Give & Take

By Amy Kurzweil | Feb 8th, 2022, 8:00am EST

Tap or swipe

I remember the first great work of art I ever made. [Image description: A female child holds a paintbrush up to a blank canvas, looking at a picture of Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting “Deer Skull with Pedernal” in a book propped up next to her, while her teacher speaks.] Teacher: “Try to copy the painting as best you can.”

I was in awe—of the image, of myself for making it. My reproduction was pinned to the corkboard of my mother’s home office for years. [Image description: Two versions of Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting “Deer Skull with Pedernal” side-by-side, showing a deer skull affixed to an upright tree branch in front of distant mountains. The image on the left has less detail.] That this work was not really mine didn’t occur to me. I wanted to share it with whoever would look, as it had been shared with me.

Now I’m a professional sharer of images. [Image description: An Instagram post by Amykurzweil, showing a man painting a jumping deer on a yellow road sign. A live deer stands on its hind legs as a model behind the man’s easel. An arrow says that Amy sold the original print for $500. The caption reads: “This #deer and his #artist are still #forsale at #undercurrentprojects! #Graphicart”] I usher my drawings through the marketplace, affixing numbers to my work in order to make a living.

I know about contracts, royalties, and copyright (sort of). [Image description: A drawing of a contract with Vox Media for a comic titled “Give & Take,” on top of two blue buttons labeled “review” and “accept.” A cursor arrow hovers over “accept.”] But these calculations always feel arbitrary to me. I know the value of art can’t really be counted with coins.

[Image description: The image of the man painting a deer on a road sign is displayed in various applications above buttons that say “Add to Cart”: framed and hanging on the wall, on a T-shirt, printed on a mug in a woman’s hands, and printed on a pillow held by a smiling woman.]

In The Gift, Lewis Hyde says that exchanges of art are greater and stranger than the sum of their material parts. [Image description: A drawing of Lewis Hyde’s book “The Gift,” subtitled “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.” An arrow identifies it as a birthday gift.] Art delivers insight, emotion, connection — things we can’t count, measure, or exclusively own.

The experience of art — “a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives,” a fleeting guffaw at a funny deer — there is not a fixed amount of these moments. This boundlessness is what makes art a gift.

Gifts bond and transform us. [Image description: A drawing of a deer, with “Deer Reader, Happy Birthday! Love, Amy” written in script.] If I gifted you this drawing, you’d likely feel obliged to me somehow (a thank you email, a friendship). If I sold you this drawing, $100 over Venmo would end our exchange.

Or if you saw my drawing on Instagram, you’d signal your thanks for my digital gift with a like, a comment, or a share. These days I can’t sell prints of deer cartoons or, it seems, do anything, without participating in this world of sharing and liking. [Image description: A drawing of the App Store, where Instagram has been downloaded.] Social media uses the language of community and the feeling of a gift exchange to invite us to its stage, as if to a party.

To me, at first, it did feel like a gift, like a valve opening, [Image description: A drawing of a screenshot of Instagram, showing that there are 8.7 million posts tagged #deer. The drawing shows five images: A pet dog in a deer costume holding a carrot, and four separate deer in the wild.] A chance to forever pin my drawings to an infinite digital corkboard!

“The [creative] gift is not used up in use. To have painted a painting does not empty the vessel out of which the paintings come. On the contrary, it is the talent which is not in use that is lost or atrophies.”

My artist’s secret: I want to give my work away. [Image description: A drawing of Amy, with wavy hair and rosy cheeks, wearing a black shirt and gray pants, sitting cross-legged looking at her phone, with three hearts above her head.] The gift of my art brings me something in return.

“...art draws each of its participants into a wider self…” [Image description: A drawing of a screenshot of Instagram, searching for #cartoonists, which has 1.8 million posts.]

But something is wrong here. [Image description: Amy sitting cross-legged, looking at her phone, but now with her eyebrows raised and a troubled look on her face.]

If the value of art is uncountable, what are we to make of… [Image description: Drawn elements of Amy Kurzweil’s Instagram account, showing 37.3 followers, and the caption “My #topten toons of 2021”] …numbers?

Here’s the cartoon with the largest number of likes on my Instagram page: [Image description: A drawing of Amy’s Instagram post, which begins with the text “The two kinds of women’s underwear:” above a drawing of green thong underwear with the caption “intentionally up your butt” and three drawings of brief underwear with the caption “unintentionally up your butt.” The caption to the post reads: “Can we please discuss this #conspiracy against #mybutt. #womensunderwear]

[Image description: A drawing of an Instagram ad from a company called Seamless Jane, showing the back of a woman with her hands raised, wearing a peach pair of underwear and bra.] “The artist will never ‘make’ money,” says Hyde while acknowledging that artists need money.

[Image description: A sponsored post from the Amykurzweil account, showing two women wearing underwear. The woman on the left is seen from behind wearing green thong underwear, behind script that reads “intentionally”; the woman on the right faces forward, wearing light blue underwear behind the script “unintentionally.” Between them is the text “up your butt.”] But somebody makes money with our art. This money-making forged the infinite digital corkboard and its infinite underwear ads.

[Image description: A child-sized Amy sitting cross-legged on the floor, in front of a large TV with antennas, showing an advertisement of a woman’s torso wearing peach underwear and a bra before a bright cloudy sky, beneath the text “Unintentional by Calvin Klein.”] We should know by now that a story is inextricable from its form.

I’m concerned by the form of this story, [Image description: A towering book with a cover that says “Instagram: a graphic memoir, by Facebook, author of Oculus,” next to a drawing of the same book with blank pages blowing open.] Its shape, the way it works,

How it floods our brains with dopamine, every swipe one click closer to a purchase, [Image description: Two slot machines next to each other, with “GRAM” printed on top surrounded by blue and green lightbulbs. The slot wheels contain images of deer heads, fruit, and underwear.] How its endlessness means I won’t spend very long on a post and neither will you, meaning the loudest, flattest, silliest, trendiest, neediest art feeds the machine,

And you’ll never really give me the gifts I want back. [Image description: A slot machine with three pairs of underwear lined up in a row, with black hearts pouring out of the slot.]

I want something back. [Image description: Amy sitting next to the slot machine, surrounded by black hearts. She holds one heart, and looks at it skeptically.]

And I don’t want to forget what Georgia’s deer revealed to me. [Image description: A shirt printed with Georgia O’Keeffe’s deer skull, for sale for $24.99, atop a blue “Add to Cart” button.] You can’t really own an image.

[Image description: Child Amy, seen from behind, painting a replica of Georgia O’Keeffe’s deer skull.] You can only honor it with your attention.

Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Believer, Longreads, Wired, and many other places. She’s received fellowships from MacDowell and Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and she was a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute and a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She’s working on her second graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story.