My father and me

I recently stumbled across this article in the Guardian, “The parent trap: art after children” by author Frank Cottrell Boyce, father of seven. I was intrigued and inspired seeing as I am very (as in, post due date) pregnant and have been wondering to myself, “What is going to happen to my life after this baby is born?” More specifically, “Will I have to give up singing?”

Of course this sense of despair is unfounded, but it feels legitimate. I would venture to guess anyone who has a child on the way mourns their loss of independence. But for the artist, the unknown could be a bit more frightening. We know how unstable the life of an artist is, believing it requires a singular devotion. We worry that the introduction of a commitment like marriage or parenthood could easily topple what we’ve been building. We may believe that in order to maintain a certain way of life for our art, we must sacrifice family, or if we want family, we must sacrifice art.

Boyce shares he once had similar feelings,

We were still students when we got married and had our first baby. It must have been hard work…Friends were mostly delighted, but also slightly appalled. From the first they’d take me aside and commiserate. “That’s it now, Frank, the pram is in the hallway.”

The full quote – from Cyril Connolly – is: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.” In fact, we didn’t have a pram or a hallway, but in the dark watches of the night I would sometimes look at the Maclaren Dreamer buggy in the corner of the tiny kitchen and think, is that it then? Will I have to go and get a proper job and never write again?

Fathers and artists: my father, dancer; my grandfather, painter

After graduating college, I had arranged a voice lesson with a famous soprano. At the end of our lesson she had some encouraging things to say about my voice and grilled me on why I was not yet in graduate school and “just what was I doing with my life.” I feebly explained I needed to make some money first, was just testing the waters with different teachers, and was not ready for grad school yet.

Exasperated, she asked, “Do you want to get married? Have children?” As if these would be the only reasons someone like me would not follow the same career path every other “serious” music school undergrad was following. She said, “You know the divorce rate among opera singers is over 50%? I have seen a lot of cheating in my day. You will have to make tremendous sacrifices and a solid marriage is possible, but not easy. I’m married, but may not see my husband for months while on tour. We decided we could never have children, given the traveling schedules we have as performers. We don’t have 401Ks, so you’ll also have to figure out how to save for retirement.”

37 weeks pregnant

Today, 8 years later, 9 months pregnant, just two weeks shy of my 30^th birthday, having sacrificed a possible career dedicated solely to music (maybe, who knows, really) I believe my life and my career and far are more rich and wonderful than I could have ever planned for myself after that voice lesson, had I taken the soprano’s warnings seriously. In fact, I am grateful for the series of events that kept me in Michigan. I am grateful that I doubted there was one way to becoming the artist I was, and am, meant to become.

Boyce touches on the reasons why I believe committing to family life can be so much more frightening, challenging, and rewarding than (exclusively) committing to one’s work as an artist,

It’s very powerful to be surrounded by people who love you for something other than your work, who are unaware of the daily, painful fluctuations of your reputation. I discovered recently that my youngest child thought I spent my days typing out more and more copies of my book Millions, so that everyone could have one.

I love this insight. I have noticed that sometimes family members may not be interested in or may not understand my artistic endeavors. This is not to say they are unsupportive, but they cannot inhabit my world. It is not only selfish of me to expect them to, but unnecessary.

Boyce continues,

Jonathan Franzen has said that “it is doubtful that anyone with an internet connection in his workplace is writing good fiction”. Family is, of course, the most potent distraction, and probably the only distraction that makes you feel virtuous when you surrender to it.

My heart aches reading that last statement because I have experienced  it. Why is surrendering to one’s family so difficult and so rewarding? Is it because the rewards are often so private? Is it because they cannot be measured in an artist’s preferred currency: money or fame? You don’t build any artistic street cred by advertising on your blog, “I loved someone with all my heart today.” It won’t get you a job, make a sale, or win an audition. And while the distraction of family can be tiresome, draining, and in some cases, something you legitimately need to distance yourself from, what Boyce says next struck a chord with me,

There’s a belief that to do great work you need tranquility and control, that the pram is cluttering up the hallway; life needs to be neat and tidy. This isn’t the case. Tranquility and control provide the best conditions for completing the work you imagined. But surely the real trick is to produce the work that you never imagined. The great creative moments in our history are almost all stories of distraction and daydreaming – Archimedes in the bath, Einstein dreaming of riding a sunbeam – of alert minds open to the grace of chaos.

