Why are artists poor?
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
There's also this attitude (in the US, at least) that you're a failure if you're not instantly successful. Rare is the artist who takes the time to build a solid foundation of fans/patrons. You're going to eat a lot of ramen in those years, but the base you build will be solid enough to build a house on.
It also helps to be unflaky. The article mentions artists as being elitists at least once, and that's an unfortunate stereotype. It's a stereotype you have to fight against in the minds of your fans, and you've got to fight it in yourself sometimes, too.
I'm still poor--by standard American standards. However, I live in a 4-bedroom house with a bedroom all to myself as a studio. I have cable internet, A/C, two cars, and a couple different computers--one for working on and another which serves as a file server for the studio.
It's slow and it's grueling, but it's making me a better, healthier person. Making your own bread (for example) is not only cheaper, it's better for you. And the stupid impulse purchases I made when I had a Day Job are no more. I sold off many of the things which were cluttering up my house just because I bought them on a whim. My credit cards are used only in emergencies, and are always paid up ASAP.
I'm currently working on $650 worth of private commissions. Ten years ago, that meant that I'd be doing 12 projects at the same time. However, after taking the time to work up a rock-solid fanbase, I can happily say that the $650 is coming from only three different projects.
Now, if that sort of thing could be a little more regular...but that's the preconceived notions talking again.
It's a rollercoaster ride, but it sure beats all the years I spent answering the phones in my tech support Day Job. :)
Amen. I'm just getting back into music as my next "career" move (touring musician/technomad starting 2010 :). This year has been spent getting the small stuff in place and slowly building a listener-base online and around town. Blogging, twittering, posting songs for feedback, playing open mic nights, joining song circles, networking. Mostly the type of stuff any real business person has to do to make their business succeed, and for artists it's no different.
I've been self-employed for 8 years now (time flies!), and I know over-night successes are fiction. It's a constant struggle to maintain or improve where you're at. Things are made to appear over-night when they took years getting to the point where the forward motion reached that level. I'm hoping to take the same approach to slowly building a music career, and I don't expect it to take just a few years. It will take as long as it takes, doing what it takes, but it's the only approach that works. It's great to hear of others doing the same thing too, right on! That's the main reason why I love HN as a community.
One story that stuck with me, cheesy as it was, was from a speaker I saw back in high school. He was talking about how you see a basketball star, or the math wiz in class, or your favourite band, and how it's easy to say "wow, that's magic!" as if they were just born with the natural aptitude and were instantly where they are today. He said that what's magic is what you don't see, Michael Jordan practicing every day for hours, the band rehearsing and playing small gigs for 10 years, the math wiz actually doing his homework. I always took that to mean we make our own magic happen when people aren't looking :)
And that right there was my first big mistake. I'd jump into an art career half-assed, and if it didn't take off like a rocket in six months, I'd put it aside and collect a Day Job paycheck. As a result, I'm pushing 40 and my art is at a stage right now where it should've been fifteen years ago.
But I didn't stick with it, and all that time is wasted time now. I listened to people who didn't understand a thing about art, and measured my success by the "get rich quick and get a Hollywood deal!" crap that everyone thinks is the true measure of success. I fucked it up and missed out on all those years of working every day to get better. Right now, I'm scrambling as fast as I can to catch up.
Those of you in your 20s, let me say this: If there's something you can't stop thinking about--whether it's art, music, coding, or whatever--then just do it. Even if you suck at it right now, it's better to get all the suckitude out of your system now, while you're young, so that by the time you're my age, you've put all that behind you and your craft is nice and polished.
Hook me up with a link to your music, man! I wanna hear it. If it's something that jives with my artwork, I'd be willing to give you a free plug. If you'd like to reciprocate, let me know.
Currently, I'm creating a comic and related artwork for that niche of people who are tired of all-ages, family-friendly nonsense. The comic's NSFW, but it's nothing racier than you'd find in an old copy of Heavy Metal.
