Sell Your Art, Without Shame

Hi, friend, and welcome back to the Write Your Story podcast.

I'm Ally Fallon.

I'm your host.

And on today's episode, I want to circle back to a topic that I have addressed a couple of times before.

But this is a really important topic.

It's a really big topic.

It is, I think, increasingly important in the modern age, in 2026 and beyond, especially if you're someone who is an artist or a creative person, or really, if you're anyone who just wants to live a life of meaning.

This is a topic that requires quite a bit of nuance.

It requires some unpacking.

It is a seemingly binary problem, but that is not actually binary at all.

That requires us to come back again and again and again to look at this tension over and over and to really like squeeze all the juice out of it because I think there's so much goodness here for us.

And our tendency is, as with any binary problem, is to lean really far to one side or the other and to lose track of the goodness that's right at the middle.

So this topic is the topic of art and commerce.

And again, this is a topic I've addressed before.

It is a tension.

There is a tension here.

We have to admit there's a tension between art and commerce.

And I think this tension gets greater and greater the further forward we move, the more AI comes in and plays a role, the more capitalism starts to play a role, because capitalism has ruled the first world, you know, for the last couple of decades at least, but capitalism continues to become more and more of a player, and I'm not an economist at all, but I do feel that late stage capitalism is evolving into something that it wasn't even before, and here I can speak about it with some measure of authority from this vantage point, which is that The further forward we move into the future, the more it requires authors, musicians, artists of any kind, anyone who's making something and selling it, it requires us to be not just artists, it requires us to be entrepreneurs as well.

And this is just increasingly more true the further into the future that we move.

Gone are the days where you could be some kind of pure artist.

I don't know that those days actually ever existed.

But I'm in the middle of reading The Agony and the Ecstasy, which is the story of Michelangelo and how he became to be the amazing artist that he is.

And I do feel that there are big differences between being an artist now and present day and being an artist hundreds of years ago.

So there are differences there, and yet this common theme remains true.

This topic has been around for centuries of the tension that exists between the art that we make because it brings our soul to life, the art that we make because it heals us from the inside out, the art that we make because we can't not make the art, and the need to generate an income so that we can pay