By avoiding mass media, we can reclaim our personhood and reject corporate culture's crass attempts to placate us with crumbs
"Art is the inside of the world," says the WHY CHEAP ART? manifesto, published in 1984 by Vermont's famous Bread & Puppet Theater. It's one of 17 statements on the purpose and nature of art made in the since much-circulated broadsheet. On its own it may seem somewhat cryptic, an outsider's enthusiastically mystical rallying cry, but like the rest of WHY CHEAP ART? it gets at something solid and essential.
A few years ago, not long after I read Bread & Puppet's manifesto for the first time, I made a choice to put my disposable income toward art made by individual creators without corporate affiliations. The comics of Julia Gfrörer, Carta Monir, Celine Loup, Katie Skelly, and other women joined my copies of Mike Mignola's Hellboy and Allison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? on my shelves.
Representation on the public stage is unquestionably important, especially for children whose sense of self is so vulnerable to being swept up in normative visions of the dominant culture. When only one image of life is popularly available, it can become difficult to see lives like your own as full and complicated things.
The sad irony is that the representation so many are so hungry for already exists. Outside the tiny, blinding spotlight of corporate media, there is an entire world of small, independent media made by marginalized creators and outsider artists of all kinds and reflecting their unique and idiosyncratic worldviews.
The art of small creators has never been more accessible. Follow artists and critics and writers you love on Twitter. Go to local zine fests and pick up whatever catches your eye. Rifle through any of a hundred online marketplaces like Etsy and Gumroad looking for handmade books and comics. Art is the inside of the world, and the entryways to that interior are inside our bodies and our minds and the thoughts and dreams of our loved ones.
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