Daily Inspiration Quote by Brad Holland

The line lands like a quiet confession from someone who’s spent a lifetime making images in a culture that treats images as infinite and disposable. Brad Holland isn’t romanticizing the “starving artist” myth; he’s pointing at a structural problem: modern mass societies are brilliant at scaling distribution and terrible at scaling dignity. Art travels farther than ever, yet the conditions for making it - time, money, attention, ownership - keep getting squeezed.

The phrasing matters. “The truth is” signals a clearing of the throat, a refusal to play the usual PR game where creativity is framed as pure passion or hustle. “Haven’t really figured out yet” is almost gentle, but it’s also damning: this isn’t a niche concern, it’s an unresolved design flaw in the way we’ve built markets, media, and platforms. And by saying “artists,” not “art,” Holland shifts the focus from product to people - the bodies and lives behind the work.

“We’re all experiments” is the kicker. It flattens hierarchy, pulling famous and unknown creators into the same unsettled lab: patrons replaced by algorithms, galleries by feeds, editorial illustration by branded content, originality by remix culture. The subtext is uncertainty with a deadline. Experiments have outcomes; some succeed, many fail, and the casualties are often invisible.

Contextually, coming from an illustrator - a profession hit early by outsourcing, shrinking print budgets, and later by AI-generated imagery - the quote reads less like philosophy than field reporting. It’s an invitation to stop pretending the current system is natural, and start admitting it’s provisional.