Should you be making more art?
The answer is pretty simple ...
Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 317
I spent 30 years of my career working in museums.
I’ve seen all sorts of things displayed, much of which has been classed as art.
In my last piece, I challenged you to rethink the physical medium and look at Mail Art zines as a way to bust through the digital noise.
The response was fascinating. Half of you were ready to run out and buy a printing press, while the other half asked a very fair, slightly panicked question:
“Gary, I’m a marketer/copywriter/entrepreneur. I have a business to run. I’m not an artist. Why should I spend time making art?”
It’s a classic trap that we’ve been conditioned to believe that if an activity doesn’t have a direct line item in the quarterly budget, it’s a waste of time.
We treat creativity like a utility bill—something to be optimized, minimized, and kept strictly functional.
But today, I want to argue the exact opposite. If you want to survive the automated content apocalypse, you need to be making more art. Not less. And you need to start doing it now.
The Death of the “Good Enough” Content
Let’s look at the reality of the market.
Right now, the barrier to entry for creating acceptable content is exactly zero.
Anyone with an internet connection can push a button and generate a perfectly structured, grammatically correct, 800-word blog post about “5 Ways to Optimize Your SEO Strategy.”
Because of this, the internet is being flooded with a massive wave of homogenized, generic, soul-crushing mediocrity.
When efficiency is maximized, uniqueness becomes the only true currency.
If your content looks, and sounds, and feels like it was assembled by a committee of algorithms, your audience will treat it like background noise, which means hey will learn to tune you out.
This is where art comes in.
Art is, by definition, inefficient. It requires friction, personal risk, and an individual point of view. When you make art, you are forcing yourself to make choices that an algorithm never would—choosing a jarring color palette, writing an uncomfortable metaphor, or structuring a layout with an intentional, asymmetric rhythm.
The Creator’s Paradox: The more you focus on purely functional, “optimized” marketing, the more invisible you become. The closer your marketing looks to art, the more magnetic it becomes.
Three Reasons Making Art Makes You a Smarter Marketer
When I talk about making art, I’m not saying you need to quit your day job and move to a loft to paint abstract canvases (unless you want to, in which case, go for it). I’m talking about engaging in creative acts where the primary goal isn’t immediate commercial conversion, but expression.
Here is what happens to your professional brain when you start making more art:
1. You Reclaim Your Visual and Verbal Autonomy
When you spend all day analyzing data and performance metrics, your creative instincts get lazy. You start relying on templates and “best practices.” Making art—whether it’s sketching, photography, poetry, or manual collage—forces you to exercise your taste. It sharpens your eye for composition, texture, and emotional resonance. That taste directly carries over into how you design your next campaign or write your next headline.
2. It Teaches You to Embrace the Imperfect
Marketing frameworks hate mistakes. They want predictable, repeatable outcomes. But true inspiration is chaotic and elastic. Art forces you to work with constraints and happy accidents. When a smudge of ink ruins a perfect line, an artist doesn’t hit “Ctrl+Z”—they reframe the entire piece around the smudge. That adaptability is exactly what you need when a marketing campaign hits an unexpected snag in the real world.
3. It Deepens Your Empathy for the Audience
Art is an exchange of human emotion. When you create something raw and original, you feel a moment of vulnerability before you share it. Remembering what that feels like is the best antidote to writing clinical, disconnected marketing copy. It reminds you that on the other side of that screen or mailbox is a living, breathing human being who wants to feel something, not just be sold to.
The Art-to-Business Pipeline
The most successful brands right now don’t look like software companies; they look like media empires and design studios. They understand that consumers are starving for visual integrity, distinct voices, and a sense of genuine human presence.
Look at your current output. If everything you produce is a straight, transactional line from “Problem” to “Solution,” you are vulnerable to being automated out of existence.
Stop asking if a creative project will scale. Stop worrying if it fits neatly into your current funnel.
Give yourself permission to make something weird, beautiful, or totally non-commercial this week.
Write a short story.
Build a crazy mood board.
Design a poster you have no intention of selling.
Shake up your routine.
The muscle memory you build while making art might just save your business.
Over to you: When was the last time you made something just for the sake of making it?
Has the metric-driven grind put your creative instincts to sleep, or are you actively fighting back?
Let’s talk about it in the comments.
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
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P.S. If you found this useful, share it with another creator who needs an ego check (in a nice way). Want more unfiltered takes on content creation? Join my newsletter. No fluff, just the stuff that works.
Next time on Shaking the Tree: When good design goes rogue …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.