Making a living as an artist
Guest Post by Marcus Westbury
May 04
I bought a guy a beer last week. No, I’m not so cheap that that is remarkable. What is remarkable, though, is that the guy I bought a beer for is a writer and theatre-maker who lives in Chicago and I’ve never met him. The little transaction demonstrated one of the many ways that artists are finding to make a living from their work.
The beer was for a blogger who had written a smart, thought-provoking post about the parallels between the current challenges facing the music industry and the decline and rebirth of theatre as major cultural force in his home town. At the bottom was a button that suggested if I liked the piece I should “buy me a beer” using PayPal. It seemed like a fair transaction to me and he now has a few dollars that were once mine.
How to make an income and be an artist or creative person is one of the great mysteries of the universe. You can work more broadly in the arts, I guess. Plenty of artists have drifted into arts administration, sitting galleries, working front of house, becoming an art teacher, doing lighting and video for concerts or lugging around and installing exhibitions and PA systems. There are plenty of paid jobs in the arts industry even if there is bugger all money for actual artists.
Or you can go corporate, where there is also a demand for creative skills. A quick survey of my friends reveals novelists turned to corporate PR writers, ghost writers who’ve penned “autobiographies” for celebrities who never read them, illustrators for hire, and video makers whose skills have been effectively applied to “tasteful soft porn”. In a world where plenty of artists are often being commissioned by the commercial sector only an ardent purist can tell you where art stops and design begins. The artist as shoe designer, interior decorator, or even cool consultant is strangely in demand.
Or you can go it alone and make your own work. More recently though, there has been an explosion of self-starting creative micro- industries halfway between day job and pocket money. The blogger in Chicago is just one of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people — some professional artists and some not — who are deriving an income from putting their ideas and their creative skills out there.
Musicians are taking a lot of the lead in this regard. Traditional sources of revenue and investment are drying up as record companies rush to protect their bottom line. It’s forcing the middle out of the music industry: the mega acts still make a fortune, and those in the mediocre middle are being squeezed out, but a whole stack of people with small but passionate fan bases have discovered there’s a useful amount of money to be made from $2 downloads. It is a crisis for the music industry, but it’s a whole new series of opportunities for a lot of musicians. They’ve found they can even get their fans to invest in the creation of a new record before they make it and a much greater capacity to self-promote live tours.
Those who make beautiful images can now put them on things. Micro-manufacturing and niche distribution mean that some artists are now in the business of making everything from iPhone cases to tea towels and can sell them to a global audience. New companies — entire industries — have been set up around the idea of mass-customisation. Want to design a T-shirt, get it manufactured, and quickly reap the profits? Easy. What about designing, printing and distributing your own book? Nothing to stop you. Making short films, online soaps or special-interest film or video? There are audiences and a bit of income for that, too.
The norm for artists — or at least the stereotypes — used to be much more bureaucratic. Get a job, get the occasional grant, hope to get a good agent or major company gig and hope to turn your practice into your steady job one day. That’s not how the art world works these days — probably because it’s not how the world works any more.
Taking the initiative to create your own work, build your own audiences, and make opportunities is a more common path to success. For better or for worse, the larger trend is that creative life is becoming more entrepreneurial.
Cross-posted from my life. on the internets
Our Friends
- Overland
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- Arts Victoria
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- darkly wise, rudely great
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- Oslo Davis
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- Read, Think, Write
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- Sorrow at Sills Bend
- SPLOG
- Tom Cho
- Virgule
- Wet Ink
- Wheeler Centre
Comments
04 May 10 at 9:54
You might be interested in the article, ‘Art, Living Culture and the Entrepreneurial Mind’, where we discuss successful revenue models for digital artists – http://bit.ly/aDlpsT
...04 May 10 at 11:51
The beer example reminds me of The Oatmeal (http://theoatmeal.com/), the effort of a single, bored web designer that has managed to become a full-time job thanks to the “Like this? Buy me a coffee!” ads at the bottom of most of the comics/lists.
From my experience it seems that picking up on the ‘micropayment revolution’ is a bit more difficult for writers though. Artists can put up examples of their work and, if interest is sufficient, offer limited run Giclee prints. But people know more or less instantly whether they like an artist’s style or not. Building the same kind of audience through, say, short stories or poems, with the view to selling a collection of them, is a heck of a lot harder. The time and effort invested by the reader is orders of magnitude greater than that of the watcher. Not that that speaks at all to the complexity of either of the forms.
Blogging with ads generating a small amount of revenue is probably as close to a good example as I can imagine for a writer. But blogging and writing are two very different animals as far as I’m concerned. I’m yet to see a blog of a single author that is dedicated to publishing polished stories and is able to generate a fair amount of revenue for that author.
Self-publishing is one route which has worked for a few people ,including a good friend of mine, Todd Keisling (http://toddkeisling.com/) who has even managed to crowd-source a book trailer to be released with a revised edition of one of his novels. And I think that the self-pub option will become more and more like the Myspace of author discovery. Until then I guess we’ll continue to see more and more interesting and unique ways that people are making a bit of pocket money to keep their creative hobbies alive.
...05 May 10 at 8:39
I am a writer who is about to get his first novel “London’s falling” (In the Crime genre) published in the UK in August this year. As an Art and English teacher I know that it is easier to sell paintings, prints and so on than to get a publisher interested in your book. That is the way of the world but there is a light at the end of the tunnel in that short stories and books can be rebirthed as films and take on a commercial life of their own. I am currently applying for several grants in order to get overseas and to develop my career and this too should be considered by my brothers and sisters of the brush and pen. All I can say to actual and prospective artists and writers is to keep on keeping on. someday you will break on through and make it to the other side. I haven’t quite got there myself but i intend to. Good luck all fellow artists!
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