I’m writing this from Maastricht, where I presented a talk and workshop on my ideas of The Artist As Entrepreneur for the annual creative industries conference organised by The Artist and The Others (programme here http://theartistandtheothers.nl/event/conferen…), an interesting Netherlands based organisation linking artists and business. Strangely, the Fine Arts Academy in Maastricht, which was hosting the conference, didn’t send any students to participate, even though they’d been told by the conference organisers a few months ago. Most people who attended were either from economics related faculties, EU finance and culture departments managers, or former arts graduates who had heard about this event from social media.
In my view this highlights and illustrates a profound and rooted problem with arts education institutions which is at the base of the discussion about artists and money.
In the XVI Century, Fine Arts Academies were created to give a philosophical framework to the former apprenticeship-based system of art education. The first one was the Fine Arts Academy of Florence, founded in 1563, which incidentally is also the one I graduated from exactly 433 years later in 1996.
In introducing the study of aesthetics, physics and other theory based subjects, aspiring painters and their professors sought to step away from associations with manual labour, which previously had been linked with painters in a disparaging way. Yet this also marked a semi-conscious detachment from the idea of “running a business”, which is also what artists do, especially now, if they want to make a living through art rather than do it as a hobby.
The thought that an artist should just spend all day making art, without thinking about the practical aspects of what they are doing, such as for example, being self employed, feeding their family and themselves, seeking and applying for commission opportunities, etc. is in my view ludicrous and riddled with the shamelessly class-system related idea that all talk of money is “dirty”. Only those who never need to worry about money can afford to completely dismiss all talk of it.
As a comparison, a 2000 statistic by the Arts Council of England said that only 2% of an architect’s time is spent drawing. The rest is planning, admin, thinking up new projects, and dealing with potential and existing clients. That doesn’t mean that Zaha Hadid was less of a genius.
Chatting to someone on Twitter just prior to the conference, my eyes had to read the odious sentence “But if an artist is doing things for money, they’re not a REAL artist”.
This sentence is odious for a number of reasons. In the first instance, it relates perhaps, in the mind of the person who said it (and presumably believed it), to the idea of “selling out”, a bit like those people who don’t buy Metallica albums post 1991.
Secondly, because there’s nothing wrong with artists wanting to make a living out of what they do. Doctors, architects and hairdressers all generally love what they do, but they still get paid for it.
And thirdly, because there’s a difference between artists doing some commercial work for need of money (nothing wrong with that either, if needed) some of the time, whilst still making art which carries forward one’s research threads , and the idea of an artist being like a post-modern Cindy Crawford in the 90s, not getting out of bed for less than $10,000 (as if!). I’m not advocating that all artists start to sell souvenir portraits of Prince George in the streets of London for a living, or even that they betray any of their principles or lines of research. Merely that there’s no shame in trying to make their current work financially sustainable.
Yet a lot of people still associate the idea of artists and money with negativity. Sometimes artists themselves do it. Sometimes it is an idea perpetrated by some art schools which (wrongly and shortsightedly) don’t place any importance on the practical aspect of making art, thus teaching students anything but running a business as artists, and preventing them in some cases from attending potentially life-changing training in professional practice, which in most UK colleges still only consists of one or two lectures at the end of the last year of studies and that’s it, off a graduates goes to flip endless burgers until the mind-numbing reality of trying to be an artist with no money sinks in and they decide to concentrate their artistic flair on writing daily specials menus.
This is a problem which affects most countries where artists exist, including the UK and northern Europe (supposedly “forward” countries), despite the fact that European statistics place the Creative Industries at the top levels of the GDP generating areas, with the Visual Arts alone generating 127.6 billions of Euros and employing 1,231.5 million people in 2012 (data: EY) and similar figures in 2014. EUROSTAT data states that the creative industries grow at a pace 1% faster than the rest of the EU economy.
But where are visual artists placed in those statistics?
The culture of shunning all talk of business in art schools contributes to a cohort of artists coming only from socially privileged parts of society, or in the best of cases, to new graduates scrabbling around to find information about how to be an artist, and quitting in between.
And it keeps artists poor.
In my opinion, one is no less an artist if they try to make a living out of being one. In fact, being paid for at least some of the work that one does, allows for more blue-skies experimentations, more crazy plans and ideas, and perhaps an a-cappella version of Death Magnetic.