Writers have produced great work in the face of things far more stressful than the school run: being shot at, in the case of Wilfred Owen; being banged up in jail, in the case of Cervantes or John Bunyan. Yet that pram is lodged in our imaginations, like a secret parasite sucking on our juices.

In fact, if you go back to Connolly’s terrific book, you’ll see that the pram is only one of the many Enemies of Promise. Others include a public school education (so emotionally overwhelming you can’t move on) and success, surely the greatest enemy of all. But no one warns you about these. It’s just the pram.

Why does it retain its power to chill? I don’t think it’s about fear of distraction or domesticity. I think it’s a fear of babies. Being a parent – or really loving someone other than yourself, whether that’s your children, parents or your lover – forces you to confront a horrible truth: the fact that we get older. The amazing boy who was born when I was still a student is a man now. There is no way that I can still think of myself as “quite young, really” or “a child at heart”. Parenthood confronts us with our own mortality, every day.

To me, the pram is a metaphor for “all family life” and I might extend Boyce’s analysis to include “all family life confronts us with our own mortality, every day.”

It was not until I met my now-husband, was planning my wedding, and my father was dying of cancer, that I realized just how little I cared for a Great Big Career in music. How grateful I was that I never followed the soprano’s advice about my career path. How little I cared that my “creativity” was put on hold because I was growing my family and losing it at the same time.

I think what I am getting at, is that artists need to be open to life. They need to be open to the possibility that family life need not be sacrificed for art’s sake. That in fact, it can make you the artist you are meant to be.

Last dance with my father before his death

Via Bad at Sports,

Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn is letting artists of all stripes pay for their medical bills by trading “credits” they earn by donating their skills & time to patients in recovery. The program called “Artist Access”  was born last year, when Dr. Edward Fishkin, Medical Director of Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center, met Laura Colby a former dancer turned performing arts agent.

The Artist Access program allows artists to provide interactive art programs for patients in exchange for health care credits. The  credits are deposited in the artist’s personal account, 40 credits for each hour of work which equates to about 40$ [sic] an hour and can be used to cover sliding scale fees in Woodhull’s HHC Options program.

BaS author Hudgens asserts, “[The Artist Access Program] isn’t a soulution for the masses and looks to be a buracratic ousourcing [sic] of rehabilitation entertainment & inspiration program development but it’s a brave step in the right direction…” I cannot say I agree that this program is a mere bureaucratic solution in avoidance of regular rehab entertainment expenses, but I do think it is a creative solution to the perennial problem of obtaining adequate health care for artists who do not make enough money on their own to purchase health insurance or who do not wish to get a day job just to obtain insurance.

I was absolutely floored by this incredible transforming apartment featured on “World’s Greenest Homes“

I think this video of architect Gary Chang’s home is not only a wonderfully executed exercise in economizing and what could be considered “green” living, it reveals how solving a problem with design has resulted in a visually appealing and artistically inspired minimalist space.

If you are a regular reader of home and design magazines like Dwell, or a hilarious favorite blog of mine “Unhappy Hipsters” you might be as shocked as I am how frequently so-called “green” designers are praised for what appears to be wasted space and resources on sprawling homes, estates, or abandoned-car-washes-cum-trendy-boutiques replete with sustainably raised, scavenged, and/or otherwise fair-traded everything-under-the-sun. (Don’t forget, they are wearing the latest and greatest organic fashions.)

Many of the 10 page photo spreads read more like, “How to Buy/Sell Tons of Designerly Stuff No One Really Needs While Living in Expensive Cities Yet Still Be Able to Justify to Yourself and Fool Everyone Else Into Thinking You Care Deeply About the Earth and the Plight of Those Less Privileged.” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind anyone living any way they like or buying whatever they desire. What I don’t appreciate is the holier-than-thou attitude of many of today’s Green Elite. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t see their fashionable excesses as rather un- “green” myself. It is designers like Chang, who live out their principles while utilizing inspired design that really impress me.

For those of us in the arts, building an audience is almost as important as, if not more important than developing your craft. You might be a genius musician, but it won’t do you much good financially if no one knows about you and, according to Greg Sandow, if you don’t make a point to connect with and get to know your potential audience.

