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Welcome to Your Art Is A Spell, the podcast that ignites inspiring and transformative conversations about art as a magical practice. I'm your host, Edgar Fabián Frías—a multi-passionate artist, witch, therapist, and proud mutant shape-shifter. My art spells have reached audiences through social media, billboards, and skyscrapers and have even been placed on the surface of the moon! Join us as we explore how reclaiming your unique artistic voice and embracing bold creativity can transform your life and the world around you. Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for our newsletter at www.yourartisaspell.com to stay connected!
What happens when the government decides that
an education is only worth supporting if it
makes enough money? Not whether it helps people.
Not whether it brings beauty into the world. Not
whether it allows someone to help a child learn.
Support a survivor. Make music that gets someone
through grief. Create images that expand what
people believe is possible. or offer care that
makes life liveable. Just, does it make enough
money? There's a new federal policy direction
that ties access to student loans more closely
to whether graduates of a program earn above a
certain threshold. And the programs that are
being discussed as vulnerable include fields
like cosmetology, massage therapy, culinary arts,
social work, mental health counseling, fine art,
music, graphic design, English, religious
studies, early childhood education, medical
and dental assisting. I just want to make it clear
that this is not a ban on these fields. People can
still study them. But when federal loans become
less accessible, education becomes something that
only people with money, family support, credit or
private loans can realistically pursue. And that
is the point I want to talk about today because
this is not only a conversation about student
loans. It's a conversation about who gets to
create culture, who gets to care for other people,
who gets to develop a voice, who gets to dream
beyond survival. And yes, I am angry. I think
anger is an appropriate response when people in
power tell us once again that the things which
make life meaningful are somehow less valuable
than whatever generates the fastest and highest
paycheck. And I also want to be grounded as I
speak about this. I want to talk about what is
happening, why it matters, what it could mean for
our collective futures and what we can do instead
of accepting this vision of the world being
offered by them. Okay, first let's talk about the
reality of what's being discussed. argument behind
this kind of policy is that students should not be
encouraged to take on debt for programs that do
not lead to higher earnings. And on the surface,
people might hear this and think, well, of course,
we should not trap students in debt. That is a
real problem. Student debt is real. Predatory
schools are real. Programs that make huge
promises and leave people financially stranded
should absolutely be held accountable. But here's
where we need to slow down. There is a massive
difference between protecting students from
exploitation and deciding that a field has little
value because its workers are not paid enough.
Those are not the same thing. If graduates of a
field are struggling financially, we should ask
why is that work underpaid? Who benefits from that
underpayment? What would it look like to improve
wages, labor protections, public funding, and
access to those careers? Instead, this approach
risks sending a very different message. If society
has failed to pay you properly for your work, then
you should lose access to the education that would
allow you to do that work. That is backwards. The
part that feels the most chilling for me is what
this does to culture. Cuz art, music, writing,
design, performance, healing work, early childhood
education, and community care are not extras.
They are not frivolous little decorations placed
on top of a real society. They are part of how
society knows itself. Culture is how we tell the
truth about what has happened to us. It is how
we preserve memory. It is how people recognize
themselves. It is how a child sees a life they
did not know was possible. It is how a person
survives isolation. It is how communities mourn,
celebrate, organize and resist. And when access
to cultural education becomes more restricted,
culture does not disappear. It becomes more
exclusive. It becomes more likely that the
people who can afford to make art, study music,
take creative risks, pursue therapy training,
or enter care work are people who already have a
financial safety net. So then we have to ask whose
stories will get told? What aesthetics will define
what is beautiful? Whose pain will be considered
worthy of being documented? Whose imagination gets
preserved, funded, exhibited, published, recorded
or taught because we already know the answer
to this. Historically, museums, universities,
publishers, musical institutions, and cultural
gatekeepers have never been neutral. Women, queer,
and trans people, disabled people, working class
people, immigrants, and people from the global
majority have had to fight for the right to be
seen, collected, funded, and taken seriously.
There has been some progress, very imperfect
progress, uneven progress, but real progress.
And policies that make creative and care centered
education harder to access genuinely threaten that
progress. They can make it harder for people
without wealth to become artists, therapists,
educators, designers, writers, and cultural
workers who shape our shared reality. There is
another layer here that feels deeply important.
When people are kept in survival mode, they do
not have the same room to dream. That is not a
personal failure. That is not because someone is
being lazy or uncreative. Survival takes so much
energy. Financial precarity takes so much energy.
Constantly wondering whether you can pay your
rent, afford food, see a doctor, take time off,
or make one mistake without losing everything
takes a lot of energy. And dreaming also takes
energy. To make art, you need some degree of
time, space, safety, and permission to listen
to yourself. To enter into therapy, whether as a
client or someone training to become a therapist,
you need space to believe that transformation is
possible. To make music, write, design, cook, care
for children, counsel people, make work that is
emotionally honest. You need access to a life that
is more than just extraction. That is why I reject
that idea that these are low value fields. These
are fields that help us recognize that we are more
than labor units. These fields remind us that we
have interior lives, bodies, desires, memories,
spiritual and emotional needs, grief, pleasure,
imagination. Art can help someone imagine a future
that they've never seen represented. Therapy can
help someone recognize that the conditions they
grew up with are not the only conditions possible.
Social work can help people find concrete support,
safety, housing, benefits, and pathways out of
violence or crisis. These are real material
interventions and they are also interventions
into consciousness. All of that matters so much.
