I don’t want to sound completely ignorant about art. I do have a fairly good understanding for art, historic and contemporary. It’s what my girlfriend studies here in Paris, so she’s always giving me lessons.
One thing I’ve been thinking about recently as I go from exposition to exposition is that there is no possible way that these artists could do what they do unless they were rich. I’m not just talking about paintings. I’m talking about videos, enourmous sculptures that require all sorts materials and, not to mention, training to be able to mold them.
Also, the ladyfriend worked for about a year for an artist who was, essentially, the daughter of a filthy rich Chinese businessman in Italy. She had the time and the money to make things and call them art. I remember one day I was in her studio, and she had just hung a piece of posterboard on the wall. On the posterboard, there was a peice of red yarn in a straight line. She kept looking at it with pleasure. I couldn’t stop thinking about if anyone who didn’t have the money and the connections to call what they did “art,” this yarn on posterboard would be laughable, yet this girl has galleries in New York, California, Paris, and Shanghai.
So, is a prerequisite for being an artist, being rich enough to have the time to do it? Or is it just because I’m looking at the artists who’ve “made it” and there are plenty of starving artists out there?
Plenty of poor and starving artist out there. You probably assume that people who play music on the street or draw cartoon like pictures at fairs to just be people that don’t have enough talent to make it as a “real” artist. Truth is, that is what a lot of them have to go thru in order to make it day to day in order to pursue thier art. It’s called paying your dues. Yeah, you are probably looking at people who have already paid theres.
Yesterday, I was at a local pottery exhibition taking some pictures of my mother’s winning “non-functional” pot. While she gets to do it for fun, the overwhelming majority of the potters there were trying to earn their dinner. This wasn’t some high class Parisian gallery thing. It’s a three day sale at a community centre. This is stuff on cheap shelves hauled in by the artist with an old car.
If you’re in Paris, you’re probably skipping over this stuff. I mean, this stuff gets little more than a 30 second bit on a local news.
Most artists I know are the staving kind who survive by doing commissions, eating nothing but ramen and selling their possessions on eBay. Well, maybe that’s a little extreme. But given how rare it is to get rich off art, I don’t see why most artists should be rich.
Not true. I assume, rather, that my opinion doesn’t matter concerning the people I look at and think, “There’s a real artist.” I see people here all the time who have real talent, but don’t get the credit that some of these other people do. Meanwhile, I know for a fact that there are a large number of people doing *n’importe quoi *and calling it art, because they have the money to do it.
I’m thinking my question was badly put. About the people who do get their works in big contemporary art galleries, is it about the connections and the money, or is really about living on nothing until you get some sort of break?
My best friend made every apartment we lived in in college into his own private art gallery. He painted, molded, or wrote on everything he touched. It was art. He is an artist. Yet, his works, which are much more than a string on a posterboard, were only put up in a coffeeshop in podunk South Carolina.
I’m wondering whether it’s money or true hard work + money that makes someone an artist.
And I’ve realized that this should have been in Great Debates or something…
Good art is labor intensive to create and there’s a reason why all the cheap consumer products we have nowadays are mass produced. Most people can’t afford handmade goods in any real volume, at least not if the artist/craftsman making the stuff wants to keep on eating. So realistically, it’s more that rich or well-to-do people are the market for art. However there’s nothing to stop a wealthy person from being creative and it certainly eliminates that whole “starving in a garret” angle.
Many artists are either dedicated hobbyists with fulltime jobs. A lot of art photographers will do weddings and portrait photography for their actual income.
Of course, once an artist makes a name for him/herself, then commissions start rolling in. And artists can occasionally get grants from various funding sources, so your tax dollars may be paying for some of those videos and enormous sculptures.
Now the question of * how * an artist makes a name for him/herself is, I now see, at the heart of your query. “Art” is a funny game. You have to be good at relentless self-promotion and schmoozing. Luck and connections play a big part in it. It’s a tough dollar.
Any hand-made custom-designed stuff, really. You can get the custom-made solid-wood wall unit for $3000 (early eighties example prices, when my parents bought one), or hope that Ikea has a pre-made unit for $1000 that fits your space.
:: nods in agreement ::
That is the critical question, and probably the reason why I am not a Famous and Rich Artist.
I am not without artistic talent. But until fairly recently, I had non-existant social skills, and even now activities such as schmoozing do not come naturally to me.
I was recently thinking about my art and the history of my career during my life. I realised that even if I had the resources to support myself while working the equivalent of a full-time job practicing and building a stock of finished pieces, I have no knowledge of the art world.
(I’m thinking about visual art, such as drawings and paintings, but I’m sure this holds for musicians as well. Probably actors too.)