Sandow writes,

As part of the project I’m doing at the University of Maryland, members of the school’s symphony orchestra went out to the student union, and started practicing their parts for Strauss’s Heldenleben, the big piece on their upcoming concert…Did the other students at the Student Union get more interested in the  orchestra? Did any of them come to the concert?

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During my visit to the Yale School of Music last week, a student told me about something very like what the students did in Maryland…Some undergraduates started an orchestra, and held rehearsals in some public place on campus, to develop interest, and of course an audience. And in fact a lot of the other students who encountered the rehearsals seemed very interested.

And then what happened? Hardly anybody came to the performance!

So, what is the message here? Sandow is careful to note he is not making blanket assumptions about the outcomes of “guerrilla marketing” techniques such as providing free sneak previews of your work, but offers that simply showing up and giving people free stuff is not necessarily taking full advantage of the opportunity you have created.

He has some great suggestions,

It might not be enough to do guerrilla promos for an event. You have to follow up.

What would the followups be?

…you need to talk to people who watch you rehearse/practice/whatever unexpectedly in public. Make some friends. Get some names! Put these people on an email list. Make them your Facebook friends. Get them following you on Twitter.

You might also try what Peter Gregson did so successfully on the BBC Proms website last summer. Bring a video camera when you show up guerrilla-style in public, and film conversations with people hearing you who seem interested. And, maybe, with some who aren’t interested! Then put these conversations on a website, or a Facebook page. The idea is to get these people to send their friends to your page, to watch the video. And, of course, to find out about your project, as inevitably will happen.

He goes on to list a lot more great ideas, so read the full post. However, it strikes me that a lot of times artists are not short on ideas for promotion, even for free promotion – some of them just do not have the personality for promotion. Some of them are too shy to start a blog, be on YouTube or tweet about themselves. I think another reason artists do not do a great job promoting themselves is that they may simply not have enough time! It is a lot of work promoting yourself as an artist or your arts organization.

According to a fine art photographer I know who supports himself entirely with his art, he says he spends 90% of his marketing and gigging at art fairs and photography workshops. The other 10% of the time is spent shooting photos. Of the time he spends shooting, he says 90% of it is on capturing images he know will sell, and only 10% on things he likes (abstract images) that do not sell as well.

The reality is, being an artist is just like being an entrepreneur. Especially if your idea (your art) is unproven, you have to work that much harder to promote yourself. I think a lot of artists do not realize just to what extent the life of an entrepreneur is a challenge and exercise in sheer stamina.

I do not know why I did not think to post this earlier, but due to popular demand and some of the great commentary my recent post received on Brazen Careerist, I’m posting one of my graduate essays on the topic of The Artist as Entrepreneur. This is something I have tried to impart to my students as a private voice teacher and something that inspires me both as an artist and an economist. There are ample examples of commercially successful artists throughout history. Learn from them.

While I know it’s bad form to quote oneself, I only do so to entice you into reading all 20 pages of The Artist as Entrepreneur,

As an artist studying economics, I’m often met with exclamations of incredulity when someone learns of my academic pursuits.  Comments usually have to do with the misconception that artists are not of the mind to bother themselves with matters of economics and money – they must be too busy creating, inventing, and dreaming…While many artists I know also think this way, I aim to show that to be a successful artist, in addition to holding a certain level of artistic competence, an artist must develop the business and finance skills that lead to successful careers for artists and non-artists alike.  The ability to market oneself, take advantage of economies of scale, utilize commercial dissemination of one’s work, and career skill set diversification are critically important to long-term fiscal viability.  As any entrepreneur will tell you, taking risks can increase career reward, and artists are often known for taking risks creatively and in their careers.  However, there is a difference between risks that can lead to growth, and risky professional behavior that does not lead anywhere.

