Why are artists poor?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6087124/Why-are-artists-poor-Self-promotion-and-making-money-in-the-new-digital-economy.html

by cyunker • 17 years ago

10 35 17 years ago

telegraph.co.uk

massa• 17 years ago

Because people don't value who makes art, they value who sells art.

muckster• 17 years ago

Why are rich people so uncreative?

cwan7• 17 years ago

Quite arguably, rich people are often the most creative (or at least high income earners are judged by their benefactors as being the most creatively useful in society). Entrepreneurs need to be incredibly creative in innovating and meeting market demands. Sure, we may channel it differently but that doesn't make it any less creative and even arguably more so.

cstross2• 17 years ago

This would be more convincing if we all started out on a level playing field -- as opposed to, say, getting into Harvard because of daddy's connections, failing upwards to the limits of temporal power, then abolishing the inheritance tax that (horrors!) might hold our buddies back.

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.

gnaritas5• 17 years ago

All rich people are not entrepreneurs, nor are all entrepreneurs rich. Moving the goal post a bit don't you think?

branden• 17 years ago

Ugh:

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.

dasil003• 17 years ago

Yes, however with the increasing noise on the Internet it's much harder to eschew self-promotion in favor of pure artistic ideals (whatever those may be) because there are no longer just a small number of gatekeepers to convince. Increasingly you must go viral, though there is clearly more room for smaller successes given the lower overhead.

blankity_blank• 17 years ago

I didn't see any cynicism in article, and I don't think that, in general, self-promotion needs to involve anything cowardly or cynical. I do think that anyone who believes their tweets will be viewed as some kind of artistic statement must have a very cynical view of their audience.

zeynel1• 17 years ago

"The job of all artists is now self-promotion."

The job of an artist has always been self-promotion. An artist sells a brand.

cwan7• 17 years ago

An alternative explanation for even highly visible/popular artists:

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...

cstross2• 17 years ago

More to the point, where does this bizarre cult of the "artist", creating works of genius in complete majestic isolation from the governing realities of life in the real world, spring from? Whence the poet starving in his garret?

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.

Goladus• 17 years ago

More to the point, where does this bizarre cult of the "artist", creating works of genius in complete majestic isolation from the governing realities of life in the real world, spring from?

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.