Link to the comic is: http://locus.keenspot.com
You'll wanna read it from the beginning, or it'll make no sense. TOC link is towards the top, under the banner and above the nav buttons.
And good luck with your music career! I've always wanted to make music, but have no talent for it. I live vicariously through all my musician friends. :)
My music site is http://www.johnnybroadway.com/ The main album up there is basically unplugged/acoustic but there are clips from my next one in the player on the left. I'm actually working on 3 more projects now, a 12 song album about a mobster (with a producer too, first time in a proper studio in 10 years! :), one EP just for fun I'm recording at home, and I've started writing a handful of songs for the next one as well...
The styles seem to be ranging from folk/country/blues to faster pop/rock and with the newer stuff more electronic as well (getting into Ableton, super fun!). On stage, it's pretty much me on vocals/guitar and I do some harmonica and use a looping pedal for a lot of stuff too. The video on my page is a song that starts with just a drum loop and ends up with five guitars going over it :)
I'm an old metal fan, but going back to college gave me a taste for this kind of stuff.
Hands In The Air is spot-on. It's my favorite. You've got good story-telling skills, which isn't common in music nowadays. And the guitar work is great!
Question, though:
How on earth do you keep it together on stage when people are talking and girls are cackling in the audience during your whole performance? That would totally blow my concentration.
The camera had to be positioned in the middle of a table of girls at that show, so any talking came through as loud as I did unfortunately. You couldn't hear them at all from on stage though, and people are going to be talking -- or rather yelling to each other over the music! -- at a bar on a Saturday night :)
That's the wrong question.
In a state of nature, EVERYONE is poor.
Getting out of poverty means one thing: creating something that other people consider to have value, and then exchanging it for cash.
Heinlein had rules for writers: 1) you must write; 2) you must sell what you have written.
This is true for all artists. It's also true for all doctors, accountants, and software engineers.
If an individual artist is poor, he or she either isn't creating anything of value, or isn't finding the market and selling the work.
Period.
I think art can have value without being particularly saleable. And with certain kinds of art, the fact that it's popular and lucrative may even be a sign that it's crass and inauthentic. Think Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol.
Then either the art you admire is way out of your price range (I admire Alphonse Mucha, but I don't own any originals!), or the artists you admire are doing a poor job of letting you know that their work is affordable, and would add to your quality of life.
Exactly!
An artwork is not a porsche. Even if I had anywhere near enough money to buy a Kiefer, there would be no room for it in my house, and it would not belong there anyway. I think it is valuable simply that Kiefer's paintings exist, and would be even if museum's weren't willing to pay for them.
There's a similarly odd attitude to learning in some sectors of academia; from one perspective, education is a worldly enabler -- and from another, it is an end in and of itself and any hint of application to base commerce is positively contemptible. (MBAs versus classical philosophers, so to speak.)
The idea that art is disconnected from commerce doesn't apply across the board. Coco Chanel or Karl Largerfeld create(d) costumes that are certainly revered as works of art -- but they weren't expected to hold base commerce in disdain: in fact, their art was their business and their business was very lucrative indeed. Their sector (haut couture) was somehow exempt from the usual rules ...
I hypothesize that we're dealing with a cultural relic of the age of aristocracy. To the nobility who expected to inherit wealth, having to work for a living was a symptom of poverty: therefore it must be denied at all costs, which meant that anything they engaged in must remain impeccably untainted by money-grubbing. Anyone in such a culture with ambitions to better themselves had better play by the rules ... and so the more elevated the culture, the greater the distance between cultural activity and commerce. An exception could be made for couture -- aristocrats have employed tailors for millennia, and the more expensive and extravagant the tailoring the better -- but couture wasn't traditionally a career that aristocrats might enter. Academia or literature, on the other hand ...
And the aristocrats? Their descendants are still with us to this day, in the form of the hyper-rich -- and major patrons of the arts fall in this category.
