You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

That sounds idealistic to the point of foolishness. The end result of your decision to quit art was that you had to get a job as a graphic designer. Doesn't that achieve even less of your vision?

A lot of people encounter this same dilemma: "do I want to conform to an imperfect system in order to stay in my chosen profession, or should I quit?"

By choosing to quit, you are giving up all of your leverage. You will be replaced by the next "yes man" who doesn't share your vision. If you stick with it, you can continue to nudge the system in the direction you want.

I have a child who is enormously gifted and could probably follow precisely the same career path you described. I fear/hope that child will make the same decisions you did.

> A place where there are no compromises, no demands, no expectations, no projections, no assessments, no tasks, no metrics, no applause and no glory.

> A place where I am happy.

I have immense respect for you. I did something along these lines too: switched fields so I could write software for myself. The same reasons you listed resonated deeply with me.

So I came to the similar conclusion of playing only for myself and my family, and I am much happier with music as a result.

I recommend to anyone working on talent-development to try, the next time inspiration strikes, creating your next piece of art for an audience of one (Self) and see what happens. The results may surprise you.

> the nature of [needing to put bread on the table] is energy depleting zapping any creative juices needed for the concentration and initiative to produce content. Let alone something of high-quality that doesn’t exude fatigue.

Most importantly ... wealthy parents ;)

The same forces that mean those people "laying down cement in 100 degree weather" often can't actually "put a roof over their family's heads" are the forces that keep poor artists for existing in this society.

First, You’re arguing that rational labor input-output, the harder the better, and the resulting inputs it creates into a system, is the highest ideal or something. You’re missing that Art and various abstractions, to include the social sciences have played a major role in shaping history and our self identities for all of human existence (Homer, anyone?). When this missing started occurring is right around the ‘06 tech boom that put engineering and input output above all else, and by extension destroyed out the protected spaces artists could function in. Coincidently, that’s right around the time the world started to lose its mind by finding meaning making via their iPhones. This engineering-centric dismissal of everything that can’t be quantified is the cause of so many social issues. Your view was also directly present in the Soviet Union, fwiw.

I’m not sure what artist insulted you or wherever this take comes form, but you’re really missing some key points of why Art and the resulting high minded artists have existed since the cavemen.

Lots of beginners in every field think that they're God's gift to whatever it is that they've just started. They're going to change the world, etc. That comes with the territory of being a beginner. Usually they mellow with age and experience.

>I have more admiration for someone who's laying down cement in 100 degree weather to put a roof over their family's heads, or someone who's putting in the hours massaging mindnumbingly boring spreadsheets to be able to support themselves, or someone putting in overtime at a hospital. The expectation that people must support you and give you preferential treatment because you're expressing yourself never made sense to me.

Just because you don't see the hours of training and production that goes into something, doesn't mean it isn't there. I might spend 10,000 hours practicing to spend 200 hours writing a novel that you read in 20 hours. I might spend four years in college and ten years writing a computer program that you'll use once. Lots of artwork is produced as work for hire. That doesn't make it that much different than any other job. A trained professional getting payment for services rendered is how things have worked since antiquity. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he was commissioned to, not just because he was expressing himself

> You always see signs exhorting you to "support your local artists", yet you never see encouragement to support your local roofers.

You see signs asking you to support local roofers all the time. What do you think all of those commercials on radio, television, print media, billboards, etc. are that advertising all of the roofing services?

Roofers produce roofs. Chefs produce food. Artists produce art. It takes labor to produce art, and if you want good art, it also takes years of training and practice. But somehow working to produce art is seen as 'lesser' than doing manual physical labor.

It's weird. It's expected that in most professions even beginners deserve to get paid. But the arts are somehow different. There's this expectation that artists should produce works for the benefit of society (and don't forget, 'art' is much more than just drawing pretty pictures, it's also the vast field of fine art, music, movies, television, writing, and a lot of other media) but that the work should be free. There's this unspoken feeling that since lots of art is easy to appreciate, it must have been easy to create, so paying for it is a waste of money. But have you ever tried to paint a picture? Compose a song? Write a novel? It's hard. It takes time. It can take thousands of hours of practice before you make anything good.

It's kind of like arguing that a programmer asking for money for the programming work that they do is somehow shaming people into supporting them for typing all day instead of doing real work that commands real pay like bricklaying or cattle ranching.

Nobody asks roofers to work for "exposure."

Nobody's telling roofers that a penny per shingle / tile would be "entitled" of them (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv... ).

Nobody's arguing that roofers should agree to roof for a pittance and come up with some "hustle" like t-shirts or other roofing merchandise in order to enjoy the privilege of roofing.