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The story of Salvador Dalí is one of many examples of artists throughout history achieving commercial success during their lifetimes…Because Dalí welcomed the popular demand for his style of work in the market and promoted it to gain profit, he was eventually ostracized from a community of surrealist artists he associated with who felt he was straying from their cause. Artist Mark Vallen quotes the following passage from Philadelphia Museum’s Dalí exhibit catalogue,

“[Art critic Andre] Breton had long thought Dalí’s art had become too commercialized and that Dalí’s growing fame threatened the unity and agenda of the Surrealists. His growing disgust with Dalí’s financial success as an artist led him to dub Salvador Dalí with the anagrammatic nickname ‘Avida Dollars,’ describing what he perceived as Dalí’s greed for money and fame.” (Vallen, 2005)

Other [commercially successful] artists include: Rubens, Tiziano, Rembrandt, Lenbach, Stuck, Picasso, and Beuys.  Composers and musicians include Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner, Domingo, Pavarotti, Carreras, and Callas.  Authors and playwrights include Shakespeare, Goethe, Dickens, Hauptmann, Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Jane Austen.  All of these artists became wealthy due to commercial success during their lives (Frey, 2000 and Cantor, 2006).

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There is no panacea that will solve the many difficulties of pursuing a career as a creative artist.  Though author Miguel de Cervantes is well known for his work Don Quixote, he struggled to find commercial success during his lifetime and was poor for most of his career.  However, his quote from Don Quixote, “It is the part of a wise man to keep himself to-day for to-morrow, and not to venture all his eggs in one basket” is apropos when thinking about one’s career or investments.  The approach to diversify and mitigate risk that has served great commercially successful artists and private sector entrepreneurs can serve today’s artists as well.

In the discipline of finance, it is common for investment professionals to speak of portfolio diversification, which is a method of allocating one’s investments among a variety of styles and vehicles based on an individual’s risk profile or tolerance in order to choose investments that match an individual’s willingness to bear a certain amount of risk.  “The principle of diversification tells us that spreading an investment across many assets will eliminate some, but not all, of the risk” (Jordan and Miller, 2009)

In the paper I elaborate on all these ideas and more! There are pictures too! There might be typos (I’ve already caught one, can you?)! Mainly, I hope what I’ve written can serve as inspiration for artists and fodder for debate on this important topic.

I love this topic. One might consider me biased since I’m an artist who now works in a more “conventional” field – but I cannot say my degree in music did anything to get me hired, from the standpoint of someone looking at my resume and concluding, “Why yes, I think your experience in the arts makes you perfect to work in the retail finance industry.” That never happened.

But could it be that the connections between music and finance, or the intense study of musical minutiae and the intense study of financial accounting statements are really tangible?

I’m not sure, but author Daniel Pink thinks so. In a recent speech he gave in California to teachers and administrators about “Innovation, Education, and The Changing World of Work,” he made the case that “whole-mind” education leads to better outcomes in education and ultimately, the workplace.

But there was more to it than that. Pink was in O.C. to talk about the importance of arts education in forming a well-rounded, competitive job-force warrior — apparently a subject of intense interest in Orange County, not only among teachers (of which there were many in the audience) but within the business community as well (they were the ones in the dark suits thumbing away on their Blackberries).
The buzz was palpable, and the mood among the people I talked to revealed the reason for all the excitement.
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Teachers and school administrators are looking for new ways to justify the conservation of arts curriculum in an era of draconian cutbacks. H.R. types, trying to keep abreast of the rapidly changing needs and conditions of the workplace, are rethinking the definition of the well-trained and adaptive employee.
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After Pink’s talk, the crowd was invited to break up into discussion groups. Among the topics: “Community-Based Arts Education Advocacy”; “Turn STEM into STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS and Math”; “Seeking Solutions to Closing the Arts Gap.”

“People are aching to have a thoughtful discussion and to hear an insightful speaker on this topic,” said Richard Stein, executive director of Arts Orange County. “Many people share Daniel’s belief that arts education should be a core curriculum subject. It’s a mistake to make it a frill or after-school activity. Many studies have shown that it’s key to the well-rounded education and creative thinking.”

It seems that the theory “a well-rounded employee does better work” makes sense, but how can this be tested, and proven. Furthermore, does it need to be? Does the overly-simplistic argument that “arts make us happier, better, more-creative people” have enough value to it? I know from my own experience, when I pull away too much from the arts, I feel the malaise of unproductivity – not because I’m not busy or not working, but perhaps its because my work tends to challenge only one part of me – the analytical and rational. Music and other arts are another outlet.

