If the Art Is Important, Now Is the Time to Do It for Free

by Don Hall

There’s this rusted-out idea floating in the ether like a bloated carcass of some 20th-century optimism—that artists, no matter the flavor, are only as valuable as their paychecks. That if you’re not making money off your art, it must not be worth much. “Exposure” is a dirty word, “free” is a death sentence, and if someone suggests you donate your time or talent in the name of something bigger than yourself, well, that’s exploitation.

And maybe it is.

But here’s the thing: we’re all drowning in capitalism’s rotting bathwater, and if you believe your art is a goddamn lifeboat, now’s the time to stop charging admission and start hauling people in.

I’m not talking about commercial hacks grinding out branding decks and calling it “design.” I’m not talking about the screenwriter who optioned a streaming docuseries about artisanal butchers and spent three weeks in Tuscany “researching.” I’m not even talking about painters selling AI-remixed portraits to crypto-douchebags on Etsy.

No. I’m talking about the real stuff.

The kind of art that scrapes barnacles off the soul. The kind that screams instead of markets. The kind that can’t quite explain why it exists, only that it has to. If that’s what you’re making, then hear me now: do it. And do it without asking for money.

Because if it matters—if it really, really matters—now is exactly the time to give it away.

Back in the halcyon days of Off Loop theater and the now mostly forgotten WNEP Theater, the only people who got a check at the end of a run were the landlords. In 1996, we put up a bizarre DADA-inspired play that involved serious critiques of art, American politics, sexual paradigms, the hucksterism in the mental health industry, all wrapped up in humor and spite and The World’s Longest Nosehair. It was a hit—incredible reviews, solid audiences, and a life well beyond its initial presentation. The artists never saw a dime. They did it anyway.

The performance of the piece inspired other artists to write, to study, to think about how art can be that hippie bullshit that “This Machine is For Killing Fascists” written on a guitar.

Yes, artists should be paid. Yes, labor has value. Yes, capitalism has found a way to commodify every single human instinct from grief to orgasm, so the act of not monetizing your creative output can feel like betrayal or madness. Especially when landlords don’t accept “slam poetry exposing the systemic flaws for an autistic black kid on the Southside of Chicago” in lieu of rent.

But there’s a brutal truth here, one that gets lost under all the Instagram infographics and podcast rants about “knowing your worth”—there is no stable market for meaningful art. There never has been. And especially not now, in an attention economy where meaning is the least profitable product you can sell.

Try putting “quietly confronts intergenerational trauma with a touch of hope” on a pitch deck and see how fast you get ghosted. Algorithms don’t care if your song could save someone’s life. They care if it goes viral in Brazil while synced to a clip of someone falling off a treadmill.

We’re in the middle of a cultural casino. The house always wins. So if your art is a weapon against the creeping numbness, why chain it to a broken market?

Let’s dig up the sacred corpse of Vincent van Gogh, that gloriously unstable Dutch genius who died broke, unloved, and covered in metaphorical paint and actual blood. Now imagine if he were alive today, flogging his manic brushstrokes on TikTok while begging for Patreon subscribers:

“Hey everyone, just painted ‘Starry Night’ after a mild psychotic episode. Drop a like and hit the bell so I can afford absinthe!”

We’d mock him. We’d pity him. But most of all, we’d ignore him. Because he wouldn’t fit the model. Too messy. Not brandable. Not safe.

If Van Gogh had waited until his paintings were profitable to make them, we’d never have them. The urgency of the art mattered more than the economics of it. That’s not romanticizing poverty—it’s recognizing that capitalism is not a reliable patron for truth. Vince, by the very definition of the word, was not a “professional” artist.

Professional is a word weaponized by those who want to own you without admitting it. It’s an anesthetic for rebellion. A leash. If you’re a “professional artist,” that usually means you’ve found a way to contort your work just enough to sell it to people who don’t care what you’re trying to say—as long as it matches the IKEA furniture.

