No *YOU* painted a watercolour of a fart in a jar just for this blog post.
I firmly, honestly, believe this: I could fart in a jar and there are 1,000 humans on planet earth right now who would pay $10 for a sniff.
There’s nothing special about my farts or the jars I have in my cupboard: I also believe you could fart in a jar and a similar, if not larger, audience of guff guzzlers awaits you.
This is not as crazy as it sounds, if you think about it mathematically.
There are 8.3 billion humans alive on this planet today. A thousand of those people represents merely 1.2 × 10⁻⁵ percent of the population.
Or to put it another way: fart in a jar, convince just 0.000012%1 of the population to give you ten bucks for a sniff, and you just made $10,000.2
It doesn’t seem so impossible when you put it like that.
Now, if you could find a thousand people to pay you for your potted poo particles, how many would pay — and how much, I wonder — for your art? For your stories, your paintings, your poems?
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Of course, this hypothetical situation meets some obvious limits (otherwise we’d all be rich! And suffering from pinkeye!)
If we are talking about all eight billion humans, they will be scattered around the globe; we must assume 80% of them live in a developing country, most don’t speak English.3 How would they find out about your beautiful biome bouquet? Many might not have internet access or $10 to fritter away on a delightful duodenal delicacy, no matter how much they want it — and remember, they really want it!
These are real challenges that make finding your 1,000 faecal fragrance fans near-impossible.
But I hope you can see none of these challenges have anything whatsoever to do with your fart, with its quality or how much it deserves to be in the world.
The fart is the fart in all its divine glory whether or not anyone is there to smell it.
Funny then, how we don’t give our works of art the same grace or forgiveness.
To us artists, there are two kinds of art: good and bad. The former is made up of work that has found thousands or millions of fans, popular or critical acclaim.
Bad art is the art that no-one reads, watches or listens to — our art.
And so we attach negative value judgements to our creations big and small, not realising there’s a whole village that would be transformed by it, if only they knew it existed.
The problem isn’t your art, it’s the discovery and distribution models, it’s the world we live in. Neither of these are your responsibility to solve. They are someone else’s failure - not yours.
So make your art! Make it naturally, wildly, abundantly, unscrew that cap and fart in that jar!
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And this is if we don’t account for the sniffers won’t be born in your lifetime. Nick Drake sold less than 4,000 copies of his three albums before his early death. Today, 2.3 million people stream at least one of his songs on Spotify every month. ↩︎
And to state the obvious: the odds would be similar if not greater in finding a single multi-millionaire or billionaire to pay you the whole $10k. Of course he or she gets to keep the jar. ↩︎
I could also rule out children who have less purchasing power, but let’s be honest, 10-year-olds are going to be your biggest audience of fart fans. ↩︎