The dragon’s den happened at a very precarious time for me. It was the same day that the election results of India was to be announced. No one would be surprised if I said that it was hard for me to push through.
My presentation included speaking about my background as a visual artist- trained in fashion, later moving into marketing and eventually a calling towards my childhood pursuit of fine arts. It can seem trivial for someone who stands outside to understand the complex nature of the calling towards the visual mediums and the interconnectedness of it all. A designer who learns fashion can essentially design everything with the tints of fashion; an artist can expand their practice to learn all forms of mediums that connect with the creative arts, or so I’d like to believe. A bag is a bag; if a fashion student makes it, it is a fashionable bag; if an art student makes it, it’s an artistic bag. A bag is a bag. But one must learn to make a bag. I was surprised to learn how many of my cohort couldn’t make a bag, even though at it’s simplest, it’s a rectangle.
Does this make me special?
Absolutely not.
If anything it is a showcase of the process through which humans gain skills and foster a life long pursuit to hone, perfect and protect it.
As a fashion student, I will never not know how to make clothing. As an artist in traditional paint media, I will never not know how to put brush to canvas. As a writer, I will never not know how to put pen to paper; but every time is a challenge almost akin to the first time. This is the ideology AI challenges right now. The idea that one never needs to put pen to paper to write a masterpiece. One never needs to put brush to canvas to produce a work of art. My worries is that it’s not that people have access to such a tool, but rather than the efforts of skilled people is used to empower this technology, only to make the same people obsolete.
My intervention on asking people to read the terms and conditions fell short in many ways, foremost of which was that assumed that writing it down for them would make a difference. There are few alternatives today and despite having a simplified version of a contract, it is still a long read that most participants were unwilling to do. Perhaps my approach should be different? Find a way of communicating that visual artists respond to better?