How many contemporary professional artists (that is, people who make a living from art) never interacted with the art world before they became professionals? Not just going to art school, but making friends with respected artists and so on.
Just to get this started…
I would say very few. Close to none. At least, I can’t think of any.
It should be said that very, very, very few artist manage to make a living of their art. In order to do so, you have to connect with people willing to pay money for your work. You also have to be able to “sell” your work, and even more importantly, have people join in and “sell” your work with you. By “sell”, I mean, of course, talk and write about it.
This is not limited to living contemporary artists, of course. The famous examples are Van Gogh and Modigliani, who were very poor at selling their work and who had the misfortune of dying before someone was willing to do it for them. Another less famous, but more recent example is the 18th century Japanese artist Itō Jakuchū. He was known and respected, to some extent but still relatively obscure until a rich American collector, Joe Price fell in love with him and started telling everyone how awesome he was. Nowadays, largely thanks to Price, Jakuchū is one of the most famous Japanese artists.
I’m mentioning this because without fans like Price, realistically no artist can hope to make enough to feed himself, and you don’t meet people like Price without friends in the right place.
There are artists like Friedensreich Hundertwasser who don’t fit in a particular movement and often intentionally make great efforts to remain unique and different, but he was nevertheless very well connected to the art world.
Jack Vettriano is the one who immediately springs to mind. He seems to take a lot of flack from art World insiders for in Art World terms being a complete outsider, but commerically he is a very successful artist,
The art world is incredibly nepotistic. It works like a close-knit religious community, favouring those inside the community and making outsiders work extra hard to show their worth and never truly trusting them - even if those outsiders are far more talented.
Well, I’m sure those far more talented outsiders are showing some of their stuff on the internet. Links?
Some of Houston’s best-known artists have taught art at the college level. Although they are successful, their incomes need help. (They might do better by moving to NYC. But maybe not. And it’s cheaper to live down here.) All of them studied art in college, so they’re just continuing the thread. In the old days, artists had workshops with apprentices…
Wikipedia’s entry on Outsider Art has a list of people who probably qualify. There is a museum devoted to such art (called l’art brut in French) in Switzerland, I think, and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore features a lot of it as well.
Many Outsider Artists aren’t discovered until after their deaths. And very few of them were “professionals”–even if they sold some work while alive. They usually made their living doing something else.
Most artists enter “the art world” through their artistic education. Along with technique, they learn about building artistic careers. Often from the professional artists who supplement their incomes by teaching…
Problem is, it’s all a matter of opinion. I’m a photographer (without an axe to grind, I’ve no interest in getting involved in the art world) Go to Flickr and look up the most popular portraits. Then go to a contemporary portrait exhibition. Some and probably most of the images in the exhibition will be powerful, interesting creative and thought provoking. But there will also be tired clichés, poor technique and boring content. The last one I went to was at the National Portrait Gallery and I was unimpressed with many of the images. This is of course my subjective opinion but then so are the decisions of those with influence with the art world and they are swayed by their own influences and friends. An ex of mine was an established artist and I saw how the art world worked. I would also point out that art by those close to you has an affect on your objectivity. We all love our children’s art. But this effect has a more subtle and sinister influence on the way we perceive the work of our friends or those close to our network. In the same way a complete outsider loses any sympathy we might have towards their artistic viewpoint - a piece of work would have to be very powerful; so powerful in fact it may lose any subtlety it holds.
Anyway, not a GQ answer so apologies if this is a sort of hijacking reply.
In “The Painted Word”, Tom Wolfe describes the “art scene” or"art world" as something completely incestuous and sef-serving - that contemporary art (for art’s sake) is all about attracting the notice of a very small number of influential critics.
Of course, there are a number of ways to be a successful artist without the critics’ approval, usually involving doing what art was about before the impressionist diversion away from reality - specifically, art as commerce. Examples like Disney, Chuck Jones, Normal Rockwell, Frank Frazetta, or Stan Lee - these guys never produced what we could describe as “fine art” and likely would not be “discovered” in the way of Picasso or Pollock - but they did produce something that people were willing to buy, that involved art, that made them rich and famous.
So I guess the question is, what do you mean by “art” or the art world? What is art?
(Art is a guy with no arms or leg hanging on the wall?)
Very interesting replies. I was aware of outsider art, but I didn’t know how big it was or is.
Of course, successful “commercial” artists like Rockwell, Frazetta, Stan Lee, etc - it’s hard to say to what extent they were self-taught and to what extent working in the business makes them “not outsiders”. The creators of Superman had at least one “really good idea” but based on the early works, were by no means “artistic”. OTOH, someone like Herge learned his craft by doing; the earliest Adventures of Tintin are almost painful to see. Tintin in the Land of The Soviets is so amateurish it’s a good indicator of the general level of the art in those days - it’s only available through the demands of collectors. The next two - Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in AMerica - are equally amateurish in their way. Over the years, the original adventures were heavily updated, epsecially the art, for book publication. However, by the time Herge died he was widely held to be brilliant in his field. AFAIK he was not, for example, a graduate of any art school or such.
Someone like H R Giger, too, has made the leap from 'art" to commercial art. however, he was into the “art scene” making nightmarish paintings for a while before his visionand style was found to be perfect for certain nightmarish commercial creations like Alien.
Their are probably hundreds or thousands of artists making a living the old fashioned way - producing art on commission or as employees, for commericla ventures. But for all the thousands, few rise to the stature of a comercially famous artist who can command 5 to 6 figures for an original piece.
I suppose the problem, too, is that with the rise of digital creations, it will be harder to atribute artistic success to physical art pieces.
OTOH, someone like Van Gogh was part of the art scene, hanging out with many of the big names and trying his hand - he just wasn’t successful (until after he died). However, his life seems to be the model that all wannabe artists aspire to - poor, starving, misunderstood, and doing their own plastic surgery.