The raw, furious, necessary stuff? The art that tells the truth so loud your teeth hurt? That kind of art doesn’t wear a tie. It doesn’t invoice. It just shows up, like an uninvited guest at the dinner table of polite society.

Hunter S. Thompson didn’t write Fear and Loathing because Random House offered him a tidy advance. He wrote it because the walls were closing in and the drugs were wearing off and America was turning into a bad trip you couldn’t wake up from. And if someone told him to “monetize his personal brand,” he’d have thrown a whiskey glass at their face and called it a day.

There’s a time to be paid. And there’s a time to howl.

The (now) conservative on the razor’s edge of hysteria federal government is revoking the cash, gang. Pulling grants. Defunding PBS. Taking over the Kennedy Center. In Chicago, the fear of being underfunded has gone from a drone of “Please Donate” to a shriek of “SAVE THE ARTS!”

Countless tiny Chicago theaters operate on a ‘pay what you can’ model—not because the artists are in lockstep with the notion that art without the transactional model involving cash but because they believe that, like a truly authentic church, the theater is one of the few places people will sit down in a dark room, shut the fuck up, and listen.

David Foster Wallace—bless his brilliant, tortured soul—once wrote that “the big thing that fiction’s supposed to do… is give the reader something. Give the reader something.” And while he was talking about fiction, the same applies to any honest art. The artist’s job isn’t to get something from the audience—it’s to give something they didn’t know they needed.

If you’re making art only to be paid, you’re not creating—you’re vending. And vending is fine, but let’s not confuse it with transformation.

The reason your novel isn’t selling might not be because it’s bad. It might be because the world doesn’t want to pay to feel something real. But that doesn’t mean you stop. It means you write anyway, post it on your weird little blog that no one reads, and you give it away like water in a drought.

Because somebody out there is dying of thirst.

Doing art for free doesn’t mean you’re cheap. It doesn’t mean you’re being exploited. It means you believe what you’re doing is too important to wait for permission. It means you value impact over income. And yeah, it’s scary.

Because the world doesn’t reward generosity. It chews it up, calls it weakness, and sells the leftovers in a three-pack on Amazon. But that doesn’t make it wrong. It makes it radical.

Doing it for free is not surrender—it’s liberation. It’s the middle finger to a culture that only values you when you’re profitable. It’s saying, “This thing matters, and I will not let your lack of cash determine its worth.”

When the world is burning, you don’t sell the water. You spray it everywhere and hope some of it catches.

Yes, I hear you. You’re grinding. You’re clawing for grant money and festival slots and trying to feed your kids while still writing your one-man play about the opioid crisis in Ohio. You are valid. You are seen.

I’m not telling you not to get paid. I’m telling you to know the difference between the art you need to sell and the art you need to make regardless. If you’re lucky, sometimes they overlap. But most of the time, they don’t.

And if you find yourself on the edge, wondering if it’s worth doing something raw and true for zero dollars and zero applause… do it. Make it anyway. Post it in the void. Give it to a stranger. Burn it in a ceremony. Just don’t shelve it because no one offered you a check.

That’s not a compromise. That’s an exorcism.

Art is one of the last honest things we have. And it’s rotting from the inside out, corrupted by ad revenue, Instagram metrics, and the unspoken rule that if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t count. That’s a lie. That’s a soul-killing, dream-crushing, death-by-installments lie.

So if you’ve got something to say—say it now. Write the poem. Record the podcast. Paint the mural on a decaying wall in a forgotten part of town. And don’t wait for Kickstarter backers or arts council approval.

Do it because it matters.

Do it because it’s burning in your gut and if you don’t let it out, it’ll turn into cancer.

Do it because someone you don’t know is waiting for it like a lifeline they haven’t even seen yet.

Do it for free. Do it loud. Do it now.

Because if the art is important—and you know in your bones that it is—then this is exactly the time to do it for nothing. Nothing but the revolution of honesty. Nothing but the satisfaction of having spoken, screamed, created.

And nothing is worth more than that.