Almost every working artist has a love/hate relationship with The Day Job. It’s the job we begrudgingly refer to with the tagline, “Hey, it pays the bills.” Is having a day job a hindrance to a creative career, or can it help an artist discover new competencies and diversify their skill set as well as income stream?

I think artists need to stop beating themselves up about their supposed failures to make a full-time living in a particular craft and instead, understand that by working in a day job or in a variety of industries, they are diversifying their skill set and making themselves much more valuable in all their career pursuits.

For some artists, the concept of a day job is not a problem, but finding the time and money to practice their art is. There was a time when I told myself I would be willing to go broke to become an opera singer. I quickly realized I was not cut out for the lifestyle and fiercely competitive world of a hopeful young emerging artist and decided that some combination of day job with flexibility to perform when I could was ideal for me.

There is no magic formula to deciding how much of one’s time and resources can be devoted to beginning and maintaining an artistic career, which I think is akin to the capital investment needed for a small start-up company. Each new fledgling artists is an unproven idea. Even if they are exceptionally talented, no one knows about them yet and exposure is one of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur.

I came across an article of interest for those of you who are struggling with leading the double life of an artist with a day job.

“Managing the Day Job” asks, “Does being a creative only half the time make you less creative than those who are creative full-time?” The article goes on to discuss the demands of balancing a creative career with the demands and expectations of the day job career. I know many artists who excel in their day jobs, and get opportunities for advancement they have to turn down because it would mean “marrying” their job, and they are not willing to do that, even if it means a pay increase. These are the tough decisions many artists have to face until they can make their creative pursuits a full-time career.

Some of them never do – and that’s okay. I’m one of those people, and ever since I graduated from my undergrad in music I’ve had some combination of day job/creative job in various proportions, but I’ve never taken a foot completely out of either. I’ve always thrived on having a variety of jobs, so this type of career balance really suits me.

In a move sure to make many in the arts cheer, Prime Minister Brown launches a new program to help arts “graduates break into showbusiness“. According to BBC News, “The Creative Bursaries Scheme is designed to help graduates secure what would otherwise be unpaid internships.”

So, what is it that will keep these talented artists in fiscally viable positions once their paid internships run out? Does the availability of government-sponsored internships have any historical correlation to the availability of long-term life-sustaining work in an artist’s chosen field? As I’m sure we all know, talent is no guarantee of a payoff in life or in the arts. I’m sure any of us can point to dozens of supremely talented colleagues that have not yet gotten the lucky break they deserve so much. At the same time we could point to supremely financially well-off artists whose level of talent leaves much to be desired. (A coloratura who pointed to the ceiling each time she hit a high-E in a Michigan Opera Theatre production of Die Zauberflote comes to mind.)

Could these paid internships be sending the signal that a life in the arts is not only super fun, but more affordable than it really is?

I would say so. As I argued in my recent post, subsidizing an otherwise already desirable activity means you will get more people wanting to do that activity, not less. Even subsidizing less desirable activities (like low income home-buying) means you’ll get more of it (and more of the supposedly unforeseen and unintended consequences). This is public policy 101.

Furthermore, compensating differentials ensures the arts market will always be flooded with shiny, happy, eager labor – subsidy or not. Just ask any dozen or thousand fledgling sopranos looking for work if they would like to sing at Covent Garden for free. Don’t you think they would all beg, borrow, and steal to make sure they were on that stage? Do you think they would consider themselves as being exploited? Perhaps after a certain amount of time, but the evil, evil market would ensure that at some point, no soprano would be willing to sing for free forever. That is, unless she was Florence Foster Jenkins.

To quote Professor and Economist Bryan Caplan, from his econ syllabus,

A. Do people always choose the highest-paying occupation open to them?  No.  “Man does not live by bread alone.”

B. Conversely, does everyone refuse to do the truly miserable jobs (like garbage man)?  No.

C. Easy to analyze this using S&D: the funner the job, the more labor supply increases; the more horrible the job, the more labor supply decreases.

(And yes, this is the theoretical textbook effect, and yes, this is keeping all things constant.) So when subsidy is thrown into the mix, i.e. Fun Job with Higher Wage Than What the Market Demands – everyone gets really excited about it and compensating differentials ensures a steadily increasing stream of labor to the newly subsidized arts market.

