es190405 Play Me Now

The new portal to becoming an artist

“Play me” is derived from “Draw Me,” the matchbook advertisement a mail-order art school used to promote their program. When I was a smoker in my teenage years, I saw it on matchbooks.

Play Me Now started with dividends, the often-overlooked reward for people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers. What people receive for their time, money and ongoing support would be dividends the same way that stock investors hope for quarterly dividends. In the book, The Ponzi Factor, Tan Lui pointed out that most investors do not receive dividends, yet they invest.

I play every day, it is my reward – the dividend - for being a teacher and artist all my life. While other people work eight-hour days, as sometimes longer and sometimes at two or three jobs, I play. People sometimes take a break and come into our Mini Art Gallery and look around, impressed at my hoard of art, etching presses and mysterious things.

If I put all this in a game, it could be an added benefit for visitors who merely want an brief escape from the reality of their tasks. Some people – and particularly those who wanted to be artists and those who are struggling to have time to make art – might envy me. Some might even be jealous, and who can blame them?

I am a winner in my game, a success in many ways except one – money. I don’t have much money compared to other 77-year old, college-educated and retired professors. For example, I recently met a former colleague who retired a few years ago with Emeritus status. I estimate he receives two checks every month. One is a social security check of about $2,500 and the other from TIAA/CREF, our country’s primary college teacher pension fund in the amount of $5,000.

However, I don’t envy him nor am I jealous because despite he, too, has a gallery in Seattle and he, too, has a studio for his painting, he does not play at it and thus cannot enjoy the dividends of play. Play is something essential in peoples’ lives, like art. It’s good for our brains. It’s like an insurance policy for hope.

Hope, in order to stay alive, requires almost constant activation of a little-discussed part of our brains called the nucleus accumbens. As I consider describing, again, the role of this part of our brains I think of it as a dividend from my investment of time and study I call “play” – pretending I am still a professor and pretending I am on a winning streak.

A game might be a structure for collaboration, as in what is one of my favorite quotations: “A structure for collaboration is like an insurance policy for hope.” This came from Rosabeth Moss-Kanter [briefly I’ve fallen down a chute, as if playing chutes and ladders, because I had to search and correct her name – but in doing so I learned a little more which is an example of the nucleus accumbens taking over my lizard brain].

What can I call a “structure for collaboration”? I think of my friend – and now advisor for the Ritchie Foundation – Alok Mandloi. Is being on the board of advisors the beginning of a structure for collaboration for EarthSafe 2022?

I think so. It’s a winning idea and fits in the larger scheme, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. I only recently began learning about the SDG, and it was through a chance encounter with a woman from Africa named Rewana Nduchwa, AKA May or Mavis.

Back to the topic at hand – Playing. I thought of this topic when my envisioned May’s goal of getting money for her group’s business – Chabana Farms in Botswana. Already she has made progress – winning an award and also winning a place in the May/June sessions let by Luni Libes of Fledge. The latter is valued at $15,000, a kind of scholarship to bring her to Seattle to the Fledge accelerator downtown.

If I had the money Fledge has attracted from investors – mostly Angel investors I assume – then I could bring people from around the world to be part of the International Print Center Incubators. I could adapt Mr. Libes’ books – The Next Step – to find out how to proceed.

However, I keep coming back to a basic fact as to how I won my game – it was through finding buyers for my art, craft and design. They’re what one might call small investors, like those people who join investment clubs and pay $25 a month to be part of a larger pool of money, and who do it to learn how to maximize their investments’ value.

I have written a book about investing in art, titled “Press Ghost Investor,” in which I explain my reasoning as to how investing in artworks-as-certificates is a plausible way to gain dividends of a different kind – not the kind of US Currency backed by a nation with a 22 Trillion dollar debt – but by a nation of people interested in saving Earth’s human and other life sustainability, i.e., EarthSafe 2022.

It is not for money that I labor, it is for other peoples’ regard to their own interest.* I taught for other peoples’ own interests. I made art for other peoples’ own interest. I play for other peoples’ own interest and I do these things to advance science (brain science, for example, in the spirit of Elmer Gates) and I play to promote the Sustainable Development Goals – the SDG.

*”It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. (and) Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. (and) No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” – Adam Smith