Does Having a Day Job Mean Making Better Art?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm sure there's something to artists living and working among the rest of us to make the art relevant, but it doesn't need to be on an employer's schedule or in the quantity they demand.
EDIT: For instance, having a job allows an artist to be a mirror of the current society, but does it help them look beyond it? Maybe, maybe not.
EDIT 2: Note this article is not by an artist for artists. It's aimed at non-artists.
For many artists there is no other choice. Art won't pay the bills but for a small few. I for one enjoy the freedom that comes with having a day job. I don't have to worry if people will like my art (because it doesn't need to make money) And I often get good ideas for writing and music when completing some monotonous task in the office.
About your first edit... I think it's absurd to think you need to be jobless in order to question society. In fact, having a job gives you a front row seat to everything wrong with us.
NYT doesn't specifically have it out for artists, they just are owned by capitalists and advocate the viewpoint that labor should be subservient to capital. Therefore they tend to publish viewpoints that are aligned with their internal ideology. They do publish some dissenting views, but by fraction this is their predominant viewpoint. If you'd like a sophisticated and detailed analysis of this, please read or watch Manufacturing Consent, a seminal work in this area.
> For many artists there is no other choice. Art won't pay the bills but for a small few. I for one enjoy the freedom that comes with having a day job. I don't have to worry if people will like my art (because it doesn't need to make money) And I often get good ideas for writing and music when completing some monotonous task in the office.
Note that this conception of freedom is bound up within the capitalist system. People that do not labor for wages are strangled until they comply. It can be that the particular conditions of wage labor are suitable for your individual situation. That is fine, but is not a comprehensive view of how art and society should interact. Real freedom would be for you to be able to work on your art as you please without want for shelter, food, or transport. Public funding of the arts is one way we can help create those conditions for artists.
It's considered notable that the British system of the dole is what created the conditions for the Beetles to develop. If you want really good art, you have to let artists practice their craft consistently.
> About your first edit... I think it's absurd to think you need to be jobless in order to question society. In fact, having a job gives you a front row seat to everything wrong with us.
That's exactly what I said. Having a front row seat allows you to be a mirror of society and allows you to develop particular kinds of criticisms. However, it is not the bounded conception of all possible kinds of art, many if not most kinds of art have nothing to do with developing a mirror. Instead, perhaps they imagine something totally different. Even producing a mirror does not necessarily require participating every day. Many times, just a taste is enough to develop an idea. Interviewing people can help you develop ideas. Importantly, the latter is inhibited if you have other things to do.
Your argument makes even less sense when you realize that artists who quit their dayjob are still part of the capitalist system, and continue to get exploited. History is ripe with examples of musicians getting screwed by a label or writers getting screwed by their publishers. Even idependent artists still work within the capitalist system and get taken advantage of. So even if nyt was part of a capitalist conspiracy, theres no reason for them to care if the artist has a job or not.
Thanks for quibbling over the semantics of freedom. Yes i know that id be more free if i could just make art all day and not work. Im not independently wealthy though. And we dont live in a socislist paradise. When i said freedom, i meant freedom from making money with art, and i thought that was understood. You cant deny that creative control with no paying audience you must answer to is one type of freedom.
Lastly, im not implying that having a job lets your art mirror society. Its possible to think outside of it. That has nothing to do with whether your employed or not. What it requires is imagination.
I would not say being a software guy has, by itself, had much influence on my art practice so far, though I may yet end up mixing the two disciplines. But I will say that having a reliable, full-time day-job over the years has hugely influenced my artistic productivity and not for the better. Other artists-with-day-jobs I know would almost certainly echo this.
However, for better or worse I chose this path because I didn't want the kind of financial insecurity I saw as a likely risk of trying the "professional artist" path. In retrospect I think I was only half right about that.
On the one hand, a good number of the successful artists I know have other money and also connections such that their worst-case scenario would have been falling back to a fancier version of my life. On the other hand, now that I'm 20-odd years into it I see that a lot comes to you from just staying in the game, and there are ways of balancing the "work" against the "art" that are more favorable to the latter. Figuring this out going forward is one of my big challenges at the moment -- it gets more complicated as your career progresses and you can't just punch a virtual clock anymore.
Purely anecdotal evidence: off the top of my head I can think of seven friends (plus me) who have real day jobs and are also visual artists. One basically gave up painting; two of us are stalled and trying to get started again; one has a job in the art world so is "inside" even during his downtime; and everyone struggles to find time for their art.
Among those I know without day jobs, I'd say about half are more or less broke and half are more or less successful (galleries, museums, etc.). But even among the successful ones there are several who would be broke if not for their partners. I guess I (obviously) still don't like those odds.
Also, I'm sure you're aware that Paul Graham wrote a book titled Hackers & Painters? The short blurb in your bio reads as if the coincidence was intentional, at least.
Getting my online portfolio in shape is one of those projects I keep weighing against actually making some new art. A few old pics can be found here, but I have many many more to photograph and put online:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140210041241/http://www.kevinfr...
Also: I don't mean to imply that my writing software has no influence on my artwork -- I've even made a few works of digital art[1], and for a while I was planning to go to grad school in that direction. But I've been programming since I was a kid, and I see "writes code" as a separate thing from "works as a software engineer." I could have made that clearer.
Thanks for your interest!
[0]: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
On your second point: have you dabbled in computational art? Anything from animation to machine learning to a homemade CNC painting bot? This intersection of the two disciplines, at least in my personal work, has always been what I find most exciting.
Apologies for the incessant questions! I just always get excited by code being using to create art and have always loved that prima facie paradoxical dichotomy.
Yes, I have done some computational art, going back to the 90's. Some Flash, some web-based, an abortive attempt or two at art-apps after the iPhone SDK came out, some low-key conceptual stuff[0]. When I think about maybe merging the art and software practices now, I think mostly in terms of physical objects affected by software interacting with humans. But not exactly robotics, I don't think that's my alley. But... time... Gotta make some old-fashioned pictures first.
Indeed I have known, as you call them "static" artists, and "dynamic" artists (poor dividing lines for this conversation), that were so enveloped that they had no time for a day job, career, marriage, or children.
But I know far more artists that have plenty of time for additional choices, such as job, career, marriage, children, leisure, etc.
Back to the original point, I don't find myself engaging readily with people who don't know, or understand, profoundly difficult physical labor, and profoundly difficult mental labor.
Both are character shaping. So an artist who is lacking one or the other, I don't find accessible. It doesn't mean that we are all busy all the time, working and thinking hard, it just means that at some point in life, having gone through that deeply impacts a person.
Throw in a little philosophy, introspection, and reflection, and those kinds of artists can produce static or dynamic (to use your words) art that really pulls one in, and demands engagement.
None of this is to say painting and sculpting don’t require skill, but I’m not sure Picasso or Van Gogh would’ve been able to show their genius if they had to be Bob Ross and do it live every time.
I wouldn't be surprised if such policies were shown to be negatively correlated with innovation (however defined), because they remove much incentive to generate good ideas.
However, I also believe that software engineering is an art, not just the programming part, but the communicating/organizing/planning part as well. It's hard to compare the two
We never hear of talented artists whose careers were sunk by job slavery, because their stories will never get media attention.