The questions for the artist in our society are along the lines of:[ul][li]How do I sell my work?[]Who is who?[] What commercial galleries are out there, and which would be likelly to be interested in selling my work? []Who do I speak to? [/ul]Art schools should teach this kind of stuff. Maybe they do.[/li]
There seem to be three possibilities for the artist:[ul][li]Support yourself by a day job, and do art in your spare time. This is the most common method.[]Be supported by a trust fund, lottery winnings, or savings while you do your art. This may be the easiest method. [*]Support yourself by selling your art. This includes both selling individual pieces to the public and selling yourself to receive a grant from some agency or patron. [/ul]I chose the first option, and support myself in the electronics industry. One of my best friends chose the third options, and was living in a tiny rented room and eating out of dumpsters and starving at times… but he was doing his art. I think both of us wish we could have had the second option.[/li]
Option one has the disadvantages that the artists don’t put in as much time to their art each week as they could, and as a result their art and expertise develops very slowly.
Option two is easy street, as described in the OP. People lucky enough to have this route available do not need to be determined to do their art, and do not have to make enough of their art publically-accessible to gain support for themselves. And of course they are not constrained as much for resources. It’s easier for them to dabble on a larger scale than the the other two options.
People who follow option three have to be really determined to do their art, so much that they will sacrifice almost everything else to do it. But if they do, they will nothing else eating up their time, and they can gain skill through practice more quickly.
About ‘talent’… all people who want to do art are able to go as far as their natural abilities will take them. A really talented artist with a burning desire to do art can make it through any of the options.
A lot of art is also communication. There may be private pieces done solely as exercises and experiments, but if you want to sell art, your audience has to respond favourably enough to it to want to buy it. This is where those social skills come in: knowing the language of your audience, etc.
I suspect that there is a greater proportion of people using option two producing mediocre, bad, or incomprehensible art (however you define those) than people using option three.
Another thing: artists take in the ideas and artifacts of the society around them, and re-create them to make new statements. In today’s litigious world, there are increasing numbers of things–logos, songs, artifacts–that are off-limits to copy without permission. This restricts what artists can say. On the other hand, these restrictions can help to support artists, depending on how they are implimented. Are they bad or good?
If we supported artists while they developed, we would support a lot of crap, I’m sure. But out of that crap would come the flowers of new talent and voices. Would that be worse than the present situation, where all but a small proportion of artists are essentially starved out of the market by the necessity of supporting themselves before they can develop?
How much art do we as a society want to support collectively? The tourist trade of Europe shows that a society with a lot of art can be very lucrative in the long run. But try to convice people of that when they only see the crap present in the short run. The artist doing the crap now could be doing stellar pieces twenty years from now. Maybe.
The dillitante artiste with the wealthy patron is a long-standing cliche (remember the mom & dad from Beetlejuice?), but like all cliches its based in fact. What bus us the most about this is the possibility that the art (and movies and songs and legislation and highway off-ramps, etc.) we get is not due to talent in the studio but in the bedroom.
Of course we prefer that artists should starve first. There’s the story of how someone left a dog in Franz Kline’s care, which he allowed to starve and then died after eating laundry soap. Kline waxed philisophical on this “an artist is someone who can survive where an animal can not.” The people who pass the starvation test may be good artists, but they can’t always be good people.
A successful artist is one who has obtained the patronage of the powerful. If the artist has starved while the work-a-day types ate well, he may have contempt for them once he has “arrived.” Both he and his wealthy patron are nature’s aristocrats, after all. Times may have changed, but when gay kids fled the abuse of middle America to New York and made it as artists, there was also the chip of the outsider on their shoulder as well as anger at being hungry. And besides, work-a-day, middle Americans tacked up bad reproductions of “Blue Boy” on their walls.
Sometimes artists see beyond this. Larry Rivers remarked in his biography how he could never be reconciled to the relationship of art and big capital. This never seemed to bother Andy Warhol, while he was scarfing Caspian caviar and silk-screening portais of Iranian SAVAK generals.
I knew that someone in this thread would contrast European vs US state sponsorship. The standard excuse it that. like all of Europe’s social benificence, it was provided under the umbrella of peace provided by American military might. But 100 years or so ago, France had one of the biggest military budgets on earth. yet Monet’s Water Lillies would never have been completed without the personal imput of George Clemenceau. Perhaps JFK if he’d had a 2nd term, but otherwise I can’t imagine an American head of state doing the equivalent of this by going repeatedly to an aging artist like Robert Rauchenberg and saying “you are a national treasure! I want you to do a major work that will define your life and our national culture in this era. And I will see that you have money to do this, and I will keep coming here to perster you!” as Clemenceau did to Monet.
I’m an artist, and so were both of my parents. It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to develop your art, in addition to putting a roof over your head and food on the table and sending the kids to college.
My parents were able to do art-related work for their 9-5s, and their “real” work in evenings and weekends. But it wasn’t until they retired that their creativity really took off. And it looks like I’m following the same pattern.
I don’t know any artists who are independently wealthy, and only a few who are able to support themselves solely with their art.
Teaching is another possibility that I don’t think has been mentioned specifically. Most of the artists I’ve known have held faculty positions or at least taught classes. Being affiliated with an institution may also make it easier to get larger commissions or grants.