As far as I can see it, there are roughly two sides of the argument. One says, “Good for the artists that get the jobs and the government probably should subsidize more. No worries about the other effects, as long as some people are better off.” The other, “A life in the arts is hard. That’s about it. No amount of subsidy will permanently change the labor market. The more you subsidize, the more enticing it becomes, and the steady stream of unemployed artist hopefuls will just keep rising.”

Bill Eddins, Conductor

Eddins puts forward that professional artists (specifically, those who make most of their living from a creative skill) may lose sight of the “magic” of creativity and offering their work to audiences. He says,

We all know that classical music faces some fundamental problems in the world today, and we are all very good at pointing the finger at various aspects of the business.  But there may be a more fundamental problem – us.

He goes on to say that professional artists, in this case, musicians, become myopic. Spending hours practicing their instrument or studying scores and only conversing with other serious musicians creates an atmosphere of intense musical scrutiny. As a result, what may be an enjoyable and uncomplicated symphony program for audiences may be looked at as tedious and uninspired to the players themselves. This is clearly not a good way to do business.

Think of every tidbit of business advice you’ve ever gotten. Doesn’t “Have passion for what you do” rank somewhere at the top? The paradox for the classical musician lies in the fact that because he is involved in the business of entertaining and educating, he is subject to the whims and desires of the audience. He is simultaneously grateful someone is willing to listen to his craft and resentful he must play a few crowd-pleasers to get them in the door.

Eddins points out,

Too often the prevailing attitude amongst musicians is one of gloom, despair, and a hidden intense disliking of our profession.  It is almost as if we have forgotten how lucky we are to do what we do.  Three hundred years ago our ancient colleagues did all sorts of crazy things besides music.  They were footmen, or they mucked out the barns, perhaps labored all day at some physically demanding job.  We have come a very long way from those times and we should be thankful for it.

He goes on,

I think what I’m trying to get at here is that the specialization of music and musicians has had some unintended consequences and perhaps we should reconsider the path our profession is on.  Is the whole conservatory movement a good thing?  Juilliard, Eastman, Curtis, etc., are they helping our hurting?  Sure, the graduates can play, but what do they know of the real world?  Or just as importantly, what does the real world know of them? They’ve already been separated from their age groups by going to specialized institutions.  Is that a good thing?

I have to admit, it is precisely because of what Eddins describes that I decided to leave a career path dedicated solely to becoming a professional vocalist and trying to get into a conservatory for a Master’s degree. After I graduated with my Bachelor’s and did a bit of legwork to find out what “real” musicians did for a living, distinct from the fun and games I experienced taking classes in school. I realized I wasn’t too thrilled about their careers or lifestyles.

I met a lovely woman whose bread and butter was singing Mozart’s Queen of the Night. This sounds great, right? Well, to me I thought the idea of singing The Queen, night after night, on stage after stage for 30+ years sounded just as banal as some desk job. In fact, I promptly got myself a desk job, since at least the competition was less fierce and the income stream more steady. It seems I am just like the musicians Eddins describes, but I could read the writing on the wall long before I dedicated myself to a performance-only career path and did audiences the service of bowing out. I find much more enjoyment out of performing the things I want, when I want, and this way (I hope) my performances remain fresh and inspired.

I am thrilled Eddins’ is pointing to multiple, complex, issues in classical music requiring problem-solving and soul-searching among creative professionals. Perhaps those seeking a creative career will finally understand the will of the audience must come first about 80% of the time and personal creative expression is perhaps only 20% of the job, and those who are not comfortable with that will choose another career. However, perhaps audiences will realize that the “magic” of being creative is not magic at all, but hours of toil, practice, and research – creative muck-raking, if you will. No creative professional rolled out of bed, inspired and creatively perfected. Their needs to be appreciated for their uniqueness is just as great as that young girl with the desk job. To them, playing a well-received Beethoven symphony is rewarding – but it’s been done so many times, they yearn for something else.

Eddins is on to something. I will have to keep mining this topic for clarity and insight, and I know this is just scraping the surface.

This week’s contribution is by blogger and international economist Vicki Boykis (@vboykis), whose self-descriptive tagline reads: “Snark. Economics. Post-Soviet. Jewesque.” She was kind enough to add her thoughts to this series.

