectation. You don’t meet an unfinished work through a shared interest and grow–you just see endless rows of males to reject (for women) and streams of females to get ghosted by (for men4) and the entire social contract breaks down in to marketing plays.

The root of it all is that people aren’t really allowed to fail, to be in-progress, to do the things that a person by all rights should be doing and still be appreciated for what they can do instead of being complete. Real people in behavioral psychology need that ongoing approval, they need to see what they are doing and how other people are affected by it. They need that “+1” from their superiors to cling to. Project management from the psychology angle is letting people know that somebody actually cares about the work they did5.

There needs to be a kind of social outlet for realness. A place where the endless thrum of sex workers preying on the lonely are banned, corporate advertisements are shoved aside, finished products and storefronts make way for unfinished half sketches and airing out the scars and failures of people actually out doing the thing. There needs to be a place where the expectations are just put aside for a little while. Maybe one of those becomes a real finished product that gets limelit from the mainstream.

But not in this hypothetical place, and not today.

  1. Many comics, especially Japanese mangas, were finished with fine brushes. People thought they were done with pen & ink. ↩︎

  2. The book Art and Fear talks about this. Art schools are particularly good at walking you through the mechanics to become good at drawing or painting on a technical sense. They are terrible at communicating how grim the job prospects of doing so actually are. ↩︎

  3. The book Outliers observed academically that people attribute to the supernatural what they can’t find their way to. If they cannot understand how to get from their position to som elite’s they simply assume it must be something innate, supernatural, or otherwise unattainable. They are typically wrong. ↩︎

  4. We’re stipulating that these are the ones who somehow acquired basic social skills despite society’s deeply seated hatred for educating people; studies have been done on the sheer volumes of Tinder rejections for simply being boring, not defective. ↩︎

  5. And from the business angle, it’s making sure they are still getting fed while the product is worked on. ↩︎