Cesare Marilungo is wondering aloud over methods for financially supporting himself through his art in the Age of Capitalism. Cesare's an amazing musician who would like to make art full-time and still eat. I code whist listening to his works and highly recommend the experience. His music mixes nicely with Eno, Coil, Glass, Radcliffe and other producers of environments you can think within.

Money is a tool to easily transfer effort in one form to effort in another. Through your hard work, you've grown a fine crop of apples. You sell these apples at market, converting them to cash theoretically earned by buyers through their own hard work. While you're really rather tired of apples, you love oranges, and could, in fact, eat them all winter long. You have a fistful of dollars from selling your apples, so you stroll over to the the orange lady and say "Give me a cart load of your finest." This cashes you out except for the price of a six-pack of import beer, but you're happy. You've successfully converted your season long toil in the family apple orchard into your favorite citrus fruit.

As we've grown in size and age as a society we've roughly standardized the cost relationships of most marketable items. Market forces continually adjust these relationships and give rise to fluctuations in price, bringing a seller a good year or bad. As new innovations change ease of manufacture, relationships between products change. Profit centers shift as the market rolls on.

But how do you price art? Art doesn't have a measurable value as commodity. In fact, it's not a commodity at all. Art is an expression of and continuing conversation about our culture. It's a direct representation of what we have been, are now and will be. Even when we commingle art and profit motive, it remains an image of us. This has led directly to Top 40, Britney and the resulting pitiful irrelevance of the RIAA. Much to libertarian dismay, art itself cannot be priced, only the byproducts of its ownership which indirectly impart value to the piece.

A collector purchases a painting and gains nothing tangible from the item itself. She can, however, use her prestige in ownership as leverage in the art and social spheres. She can also sell copies of the item to people who would like a reproduction on their wall.

If you're an Open Source geek, this should be sounding familiar. Art, like all aspects of culture, is inherently open. It functions more like Creative Commons' Share-Alike license than market capitalism. Whatever boundaries art has are imposed externally and by social agreement, not from anything intrinsic to its structure.

Part of the difficulty creatives face in our money-focused era is the linking of self-worth to income. We all "know" it's bullshit to think less of yourself if people don't buy your creation, and we all "know" we can't draw an honest correlation between purchase volume and good art/bad art, but we're surrounded by a world where every man, woman, child, beast and even our genetic coding is monetized. In a social environment where value is equated with price it's difficult to honestly know "you are not your khakis" and hang on to the knowledge.

Imagine through some fireworks of political revolution we suddenly do away with money. People will not know how to move on. How will efforts be translated into other efforts? We might witness society overwhelmed as the bulwark of cash is removed with nothing else holding back the tides of ennui. Imagine all the Western nations somehow bereft of the prime motivating force their lives have been built around... "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!"

Rather than think in terms of "staying true" to concepts of open source in the face of rampant capitalism's 800 pound gorilla, instead think of weaning the public off the drug of dollars, dime by dime. We can chip away at the capitalist edifice via the GPL and Creative Commons licenses: give content away and educate people on what it really is, something other than a simple commodity.

For surviving the transition period, artists can charge for copies of some of their work in various forms. Authors sell dead tree versions of their freely downloadable books. Musicians keep some mp3s free for download on their sites, while charging for exclusives and instant recordings at live shows. Artists sell large prints of originals through online viewing galleries. In each case our tech enables us to embrace, extend and eventually transcend the corporate marketplace. We use the capitalist urge against itself rather than worming every last cent out of our supporters.

In the long term, the public must be convinced of the need for public patronage of the arts. We must transform from consumers into supporters, buyers into patrons. We are all stronger and more secure in our civilization when art in all forms is proudly supported and encouraged.

This is the true calling of the 21st century artist. All of culture and the heads it occupies is our canvas.

Strap on your best revolutionary recording gear and ready your sound, Cesare. We have a long battle ahead of us.