It's been around since the late 19th century, at least: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_boh%C3%A8me
But Mozart wasn't really treated like a genius working in majestic isolation. Famous and popular maybe, but that was it.
So I'd say aristocrats were subject to culture in this way, as well.
The longer version is that artists still make things by hand. In 1500, handmade things were all there were. Now paintings have to compete with manufactured products, and they're so expensive that only a small number of people prefer them. (And if you subtract the people who buy art for reasons of fashion or prestige, you get close to zero.)
Said of Annie Leibovitz as she faces the loss of her personal collection: "Budget is not something that enters into her consciousness." http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.2f54f844fc040f6d...
The job of all artists is now self-promotion. In an age in which the old cultural gatekeepers are being swept away, the most pressing challenge of creative artists is to build their own brands. And it’s the Internet which provides creative talent with easy-to-use and cheap tools for their self-promotion.
In a sense this is true, but you could replace every instance of "self-promotion" with "creation" and you'd have a conclusion that is just as correct without all the craven cynicism. If you want you can interpret every tweet, webcomic update, or flickr photo as a marketing effort. Or you can choose to see the internet as a canvas and these as the brushstrokes.
The job of an artist has always been self-promotion. An artist sells a brand.
Hint: America isn't classless -- it has a hereditary aristocracy. They just don't put titles like "Lord" or "Baroness" in front of their names.
Nor does it mean that because they're there they're somehow more creative than people who didn't have those opportunities and couldn't get there.
> but I would argue on average, most high income earners must be because of the value that others are willing to pay for.
Just because people are willing to pay for something, doesn't mean producing it is creative. Being creative is certainly "a" path to wealth, but it's hardly the only one, and having wealth does not in imply that you are creative or any more creative than the average person.
Now of you restrict the "rich" people you're talking about to the subset that were self made, from rags to riches, then yes, I'd agree that they are very likely much more creative than the average person; but you haven't done that.
The original question was why "rich people are so uncreative?". With reference to the subset of high income earners, I'm not saying that they would be more or less creative than others in those positions who had better opportunities. I am however saying that the nature of their jobs - as high income earners - suggests that they need to provide something relatively unique as a function of their job that reflects value on average at least equal to their income (unless you're saying that most have somehow lucked into "high income" and on average the people who pay them are irrational/stupid). Again this isn't to say that someone else in that position couldn't be more or less creative - it is however to say that the nature of their job based on the attribute of high income requires more creativity.
I never said that being creative was the only path to wealth - however, innovation does require creativity and innovation is how wealth is created where rule of law exists. Wealth is a reflection that society appreciates a given idea/innovation. I'd even argue that seeing arbitrage also requires a certain level of creativity though as noted, I would concede that inheritance does not. Nor would I restrict it to the self made rich people as the reality is even those born into wealth would need to exercise a certain level of creativity to maintain/grow it (even if others might be more effective at doing so).
(a) a person who could be more creative doing piece work at a factory (b) a person who may be less creative performing some form of art
Both these individuals may have arrived at their respective current jobs in life but I'm not saying that opportunities had nothing to do with it. With respect to rich people, I am saying that high income earners have to maintain a higher output of creativity on average to maintain that income as a function of their job. I'm not saying that luck doesn't have a lot to do with it, or that geography or ancestry doesn't have to do with it.
> Many rich people are entrepreneurs.
Yes, and many rich people aren't, so what.
> Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest ways to income mobility.
Agree, but no one was talking about entrepreneurs, you just injected it when he said "rich".
> That being said, other high income earners tend to also need to be highly creative
No one said anything about high income earners either. Rich is about net worth, not about income. Lots of trust fund baby's out there who could hardly be called high income earners as if they did something for it.
He trolled you with a vague statement and you swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker and injected your own ideas about what he meant to attack. You're tearing down the straw-man you setup yourself.