In November, 2012, the Minnesota Department of Revenue notified the musician Venus DeMars that her tax returns would be audited. DeMars, a respected fixture in the Minneapolis rock scene, had performed since the mid-nineties as the lead singer of All the Pretty Horses, a moody, glam-inspired rock band. She and the group had released half a dozen albums and toured throughout the United States and abroad. Her accountant had deducted business expenses, such as money that had gone into touring and performance. But it quickly became apparent that the audit didn’t arise from any arithmetical errors. At stake was whether she was, indeed, an artist.
The state tax authorities found her claim dubious. In their view, someone putting most of her money into an endeavor that produced very little return couldn’t possibly be doing work. DeMars’s deductions were therefore illegitimate, she was told, and she owed nearly thirty-six hundred dollars in back taxes. Her legal fight took a year and a half and cost around twelve thousand dollars, which fans and fellow-artists helped her cover. In the end, the Department of Revenue relented; it even paid her a tax refund of around seventy dollars.
People generally don’t become artists for the money. In fact, they are probably drawn to art as a refuge from thinking about money in the first place. What they don’t bargain for is an inquisition calling into question the very reality of their day-to-day work as an artist. The vast majority of American artists are like DeMars, essentially freelancers who generate little in the way of profit. According to a 2018 survey conducted by the Music Industry Research Association, MusiCares, and the Princeton University Survey Research Center, American musicians earned a median income of twenty-one thousand three hundred dollars from their craft the previous year. A 2014 study by an arts advocacy organization showed that only ten per cent of America’s two million art-school graduates make their primary living as artists. Among those grads surveyed, working artists reported a median income of just over thirty-six thousand dollars. Before the implementation of some provisions of the Affordable Care Act, in 2013, it was estimated that forty-three per cent of artists lacked health insurance.
In the past, it was easy to blame the gatekeepers, such as publishing houses and record labels, for skimming off the profits that artists’ work generated. But those institutions are now in decline. There are more people writing books and recording music than ever before, more ways to find potential fans who might support your passion for calligraphy or painting portraits of other people’s pets. Every post on Twitter or TikTok is an easy, cost-free path to discovery for an upstart comedian, actor, or cinematographer. In “The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech” (Holt), the critic William Deresiewicz considers how we arrived at a situation in which it’s easier than ever to share your creativity with the world, and harder than ever to make a living doing so. He interviewed roughly a hundred and forty writers, musicians, visual artists, and filmmakers about their experiences working in the so-called “creative economy.” Most spend a disproportionate amount of their time effectively running a small business, focussing on winning the attention war through “the overlapping trio of self-marketing, self-promotion, and self-branding.” Even established artists spend their days fielding requests to work for free or, worse yet, for “exposure,” which, Deresiewicz writes, is “a synonym for nothing.” As the novelist and essayist Alexander Chee explains, “There’s an illusory ‘made it’ point, the point at which the writer no longer has to worry about money. It doesn’t exist unless you were born someone who didn’t ever have to worry about it.”
Maybe you think all this is simply what happens when improvident artists, determined to do what they love, finally face reality. Deresiewicz wouldn’t entirely disagree; art is “not a job, not in the sense that anybody asked you to do it,” he writes. But artists “do deserve to get paid for doing something you love, something other people love.” Nor is there anything corrosive to the artistic program in seeking your just reward. “Wanting to get paid does not mean that you’re a capitalist,” he writes. “It doesn’t even mean that you assent to capitalism. It only means that you live in a capitalist society.” He quotes the cartoonist and writer Molly Crabapple, who once argued that “not talking about money is a tool of class war.”
There’s still plenty of money to be made in art, or writing, or music. It’s just not being made by the creators. Increasingly, their quest for personal artistic fulfillment is part of someone else’s racket.
When did money and art go their separate ways? Before there was a culture industry or an art market, there were the whims of élites, who saw art as just another outlet for their largesse. Art—at least the traditions that comprise the Western canon—was once beholden to religious authority and political power, not critical of it. Being an artist was a job like any other. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel because he was commissioned by the Pope. Shakespeare was supported by wealthy patrons. Even famous, sought-after artists couldn’t integrate themselves into the upper classes.
