Yesterday a blog by Peter Saint-Andre took me to his much older (2015) post on self-patronage that touches on the subject of an ‘artist as an entrepreneur’. This struck a chord with me.

Not that I ever thought of myself as an artist, but about a decade ago I was seriously considering a career change. In the end it didn’t happen, and one of the big reasons was that I came to appreciate the intrinsic value of a hobby, the freedom it offers, and the unconstrained capacity for pleasure that comes with that. I have once before, about a decade before that (and out of a sheer existential necessity), turned a hobby into a profession, and it came at a cost, it took some (and progressively more) of the pleasure away from me.

It occurred to me repeatedly in recent years that the concept of a hobby is being lost, we seem to be under an enormous pressure to monetise all we do, to turn ‘professional’. This is not hugely surprising in a world that values money above all else, and struggles to define value in non-monetary terms, but as soon as we do that, our freedom to be ourselves is constrained by demand, other people’s goals, tastes, fashion trends.

The moniker ‘professional’ is of a limited value, beyond denoting work for money; in any field you will find some truly abysmal work done by the professionals, and some of the best of it by ‘mere’ amateurs — it’s time to reclaim the moniker ‘amateur’ from it’s pejorative use and make it again mean what it once did: I do this out of passion alone.