God shares no attribute with the created. Obsolescence is an attribute of the created. God willed the obsolescence of the emerging artist by creating this world in which nothing escapes expiration. Whether religious or secular, the artist is created finite. The question that follows is whether the emerging artist expires with less agency or more.

Planned obsolescence is the industrial practice of designing a product to fail, or feel inferior, on schedule. There is a documented case in which a court found obsolescence to have been planned by a cabal. In 1949, a U.S. federal court found that the Phoebus agreement formed part of a conspiracy protecting General Electric’s dominance of the American lightbulb market. The cartel, formed by representatives of major international lightbulb manufacturers, standardized household bulb life at a thousand hours and penalized members whose bulbs lasted longer.

But obsolescence does not require a cabal to emerge, and the emerging artist must recognize this. Obsolescence can emerge through competition, a calendar, and an appetite for next year’s profits. Those who recognize that the art world operates within these conditions capitalize on that knowledge while emerging artists remain none the wiser.

The art market processes the artist’s aura into capital, yet the artist is instructed to remain removed from the pricing and sale of the work. The industry deems artists too pure for commerce and conscripts them into monkhood.

Joseph Beuys’s equation “Art = Capital” captures the contradiction of this secular monkhood. In 1979, he argued that human creativity was society’s true productive wealth while attempting to neutralize the authority of money, ownership, and profit.

Part of his institutional legacy is an art education that celebrates creativity as capital while leaving artists unprepared to secure capital themselves. Equating creativity with capital is all well and good until rent is actually due.

Josh Kline recently explained in October why the artist can no longer survive in New York.

Kline writes that the art industry is comatose because the cost of living has become unaffordable for artists. Kline’s essay diagnoses and names a cause of illness without healing the body. What the diagnosis cannot determine is how to pay for the treatment.

Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic (2025) supplements Kline’s diagnosis by revealing the funding asymmetry between the founder and the artist.

Karp argues that startup founders are artists and that building a company demands an aesthetic point of view. He wants the founder to have the artist’s eye. The blind spot in his argument is that the eye of the artist belongs to people who cannot make rent. If the artistic mind is as essential to the republic as he says, capital should be pointed directly at it.

My position is that emerging artists should submit to the reality that they work inside capitalism and reconstruct their role within this system. Their economic evolution means gaining agency by becoming an entity that raises, holds, and allocates capital rather than remaining the object those decisions are made about.

The art world operates in part through an investment portfolio logic much like venture capital, using the oversupply of emerging artists as a spread of bets. The emerging artist is already speculated on like an early-stage founder, but the practice is rarely structured as the enterprise receiving investment. The model does not require most emerging artists to succeed. It only requires a few to become valuable enough to justify betting on the rest.

Emerging artists lack access to working capital early enough in their practice to sustain their practices. Incorporating early presumes the emerging artist will flourish and creates the structure through which capital can reach the practice before the market validates that presumption. A successful round of fundraising exchanges a claim on the corporation’s future value for current runway.

That runway can relieve the burdens of production, fabrication, and the cost of living. For most artists, and certainly for me, the cost of living is the heaviest one to carry.

You literally cannot spell “startup” without “art.” My embrace of capitalism started with changing my last name from Raheem to Incorporated and establishing a Delaware C Corporation under the same name, Hamzat Incorporated. I chose a C Corporation because it allows me to use the same Y Combinator SAFE used by startup founders to raise capital from investors now in exchange for rights to shares later.

My definition of an artist is a creator of value in the entire range of the word: aesthetic, financial, social, and spiritual. Artists are people; technology corporations and art-world institutions are institutions. The emerging artist stays economically subordinate to them because institutions that control capital are more powerful than people. Incorporating early allows the emerging artist to become an institution before expiring as inventory.