The advantages of being an amateur artist.

 I heard a podcast, which I cannot find now, about how Spotify models the sort of songs that are created. For short pop songs, many of which are only 2 minutes long, the song writer and/or performer gets almost immediate feedback about how well the song is doing, and they can change the music. Slower beat, less plays, less income, so let's up the beat. Some song writers are trapped in a disagreeable loop of constant modification in order to earn enough money to live on.

(To see how poorly streaming pays songwriters listen to "The Price Of Song" a BBC Podcast in the "Seriously..." series. )

 Anyway, musicians chasing more plays reminded me of a disagreement I had with a friend about one of my drawings...

 He said that there are certain rules in art which need to be respected, one of them is balance, and my drawing was not balanced. I was amazed at this assertion, as if art must be made for decorative purposes.

 

 That criticism, together with what Spotify is doing to pop music composers, made me think that it may be better to be an amateur artist who makes WTF he wants compared with trying to earn your living through art, respecting rules, canons, gallery owner's ideas, and calls for decorative balance. 

 And speaking about making a living by art, De Chirico had a financial problem. After he did his most famous early works (dreamlike and enigmatic)...

 

...he could not sell his later stuff. Since he wanted or needed the money he made more paintings in his old style and (pre-)dated them falsely to that period too. So they seemed to be genuine earlier De Chirico works. It was as if he was faking his own work.

Maybe my art is clumsy, it is "an ill-favoured thing sir, but mine own."

(Spinoza (that odd geometrical philosopher) had the same idea, deciding to work for a living (grinding lenses) and refusing monetary help so that he could be free to philosophize as he wanted without being conditioned by patrons.)