In the eighteenth century, art became a unified concept, “a distinct realm of social activity not subordinate to any other,” Deresiewicz writes. Art, in the wake of the Enlightenment, became a kind of “secular religion” and, consequently, artists began viewing themselves as independent from the powerful or the holy. The archetype of the starving artist emerged, the visionary straying from the crowd, sacrificing economic well-being in order to carve out something new and special. The Muses were no longer part of an antiquated religious cosmology but forces for creativity. And yearnings that may once have strengthened one’s spiritual devotion found aesthetic outlets: “Instead of looking in the Bible, you read Dostoyevsky, or listened to Wagner, or went to see an Ibsen play. Libraries, theaters, museums, and concert halls became the new cathedrals, places where you went to court the old emotions of catharsis, transcendence, redemption, and joy.”
In America, the New Deal’s mobilization of artists helped enshrine creative expression as a public good. The institutionalization of art resulted in new standards and types of credentials (M.F.A. programs began only in the late thirties), as well as more nuanced distinctions between professionals and amateurs, high culture and low. The twentieth-century proliferation of American music, writing, film, and visual art was nurtured both by the state—American culture became a key export during the Cold War—and by new industries that had arisen to manufacture, distribute, and sell such wares. The sheer size of these industries up until the two-thousands guaranteed the livelihoods of a range of people—executives and managers, but also those engaged on the technical side of things, to say nothing of the mid-level hopefuls and critics’ darlings whose careers were essentially bankrolled by a company’s superstars.
The Internet was supposed to free the artist, and to democratize and de-professionalize the practice of art. In some measure, it did—while also demonetizing art itself. Perhaps our shift in values can be traced to the emergence of file-sharing networks, like Napster or LimeWire, when a generation of consumers glimpsed the convenience and ease of digital culture. I remember feeling faint the first time I used LimeWire, and convincing myself that this was the proper state of things: music was meant to be free and accessible. Who needed a CD collection if you had a decent Internet connection and an up-to-date computer?
The sheer volume of stuff on the Internet scrambled our sense of how art and artistic labor should be valued. As Deresiewicz constantly reminds us, “price is a signal of worth.” Furthermore, it was easy to focus on the exploitative record label, and rally behind the artists’ cry that their creativity was being stifled. It became much harder to feel scorn toward the company that was selling us our Internet connection or headphones or portable listening devices, even though they had almost completely infiltrated our lives. The shift to digital replaced the fusty, out-of-touch old business model with a new one that didn’t seem like a business at all. It was a platform, a device, a raft of free services. Deresiewicz writes about how the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocated for both privacy rights and the free flow of information, was partially founded by people in the tech industry. What you did on the Internet mattered less than the fact that you were there all the time.
The Internet’s monopolization of leisure and the tech companies’ passive attitude toward piracy gutted the traditional culture industry. Publishers, movie studios, and record labels used to make investments in artists, some of whom paid big, many of whom did not. Often, the former would pay for the latter. But that level of risk has shifted back onto the artists. The expectation that art should be free, Deresiewicz says, has “left labels, publishers, studios, and others with fewer resources to invest in talent—hence not only falling advances, but also shrinking ‘lists’ (to use the publishing term), the roster of artists and works that a company is able to support.” The effects are felt downstream, where a middle tier of artists has basically evaporated.
“I’m an autoworker,” Kim Deal, the iconic front woman of the Breeders and founding member of the Pixies, explained to Deresiewicz. “I’m a steel man. I’m just another person in the history of the world where their industry has become archaic, and it’s gone.”
The big illusory promise of the digital age, it becomes clear in retrospect, was that removing a layer of business meant doing away with the exploitative parts of capitalism. Instead, it created the conditions by which companies like Amazon could dominate the realm of distribution. In July, Spotify sent a letter to shareholders suggesting that the days of Top Forty charts were over: “It’s now the Top 43,000.” The company offers this as evidence of its users’ diversifying tastes, which is an alluring spin on the reality that more musicians are competing for slices of a shrinking pie. Deresiewicz revisits the writer and entrepreneur Chris Anderson’s 2004 celebration of the “long tail” of culture, his theory that the Internet offered a bright future for all the niche artists who trailed behind the blockbusters. The infinite bookshelf sounds nice until you try to actually choose something. Artists were still in a market, only a much more competitive and relentless one. Anderson thought that the blockbuster syndrome effectively arose from a scarcity of shelf space, a problem we had now solved. In fact, our array of choices proved paralyzing, and attention consolidated around those at the very top. Today, seventy-seven per cent of music-industry revenue goes to the top one per cent of content producers.