Vicki Boykis - International Trade Analyst, Blogger

1. Why Are Artists Poor? (a great question, and the title of a book by economist Hans Abbing)

a. Why are so many people who pursue “art” for a living poor, or simply unable to lead a stable financial life?

There are several answers to this question, from my experience as a part-time freelance writer with a steady daytime economist gig.

The first is that writers and other artists are not in demand. That is, literature, writing, analysis, etc. is important as part of humanity, but it is not as an essential need as healthcare, food, water, transportation, etc. So, from an economic perspective, the elasticity for art is very high.

The second is that there is an oversaturation of supply of artists in the marketplace. Many people (myself included) feel a pull to create. Not as many feel the pull to astrophysics or, say, dentistry, which is why artists often have trouble leading a stable financial life.

b. What do you think is the greatest roadblock to artists being able to make a steady living in their craft? Do they trap themselves into thinking financial success=selling out?

The greatest roadblock is the inherent nature of the artist, which lies in inspiration. How many allegorical stories have we heard of the artist not being able to create unless he was inspired? In fact, I just read an interview today with Alasdair Gray (who I’ve never heard of, by the way,) who said that he did his best writing when he was in the end of a miserable first marriage.He says, ” I was writing various chapters of Lanark throughout that time and what I can remember is that near the end of the marriage, I could only relax by describing the horrible state of the city of Unthank and the institution under it. Because what I suffered…”and went on to write a remarkable series. Often, us artists think that we can only paint after a surrealist dream or sing after listening to Susan Boyle or write after having a delicious jar of Nutella and thinking we want to describe the creamy hazely goodness for an audience.

Steady living involves something else entirely: having your nose to the grindstone. So, often, this involves writing copy or affiliate marketing articles or constantly pimping out your writing on Twitter, which creates the selling out feeling that many artists sneer at, equated with a steady living. You don’t need to “be in the mood” to add up an Excel sheet. You do to write the Inferno. In fact, that’s why the patronage system was so awesome. You could pretty much just sit around in your 12th cenutry boxers, go to Ye Olde Starbuckes at noon and crank out The Sun Rising whenever you felt like it. So yes, artists do trick themselves into this model these days, and if anyone is coincidentally intersted in patronaging a plucky economist, please contact me asap.

2. A recent article “Chinese Graduates Increasingly Drawn to the Arts” highlights a significant shift in Chinese culture and art.

a. Based on what you’ve read, what is your opinion of the recent surge of contemporary art in China? What has allowed this to happen?

The less a society is merely trying to survive, the more arts, which are, as I wrote above not necessities, evolving. Something I think about is China as that island in Lost. I pretty much have no idea what goes on in that show, but my husband watches it on Hulu in the same room I have my computer, which means I’m doomed to watching it. I remember seeing some sort of doctor in it, and he was pretty much hot stuff the first couple episodes because everyone kept coming down with some kind of plague or having babies or what have you. No one needs artists in the basic stages of society, which is what China was going through as it struggled to recover from the Great Leap Forward and into an industrial society. Now that things are going much better, its economy is growing exponentially, there is more focus on the more refined aspects of culture, expressed in art.

3. Property rights are a hallmark of a free society. How do property rights affect an artist’s ability to make a living? How can we balance the freedoms of globalization and technology and protecting artist interests online?

a. Is “crowd-sourcing” killing the individual artist?

If you’re talking about things like taking ideas from social media, I would say yes and no. Perfect example of how it has? Saving Face, a chick-lit novel written in real-time and with help from Facebook and Twitter by Dahlia Lithwick. She basically wrote a chapter a day and asked for input on legal terminology, mom terminology, and writing from Facebook fans and on Twitter. I helped out, along with hundreds of other people. Did her novel turn out great? Yeah. But she couldn’t have done it if she didn’t have the legal background on her own and writing talent to boot. So I’d say there are two sides to the coin.

b. How has creative commons changed art, music, and social media?

TONS. Just speaking from my own experience, it allows me to remix things on my website that I would never have been able to before. For example, I make a comic out of creative commons pictures based on current events. I would never have been able to desecrate great photographs in the same way before. At the same time, many great works are still not remixed. So, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in earlier contributions to the series: read Take 1 and Take 2 as well!