The Alien Wallpaper Experiment: How to Succeed in the Arts

    I have been an oboist for most of my life. You can just imagine the fortune I have acquired by playing and teaching the oboe. Well, maybe you can’t. It is noteworthy that a former teacher of mine famously told his freshman class that of the five or six oboe players entering the conservatory that year, maybe, just maybe, one of them would make a living by playing the oboe.

    With the daunting circumstances of my profession in mind, I mulled over how to develop an alternative money-making plan. Since I have always enjoyed drawing and designing, I thought to make it big by striking it rich in the art field. Now, I realize that visual artists, like oboe players, do not make much money.  This led me to several considerations that have guided my most recent artistic efforts.

First, the markets for art here on Earth are just too limited.

   To make it really big, it is necessary to have a market that extends beyond the confines of this solar system. To make it truly, truly big, one would need to serve the galactic market. Why think small? With this in mind, I decided on a course of designing wallpaper for aliens.

    I thought a good name for this effort would be, “The Alien Wallpaper Project”. I truly love this name, and I became quite attached to it as frequently happens to me when branding a product. For instance, when my Baroque Trio musical group was in the process of finding a name for itself, I suggested, “The Vivaldi Marching Band”. Sadly, this name was soundly rejected in favor of a more formal name, but I have remained attached to it ever since! Ah Well! But back to The Alien Wallpaper Project. It occurred to me that if instead of “Alien Wallpaper Project”, I used the name, “Alien Wallpaper Experiment”, then I would have a terrific three letter acronym,  AWE.

Probing the Alien Marketplace

    Having accomplished my branding, I thought I’d probe the alien marketplace. I decided that in order to maximize my brand, my customers must be upscale aliens. They must be aliens with galactic capabilities, at least technologically advanced enough to mine asteroids, and able to extract Helium 3 from the atmosphere of planets like Saturn to fuel their spaceships. They must be capable of faster than light travel to come here to buy my products, and they must use quantum entanglement to communicate about my products to the folks back home.

    It occurred to me that this kind of abundance and capability monetized must mean that one of their universal drachmas has got to be worth, let’s say, a billion of our dollars, maybe more. This is just logical, is it not? This led me to consider that I would only need to sell one swath of AWE to a private alien, an alien corporation, or an alien non-profit, to be set for life, or at least until my competitors successfully market to the aliens, and the value of alien currency is rebalanced by more trade with Earthlings.

    With this in mind, I have produced AWE I and AWE II. I have yet to produce AWE shucks, but AWE III is in progress. 

Alien Wallpaper I

Alien Wallpaper II