I’m writing my break up letter to the art world, to being an artist, because breaking up with it is the most creative action that I can think of at my current growth and maturity.

For some reason, my little Aries Sun in the second house always wanted to be an artist. That was what I said I wanted to be when I grew up whenever anyone asked from when I was a very small child to a petulant teen.

Part of that was because I was really good at drawing. The better I was at drawing, the more people praised me for it, and the better I thought I was at drawing and the better I got at drawing. This is Aries Sun in action. My Sun is in the second house, which deals with tactile things. Chances are, if I can imagine it or see it, I can make it happen on a piece of paper. And very quickly.

Pluto has been squaring my Sun since the beginning of this summer but I first started to feel this rage when it opposed my Moon back in 2014. Pluto, like a flashlight in the dark, shows all the shadows loud and clear.

It’s shown me all the power complexes and anxieties I hold onto when I relentlessly pursue this thing of wanting to be an artist without examining why or what it means, not just to me but to the world around me. These are my observations, as I continue to go through this transit:

1. Only white non profits are supported by our tax dollars. The model of the art non profit is this: it takes the tax dollars of the public and supports a couple tokenized artists, who consolidate these public dollars into select items representing beauty and critique and depth. These objects really do fulfill that criteria. However, they are also bought by private collectors and become not only private property but speculative stock value.

2. Even the most grassroots of operations crave validation. The institutions that often end up being the operators who validate artworks are the ones with the most privilege. Community centered and radical spaces are often funded up real estate developers hoping to increase the market value of a neighborhood.

3. Artists are the sugarbabies of the art world. You can apply the lyrics of Lana Del Ray’s Young and Beautiful to a work of avant garde art considering its own historical value. We’re required be coy around money and we’re required to always look good. Recently, daddy institutions have been interested in BDSM, in a little pain, where they curate a little institutional critique into their territory. This has a cathartic feeling for everyone involved. Dealing with daddy institutions is the art of the scam, or trick. The thing about the trick is, you never know who is pulling one on whom–the john or the worker. On a sex work scale, it’s assumed that the john holds the power. On an international scale, America (the sugarbaby of the world) has all the power. In an economy build on debt, it’s the borrowers who have the most pull.

When Pluto opposed my Moon, it was my inability to admit to my desire for power that stunted my growth the most. This time around, I want to learn from my mistakes. I’m learning that all our models around power are not really what power is about. Men don’t know what power is. They think that they can have power over someone, and you can’t. You can only have power with someone because power, like love, is something that grows the moment it is shared. It cannot be owned by one individual.

So, I’ve been breaking up with the art world for years now. But it’s not what you think. Break ups are the most creative and cathartic periods of my life. I will continue to break up with the art world for a life time. And it will be a life time that is infinitely more creative than if I were to try to be an artist.

All this Pluto activity, all this power nonsense, is making me realize that there is nothing ethical about being an artist. This sucks, when art is supposed to be the conscience of society. There is also nothing ethical about saying that there are ethics behind art, or that there’s a way to be an ethical artist in an unethical world. To say that there is a path toward ethics without changing the status quo, that there is a way to wash your hands clean of the blood our American culture class is based on, is to find out that you have committed a murder and try to hide the evidence.

But, what is supposed to happen once a murder is committed? It’s that singular, unsettling moment, when a murder has been committed and no one knows what to do that our society has not solved and will never solve. Do you call the police and enforce judicial disciplinary action on the individual? Do you create justifications and base your entire group ideology around supporting the murderer as survivor? What do you do in that unholy moment?

What if that murder wasn’t a murder but a genocide? What if your entire culture is based around the erasure of that genocide? What kind of artist or cultural worker can you be then?

What is the amount of murder you do doesn’t make up for the amount of life you create and nurture? What if someone can be both compassionate and cruel, and neither makes up for nor voids the other? What if all our good deeds aren’t thrown into the void of bad things we’ve done, or someone else has done, but stands on its own? What is love doesn’t obliterate hate but coexists comfortably?

But when I talk about ethics, I’m not talking about good or bad. That’s morality. I’m talking about a social agreement of what is normal in our society. And what is normal in an American society is the constant erasure of mass bloodshed both in the past and the present.

So, it’s freeing to be breaking up with the art world, to not go to show openings or imagine what work I’d produce if I could afford the time and space. It allows me to appreciate what creativity I have when I don’t have the time or the place. Creativity is a reaction to oppression. No institution can give your creativity back to you by promising you time and space because those are not the things that make it necessary.

Breaking up with the art world means that I am able to appreciate my friends’ accomplishments without wondering when I’ll be able to get the same opportunities. It means not having to appreciate creative work through the admiration of how well something is able to pass through an institutional framework. It means admitting that being an artist is an unethical behavior, not because of anyone’s intentions, but because the system is unethical.

So, I’m going to spend my life breaking up with the art world. That means that I am going to spend my lifetime figuring out a way to be creative in a way that resists the creative system of institutions. That’s a big thing for my little Aries Sun in the second house, whose always had an immense amount of pride around what praise I can garner from others. But the second house is about value. It’s about goodness. There’s a such thing, I realize now, as creating values without value and goods without goodness.

So, goodbye white, patriarchal art world! I’m sure I’ll run into you here and there. We can even stay friends. But one thing I will not do is base my sense of worthiness on you and what you think of me. I’ve gone inside you now, taken you apart, and am leaving to give myself back to me.