People do ALL these things with artists.

Labor should be paid, that's true. Trade work is valuable, sure. Craft is a matter worthy of respect, certainly.

But the idea that most artists (outside of a small fraction) are somehow privileged is so far from the truth that it isn't even wrong.

Do roofers need support?

I believe it's mostly critics who look for "higher truth" in art?

It's incredibly difficult, and not at all like arts as a hobby. I think it is terrible advice blindly telling folks to pursue arts because it makes it seem reasonably achievable, and sets people up to waste far too much of their time becoming miserable with real consequences for themselves and those around them.

If someone is discouraged by the "don't do it" advice that easily, then they were likely not going to be making it their full time employment.

And the folks who have the drive and determination to see their goals to the end that aren't going to be dissuaded by some random person on the internet or at a conference telling them they are going to fail.

Robin Williams had advice like that all the time, and along the same lines I really thing Cal Newport's 'So Good They Can't Ignore You' is incredibly beneficial to anyone at the beginning of a career path.

I would call it realism, not pessimism.

> I can say from experience that becoming a self-employed artist is possible, but not easy or quick.

Congratulation on making it, But that's the survivorship bias the article mentions. For every one like you, there are a thousand who did not make it, and will never make it. Should they stop trying because of this? Nope. But should they be aware of this and not bet their whole life on their art? Definitely yes.

There are far too many people living in the decision that they just need to make an attempt or hustle for a short while, and they will swim in money and fame. And too many of them invest their life, money and future into this. I know some of them, and have seen where it ends. Realism is not pessimism, it just keeps you away from the darkest parts of life by pointing at darker parts.

My advice to them is that if there is anything else they can do, do it. Being a professional actor is miserable. The odds are it will fail entirely; most of the remainder will barely make subsistence.

Much of what I do is to provide a place for people to be genuinely creative in ways that they couldn't afford to if their living depended on it. We get to take artistic chances that please us. You don't get that if your livelihood depends on it.

A few people have taken my advice and concluded that they needed to do this. Some have had minor successes. Good for them. Others tried and discovered that indeed, it was not fun and not good for them, and they left. None, fortunately, are starving, convinced that persistence is the key to success because they read it on a motivational poster.

But, in general, while there's a lot of variation in musical styles/art styles/etc. that a given person likes, I find that there's fairly broad agreement that an expert list of, say, the 50 top classic rock songs are pretty good--among people who like classic rock even if they might disagree on the order.

There is a steady, near linear association with “quality” (no matter how you abstract this definition), and then the more exponential gains are typically exceptional instances with more unique circumstances for how they were measured along this portion of the curve.

Another widely measured example is income. Most people have jobs with increasing pay commensurate with market demand, but the top have exceptional combinatorial factors involved: e.g. they are BOTH highly skilled AND own a business or have some obscure high risk job, were an inventor of something, receive substantial trust fund income, etc.

The more boring way of stating this is… exceptional results are by definition exceptional.

It seems obvious to me that hardly anyone primarily cares to pay for the self-expression of any other, except perhaps for their close ones. With media, the market pays primarily for aesthetic value, communicative ability, branding value, socio-political expression, store of money, etc., rather than for the self-expression of the author.

Nobody else really expects to get paid for self-expression itself; on the other hand, most of us commission others to express ourselves, e.g. in fashion or decoration, or at the very least in our own materials and time for something that has no value to others. So it seems privileged to me to expect to be paid in a sustainable manner for primarily doing something that most people have to pay others for.

My first guess is that this is because "the art experience" is far more transient at the individual level. With the introduction of, say, WhatsApp, there was a paradigm shift in how we're able to contact people around the world and it doesn't go away. Even the most provocative piece of art is only experienced in the moment and maybe, maybe, causes you to reflect on your perspectives for a little while afterwards.

source: artist

Like even Wagner who is arguably one of the most influential and popular composers of all time spent most of his life destitute and only was stable when the Kaiser himself was sponsoring him.

I think in the same way though this speaks to something deep and profound about music, I once heard the saying "You can buy anything in this world for money" and I think that the problem we have pricing music has to do with how transcendental it is, it is designed specifically to convey or share something that transcends mere language or description, musics purpose is to communicate from one soul to another in a way that is deep and meaningful, that touches people and brings them in alignment and helps people see that which we can't quite understand in normal life.

It is beautiful, and I think the attempt to commoditize music, make it corporate and subjugate it to the whims.of the market end up making music a little less musical.

https://bachnetwork.org/ub12/ub12-heber.pdf

There were a lot of great composers in that period, but that's over 200 years and there were probably many more who are forgotten or were never even given the opportunity. And today there are probably more songs released on Spotify daily than were written in all of the 1700s.

