Art industry by Joseph

Art industry by Joseph - June 2020 Scholarship Essay

I intend to bring a higher level of meaning and value to art. The intention behind art is to convey an idea and/or an emotion. One big issue among multiple sectors of art is that it's hard for non-artists to judge how effectively art conveys an emotion, or that it conveys an emotion at all. The result is that many artists are undervalued (underpaid) or not noticed at all. This is seen in multiple types of art. Wouldn't reading Spider Man be different if it was drawn in rubber hose style? Or playing Mega Man if it was done in gritty comic book style? There's a general lack of appreciation for how the art style of something affects it. Since art style is a very individualized aspect of art, it means who draws something affects it greatly.
One method would be to make it easier to see different artists. At the moment, social media is proving to be effective at sharing one's art, but it is a very luck based system. What would be better is for companies to ask for submissions of portfolios when they start a new project, view them in a random order, then select the "right" person. Of course, implementing that would require the head of the project to listen to me, requiring me to have succeeded in the current luck based system.
The other issue is that it's easy to get away with underpaying artists. The only way I find logical to fix that is if there were a widespread strike or workers union to change some laws about artists' pay. That on it's own is difficult because lawmakers usually don't notice or care about art. However, one could argue that a lot of problems could be solved by switching out lawmakers and giving them a different set of rules, so it may be best to just start there.
Finally, a lot of this happens because employers aren't aware of everything an artist has to do. If you look at a comic book page, you probably wouldn't guess that took more than six hours to make, and that the pencil it was made with cost $300. One simple thing I could do is open the lines of communication. What I essentially intend to do is some reform in the industry. I can't do it alone, but it can be done.