It has been easier for some fields to adapt to this consolidation than others. Musicians now often view it as a given that they’ll make very little selling songs; instead, recordings have become promotional tools for touring or merchandise. For some visual artists, the patrons of yesterday have been replaced by partnerships with savvy brands or creative agencies. Private foundations, like Ford, continue to support artists who share their vision of social justice, quietly shaping the artistic discourse in the process.
But the possibility of infinite options and shrinking attention spans means that some industries have become more risk-averse. In film, the dominance of superhero movies, which appeal to audiences across geographic and linguistic barriers, has made studios less inclined to green-light romantic comedies. (Streaming outlets have stepped in here.) Television is a robust arena, yet it relies heavily on “pre-awareness”—rebooting things that people already know.
There have been many well-meaning attempts to create new infrastructures. In 2009, three creative types launched Kickstarter, a Web site that made it easier for people to crowdfund their artistic projects. It has funnelled billions of dollars into the hands of artists and inventors, functioning as what the Times called “the people’s N.E.A.” Platforms like Buy Me a Coffee and Patreon allow you to support someone on a monthly basis. But high-profile success stories, such as the musician Amanda Palmer, who raised more than a million dollars on Kickstarter in 2012, rarely offer replicable models for building and sustaining a career. Meeting a funding goal is not the same as securing a living. Most Kickstarter campaigns fail. According to a 2017 analysis, only two per cent of creators on Patreon bring in more than the federal minimum wage.
Deresiewicz has spent his career as a sort of Henry Adams figure, passionately invested in learning rather than in formal education, character rather than persona. He is the author of a moving, well-received book on Jane Austen, and another on the failures of élite education. Both offer deep engagement with great art as a path toward self-enlightenment. Yet Deresiewicz has witnessed the devaluation of such cultural communion, as well as the labor associated with it. After pursuing a traditional academic career and teaching English at Yale for a decade, he became a freelancer in 2008, right around the time that journalism and publishing began to feel the true effects of the Internet.
Perhaps this helps explain his innate suspicion of technological fixes, and also his resignation to the market’s unforgiving rhythms. “Art and artists must be in the market but not of it,” he writes. “And in that consists a tension that cannot be resolved; it can only be endured.” Throughout his book, Deresiewicz prizes art that is serious and sophisticated, made by artists concerned with autonomy and not selling out. He allows that his personal tastes might appear élitist to some. The present seems to confound him. He insists that few people who make music embrace materialism, which seems to overlook the aspirational tensions of a lot of contemporary Black music. Nor does he entertain the possibility that the Great American Novelist is actually programming a video game or writing a television show. (Television, he notes grudgingly, is one of the few growth industries for young writers.) Building an audience nowadays “means being willing to be personal, even intimate, with strangers,” he laments. “You sell your work today by selling your story, your personality—by selling, in essence, yourself.” These words are meant to strike terror, and yet he’s describing a set of possibilities that for many young people are exhilarating.
A few years ago, I found myself at a party in an empty lot in a condo-less part of Brooklyn. It was the kind of event where someone is at the entrance checking for your name on a clipboard. All around us were giant concrete slabs that had been painted by some of the city’s best-known street artists. I didn’t understand the nature of the gathering until I noticed that it was being sponsored by a real-estate developer. Graffiti, once a scourge, was being used to get people to think about the growth possibilities of this unfancied city block. The art lent our surroundings a frisson of creativity.
One of the reasons there was once a more robust spectrum of working artists is that it used to be much cheaper to live in cities like New York. The coming-of-age biographies of famous artists are filled with moments of desire and vision, but they are, more often than not, stories about resourcefulness in an era of affordable rents. By the time the punk singer Patti Smith published her memoir “Just Kids,” in 2010, her descriptions of seventies Manhattan, where one could support two artistic careers by working at a bookstore, seemed an impossible fantasy. Smith has since suggested that aspiring young artists move to someplace like Poughkeepsie.