I switched a few years ago to splitting these apart: I (1) got a non art tech job that I love (which is key) and that pays great, and (2) I started doing pure artistic games on the side as a hobby, no need for money from them.

I am much, much happier. I think many people, my past self included, cause themselves a lot of pain by trying to lump everything together. If someone loves baking pie no one says “When are you going to quit your job and open a bakery?!” It’s just fun! Why does it need to pay the bills?

Most podcasts being created now will probably still fail, but it feels like a nice step away from the current ad-induced hellscape.

I've personally been part of about a dozen musical albums, i've never seen a penny or any recognition for it. One thing i managed to upload to the internet got a third of a million hits, but it was happenstance, not music, and i just happened to edit wikipedia very quickly and have a really good sound file host at the time. It was the "re-awakening" of the UVB-76 "buzzer" in ~2010 - and i can't even remember how i recorded it anymore! Wired magazine and a few other outlets approached me to license the recording. If you've heard the "NAIMINA" recording of UVB-76, that was something that was originally put on the internet by me.

I haven't released a "real" song in over a decade.

To get at the real value of art, something that is not a necessity, you would need to somehow query every individual in a way where they had all their needs met and enough expendable income to use on art so that they would seriously consider buying it. But it can't be too much wealth or the situation is trivialized. The context puts a lot of restrictions on when someone is willing to buy an aesthetic good that doesn't provide other functions.

Yet, as a society we can recognize that art benefits us on a social and intellectual level. So a society as a whole may want to patron some artists, regardless of what they make. This is an inert value for art, a recognition from society that there is value there, even if they don't know it exactly and wouldn't buy it for themselves.

This goes for any good or service. Usually when people talk about the "value of something" they mean "the price that people are willing to pay for it".

So is the inherent value of gold, sans its use in electronics and dentistry.

It does become a bit circular. Just saying "the value of art is what other people judge it to be" just begs the question "how do those other people judge it?" ad infinitum. When I hear "inherent value", I usually think of a non-monetary value, a value that exists outside a system of multi-party transactions, some utility that is possible even if no one ends up using it.

For art, I believe the inherent value is what it makes you feel. If a piece of art doesn't make you feel anything, it's pointless and useless as art.

Because it's an excellent investment, socially speaking.

Because investment in the arts (I mean serious investment. Not like USA) has worked pretty well for some countries.

And why do these "boring pleb jobs" exist? Why doesn’t everyone create and share their creations? This isn’t limited to art. Consider the inventor of insulin sold the patent for $1 because he believed “Insulin belongs to the world, not to me.” Anyone who creates from the heart, artists scientists or otherwise, should be the gold standard that all humans live by. If everyone lived this way, then there would be no need for busy work jobs.

I'm a fine artist and would put myself in the "not successful" category. I don't make nearly enough to live off of it but it's inherently something I have to do. I could, and have, done commercial work in the past that I could live off of but I just can't bring myself to feed the content machine.

edit: And although I'm kind of ok with the "not successful" part I think my work is important and should be seen. More than anything my measure of success is to add to culture.

Is champagne higher-quality than coca-cola? Of course it is, but no serious person argues that the world ought to prefer champagne to coke. Quality is a combination of a bundle of--cough--qualities, not all of which are accessible to everyone, nor are they necessarily desirable to everyone.

One example of the accessibility aspect is that many mediums have a natural progression. The music educator Jerry Coker provides a simple model: He wrote that the enjoyment of music requires--amongst other things--a balance between familiarity and novelty.

In his model, when we listen to music our brain is constantly "playing along," basically predicting what the next note or whatever will be. When it's always right, we can grow bored of it because it lacks novelty. When it's always wrong, we grow frustrated with it because it lacks familiarity. Somewhere in between is the right combination of "yes, I know this, but whoa, that was cool!"

This model explains one kind of progression: We begin in a new genre with things that are relatively simple to digest and which are repetitive. As we gain familiarity with simple and repetitive music, we seek out more complex music that has provides a little more novelty, such as unusual chord voicings or progressions.

Of course, we eventually grow overly familiar with that, so we seek out even more novelty, and at some point, we find ourselves enjoying music that our friends who haven't taken our journey find repellantly random.

Is that music of higher quality? Yes? It's something that people with more experience with music prefer, which is one way to define "quality."

Is there something wrong with the simpler music that is more accessible to those who haven't taken the same journey? No.

Is there something wrong with the universe that most people do not enjoy the "higher quality" music? Also no.