Is Art Rare?

August 4, 2025

• The company I work for is going to a hybrid model. After five years of full-time remote work, I’m back in the office two days a week. The first week of this was last week.

  It was fine, I suppose. I had almost a year to prepare myself for it, so it’s not like it came as a shock.

  But I’d rather stay home. My work is quite independent, and it feels like we’re just there to be window dressing so that the C-suite can feel important. My team generally communicates through chat, and I have no reason to speak to anyone else in the office.

  Not that I’m opposed to talking to people without a reason. It’s just that small talk in the office panopticon isn’t the most comfortable way for me to get to know people. Other people must feel the same way, because the office is mostly silent.

• I’m taking a week off from work. Our RTO day was never set in stone, and it just happened to be the week before my long-planned vacation.

  So now I’m off for a week, and I couldn’t be happier. Even outside of the RTO situation, my work life lately has been less than ideal. I need a break.

  It’s a staycation. I’m mostly just sticking around at home, working on projects that I always wish I could do while I’m working. If I complete even half of the things on my checklist, I’ll be happy.

• I took time off at this time last year, too. On the first day of my 2024 staycation, I left the house and promptly locked myself out. Guess what happened today, exactly 364 days later? I had to cut through a window screen and climb inside, lmfao.
• I was doing research for a book I’m editing, and I came across this quote from Taylor Swift: "Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for."

  This was her explanation for pulling her music from Spotify in 2015. I don’t at all disagree with the sentiment that artists should be paid, but it struck me that she said art is rare.

  Is it really? My instinct is no.

  Like, on the topic of music... It isn’t actually rare? Many recordings exist. But that’s a bit pedantic, and not really what she’s getting at.

  Stepping back and looking at art as a whole, though? I still don’t think it’s rare. There are more than 8 billion people in the world, and I think the majority of us are capable of art of some kind.

  The ability to profit from art is rare. The ability to make art a full-time career is rare. Becoming a billionaire from art is almost unheard of, though I think it's likely her billionaire status comes more from her team's business prowess than from her own artistry (sOrRy, Swifties).

  But art itself is not rare, and it strikes me as privileged and weird to say that it is. I’m sure someone else has written about this much more articulately, so I’ll just leave it at that. (But I’m on to you, Taylor Swift.)