A few years ago, locals in Los Angeles’s predominantly Chicano neighborhood of Boyle Heights began noticing the sudden appearance of art galleries opened mostly by fashionable young white people. There were rumors that developers had provided them with cheap, stable rents, as long as they stayed in their location for a set number of years. They would be shock troops for gentrification, bringing other hip young white people to the area. Local activists organized and eventually drove the galleries out. (In a bizarre twist, there were claims that the constituents in this movement included older white artists, retaliating against the white newcomers.)
In 2002, the urban theorist Richard Florida published “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, and Everyday Life.” Deresiewicz laments Florida’s rise to fame and the way his book became a manifesto and an instruction manual for developers and city planners. The creative class that Florida believed would shape the future was made up of those whose work possessed some kind of intellectual dimension: scientists, engineers, architects, designers, writers, artists, musicians (the “creative core”), along with people in law, finance, education, health care, and so on (“creative professionals”). Deresiewicz remarks that the plutocrats of yore, such as the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, “built the museums and libraries and concert halls” and “supported culture as an end in itself.” In contrast, Florida and creative-class evangelists value art for more mercenary reasons. Florida’s work convinced city leaders that this class brought with it disposable income, a youthful, cosmopolitan energy, and entrepreneurial spirit. Cities began trying to lure creative types, by rebranding around a cool musical legacy, say, or designing creativity-friendly office parks, or investing in public art and festivals. Often, Florida’s ideas were merely the narrative cover for gentrification. Tech workers were creative; the minority entrepreneurs already there were not.
That Florida called it a “class” suggests how meaningless that word often becomes in the American context. Class can be a vector for organizing and political action. Here it had little to do with shared political values or a collective alienation from power; it meant a kind of life style. One persistent critique of Florida’s work arises from its suggestion that creativity is hampered by too many rules, or outdated models of collective action, like unions. Job security was its enemy. While tech companies adopted the mantra of creativity, they also discouraged workplace organizing. At Kickstarter, which was founded to make the lives of artists and designers less precarious, tensions over a union’s formation simmered for months. (The Kickstarter Union was eventually formed earlier this year.) “In the context of corporate work,” Deresiewicz writes, creativity “is basically a form of propaganda, a way to make people feel better about their jobs—or, in the case of the ‘independent contractors’ who increasingly perform this kind of work, their lack of jobs.”
Throughout “The Death of the Artist,” you get the feeling that Deresiewicz is passionately relitigating arguments he once had with a Pollyannaish friend. It’s like overhearing one half of an increasingly tetchy bar argument. Artists, Deresiewicz contends, once imagined worlds other than this one. What might we forfeit if only the independently wealthy can pursue art for a living?
“The Death of the Artist” is relentlessly bleak, in much the same way that conversations around college debt or a post-automation economy are bleak. “You shouldn’t have to be a winner not to be a loser,” Deresiewicz writes. By the end, it has become clear that his subject was always inequality. Art is often prophetic; here it just reflects the broader reality, where a few prosper, many do not, and the space in the middle dissolves. Deresiewicz’s answer to the predicament is to “organize.”
In recent years, artists have seriously interrogated what it means to be members of a community. Rockefeller and Carnegie built museums, but they were still plutocrats. It hardly brings comfort to think about David Koch’s support for Lincoln Center or the Sacklers’ for the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Artists have pushed the conversation on financial divestment. The recent #PublishingPaidMe hashtag on Twitter allowed writers a space to share information and negotiation strategies.
What Deresiewicz means by “organizing” is something even grander than new patronage models or industry transparency. He dreams of breaking up monopolies, raising the minimum wage, empowering workers, making college cheaper, and reversing corporate tax cuts, all in the name of “rebuilding the middle class.” It’s an unromantic answer to the book’s overarching question of what is to be done for the struggling artist. “We do not need the government to pay for art, or the rich with their philanthropy,” he tells us. “We only need each other.” In this moment, Deresiewicz’s crankiness melts away. He seems no longer like a naysaying critic but like someone who has converted all the songs, stories, and visions in his head into something else. It’s possibly the book’s most convincing answer to why art continues to matter even as it loses value. Why not ask for what seems impossible? ♦