We're often taught to talk about art as if it's
separate from politics, separate from economics,
separate from real life. But culture changes what
people can see. And what people can see they can
name. And what people can name they can organize
around. Before a society changes laws, it often
has to change its imagination. People have to be
able to picture a different way of living,
a different family structure, a different
relationship to gender, a different relationship
to disability, race, work, wealth, care,
the environment, pleasure, or community. That is
what art does. That is what music does. That is
what storytelling does. That is what healing does.
It shifts the boundaries of the imaginable. So
when we talk about these programs being pushed
farther out of reach, we're not just talking
about career training. We're talking about the
infrastructure that helps people imagine and build
different lives. And I want to be careful here.
I'm not saying that every artist is automatically
a revolutionary or that art alone can solve
material problems. It cannot. We need housing.
We need health care. We need wages. We need labor
protections. We need material redistribution.
But art and culture are not separate from those
struggles. They help us feel why those struggles
matter. They help us refuse narratives that say
suffering is normal. Exploitation is inevitable
and there's no alternative. And one of the reasons
why I'm so angry about this is because for me,
therapy changed my life. It changed
what I believed was possible for myself.
It changed how I understood my own history, my
own internal experience. It helped me recognize
patterns I had been living inside of without
even being able to name them. And art has done
the same. Art has helped me encounter realities
beyond the one I was handed. It has helped me find
language for things I did not know how to say. It
has connected me to people across time, geography,
identity, and experience. It has helped me make
meaning when meaning did not arrive automatically,
organically, cleanly, when it was messy. Not only
that, but I would not have been able to study and
go to school if it weren't for federal funding.
I come from a background of people who did not go
to school. I'm not someone who was born into that
type of privilege. I needed financial support to
even start my career as an undergraduate,
let alone pursue two master's degrees,
one in therapy and one in art. I would not have
been able to do that without federal funding or
support. That would have been impossible for me to
do. So when I hear that the fields of art, music,
therapy, counseling, social work, and care are
treated as if they're not economically worthwhile,
I do not hear an abstract policy conversation.
I hear a message that says, "The things that
helped you become more alive are optional.
The things that help people heal are optional.
The things that help people feel less alone are
optional. And I reject that. We must refuse the
idea that market price is the same thing as
human value. A therapist may be underpaid
because insurance systems are broken because care
labor is feminized and historically undervalued
because access to mental health care is unequal.
An artist may be underpaid because creative labor
is routinely extracted for exposure, prestige,
or the promise of future opportunity. A social
worker may be underpaid despite doing work
that literally keep people housed, safe, alive,
and connected to resources. An early childhood
educator may be underpaid despite helping shape
the foundation of a child's entire life. All
of these low wages are not proof that the labor
is unimportant. They are proof that our current
economic system is failing to honor the labor that
sustains people and communities. And if the answer
to that failure is to make it harder for low income
people to enter into these fields, then we are not
solving anything. We are deepening the inequality.
So what do we do? First, we tell the truth about
the value of our work. Artists, therapists,
educators, healers, designers, musicians, and
care workers, what you do matters. Your work is
not a cute hobby. It's not an indulgence. it
is not automatically less valuable because a
broken system has failed to compensate it fairly.
Second, we need to advocate for policies that
expand rather than restrict access. We need public
investment in education. We need better wages for
care workers and cultural workers. We need debt
relief. We need labor protections. We need funding
structures that do not force people to choose
between serving their communities or being able to
survive. Third, we need to build interdependence
while we fight for structural change.
That can mean mutual aid, skill exchanges, sliding
scale offerings where sustainable impossible,
shared studios, community resource lists,
referring clients and collaborators to one
another, supporting independent artists
and practitioners directly when we can,
choosing not to demand free labor from people
whose work we value. And finally, we have to
keep dreaming. Not in a vague way, not as denial,
dreaming as a practice of refusing the limited
future that we are being sold. They may imagine
a future where culture belongs to the wealthy,
care belongs to the wealthy, therapy belongs to
the wealthy, and only certain people can afford
to make meaning. But that is not the only future
available to us. Our imaginations are far more
expansive than that. Our communities are so much
more creative than that. And the work is to make
those futures into a material reality. So as
a way to close, I want to leave you with this.
The question is not whether art, therapy, care,
music, beauty, joy, and collective imagination
have value. The question is whether we are willing
to build a society that recognizes and supports
that value. Because a world where only wealthy
people can afford to become artists, therapists,
educators, musicians, and cultural workers is
not a neutral world. It is a smaller world,
a more controlled world, a world with fewer
voices, fewer possibilities and fewer ways for
people to recognize their own power. So, let's
stay angry, but let's make that anger useful.
Let's defend these fields. Let's pay people. Let's
support each other. Let's refuse scarcity as our
only imagination. and let's keep making the
work that reminds people that another world is
possible. And with that, I want to remind you that
your art is a spell and it will change your life
and the world around us. If you have received any
meaning, support, care from this message, I urge
you to share it with a friend. I also invite you
to go over to our Patreon at patreon.com/yourartisaspell
there, You can become a free or paid
member for only $5 a month. This helps me continue
to make this podcast and I want to thank the
paid and free members over on Patreon. Last,
if you would like to get on my newsletter, I
want to invite you to go to mutant-magagic.com
and sign up for my free newsletter. Remember,
we are much more powerful than you could ever
imagine. There is a reason why they are trying to
pass laws like this and make changes like these.
We cannot forget our power and
the magic that exists between us.