You Can Lead a Horse to Water..

But that motherfucker might be dedicated--mind, body and soul--to dying of thirst.

AKA: The Two Second White Gold Primer:

1. All prices for mass content are fixed. (i.e. all songs are $.99, all movies $10, all magazines around $4, all DVDs $24, all TV and radio free, etc.)

2. Fixed pricing (or socialist) systems yield unnecessarily low quality products.

3. Our culture is unnecessarily (and massively) worse than it should be.

4. Allowing content prices to float, as we do in every other sector of the economy, will result in a wide range of cultural content at all quality levels and at all price points.

5. Floating content prices are inevitable, but they can be sped along, most notably by buying the only premium mass content product available in the market today--my book, The Love Artist, available at $120 from the White G store. Even if it is the worst book ever written (and it's not), making it a "story" and allowing it to become mediated will positively impact our culture. economy, the environment, and our daily life more than all the fucking Adornos and non-profits combined.

(Remember, non-profits don't make any money, they must be funded by old world activities like oil, direct advertising and software. Non-profit growth must be predicated by growth in corporate profits, period.)

[For explicit reasoning and numbers on all this, just dig into the blog. This isn't a hope or a wish or a viewpoint, but a concrete, predictable mathematic certainties. I'm going to run through it without much proof for the sake of speed and rhythm. --I'm not busy, but I know you are.]

Right now we have a fast food culture. Very low price points demand that products reach the broadest range of consumers. So the 18-34 demographic os overserved and most other smaller niches--including very wealthy, very loving, very conscious and more mature consumers--are underserved or not served at all.

Artists who think that they have escaped the economy usually just use whatever perspective they have gained to fight the economy. Resulting in two kinds of culture: a vapid and committee-approved mainstream and a depressed, angry and bitter counterculture, which claimes to want to destroy the mainstream but really just sharpens and improves it by providing a valuable pool or new ideas, feelings and fashions from which to draw.

Ultimately, neither the mainstream nor the counterculture is valuable to mature, responsible, loving grown-ups--the consumers with the most money to spend and arguably, those in need of a culture most desperately.

Art and culture--love--cannot succeed without vulnerability and neither the mainstream nor the counterculture delivers more than the smallest amount absolutely necessary to sell (or, in the case of the counterculture, to be conferred by insiders as "authentic").

Neither feels safe enough to do much new or valuable. To take significant risks. So our culture grinds to a standstill. And no incentives (money, love, recognition, security) exist to draw new practitioners into the mix.

Put it this way--being depressed and wearing all black is as culturally risky in 2008 as being perky and going to church was in the 1958. Not at all. The counterculture, which prides itself on being the sole arbiter of modern authenticity, is as fake as a Barbie knock-off.

A mohawk means nothing. Nor do ripped jeans, nor does no bra, nor do piercings or tattoos. They are all well-mediated poses.

Only love, vulnerability, taking risks, exploring and expressing desires--only these are real, valuable and risky. The only problem is that as these are not rewarded anywhere more highly than the status quo, they have little incentive to grow. Our culture is growing--as quickly as our 18-34 year olds are growing culturally.

But there are people and populations who are growing much faster. And who have already gone through and graduated from what those folks have gone through.

Our culture sounds like a skipping record because it never graduates anyone. It just stays in high school and college. (And the often confused first years after.)

A book that's real will likely only appeal to the small portion of society that's real, meaning, at $14 a copy, that it MUST fail. And that the writer will be forced to labor for years and years (a good book takes years to write) to subsidize another one. Which must fail as well.

The same is true for songs, movies, magazines, televisions shows and all mass medium arts.

To grow up, the counterculture must get real about its desires for love, fucking, money, fame, attention and stability. It wants health, security, home ownership, insurance, new cars and all the rest. And it must confront its own infatuation with fixed price systems (socialism) and communalism in general to grow. And it must own up to that. Because currently individuals must leave the culture (or be banished) when they admit these verbotten desires.

(And don't worry, the mainstream has just as many fears to confront.)

Whoever has the balls to face these fears--and can understand that cultural content MUST eventually grow in both price and quality--will make a shitload of money.

I'm currently looking for $3 million in start up money. To create the first and only premium content company. The products are ready. The marketing campaign writes itself:

$120 for a book? Are you f$%^ing crazy?!

Yes, compared to what you think is sane, I am.

And I will be ridiculously and overwhelmingly (again, by your standards) compensated for introducing the world to a new standard. It's been done many times before and will be done many times again.

The only difference is that you know about it beforehand.

And can make an investment that makes the Google IPO look like a dud.

After all, they're just the pipeline maintenance company.

We own the oil, baby.