Is it “Harder” to be an Artist Right Now?
How do any of us find the time and money to do creative stuff?!
When it comes to the ways one can balance a creative life with a working life, Andrew and I have tried it all: Trying to make money from your art (a crapshoot). Trying to make money as an administrator in a field related to your art (actually the worst). Trying to work a full time job and do your art on nights and weekends (exhausting). Trying to divide your schedule between a part time job and part time creative work (often effective but also cash poor). Some days I think we ended up starting our own business as a result of try-try-trying all the other routes first.
The question that has been on my mind — and on my group chats — this week: is it “harder” to be an artist right now?
The debate was sparked by an article, shared on a group chat of creative women, about the difficulty of balancing mothering and art-making. I jokingly fired back that it clearly wasn’t having a child that prevented this woman from making art, but rather having to work a full time job.
What followed was a debate about the pragmatic realities of working and being creative. One friend posited that it’s always been difficult to be an artist; it’s no harder today than it ever was. Is that true? And what exactly constitutes “harder”? Our text chat revealed that we might be discussing two different, but related, questions: (1) is it harder to make a living from art today? And (2) finances aside, is it harder today to simply maintain a creative practice? Both questions are fundamentally a matter of resources: those of money, and of time.
The Money Question: Is it harder to make a living from your art?
The collapse of the creative middle class has been well documented1, further compounded by today’s digital landscape. Art is democratized AND demonetized; disseminated by a virtually-unregulated internet. “Art” is conflated with “content.”
The traditional markets for artistic product (record deals, book deals, development deals) have contracted. There are, technically, more paths to gaining recognition outside these traditional markets: streaming your own music to Spotify; self-publishing your own novels; uploading your own sitcom to YouTube. But recognition rarely pays the bills …and when it does, it’s by the tech companies that leverage your content for ad revenue. By and large the general public no longer pay directly for artistic content; we pay by offering up our personal data in order to receive the content “for free” on the internet, leaving a less certain path for that revenue to return to the makers.
There’s an enormous gap in what it means to be a working artist. You’re either Beyonce and Taylor Swift, who literally changed regional GDPs with their ‘23-’24 tours; or you are reaching into your own pocket to tour at a loss. With less money to be made overall from music sales, books, or screenwriting, it seems like ever fewer artists can eke out a living at all, much less through democratic means.
Even for jobs in the creative sector that come with a salary and benefits, the outlook isn’t sunny. In an economic environment where labor itself is devalued2, creative labor can hardly be exempt from this fate. Creative fields are already chronically underpaid and – speaking anecdotally as someone who’s easily applied to 500+ jobs in my career – wage growth has all but stalled in the creative sector, with most salaries at performing arts institutions not even remotely keeping up with cost-of-living over the past fifteen years.
Much more to say on these points, but let’s save it for a future dispatch, in favor of addressing the other half of this question.
The Time Question: Is it harder to do anything creative at all?
This is a hypothetical that interests me greatly at this juncture. Let’s suppose you have little (or no) aspiration of supporting yourself financially with your art. Suppose you embrace having other work to provide the primary source of income for you and your family, and simply wish for the time to write, sing, paint, whatever — for its own sake.
Like many New Yorkers, I idealize the bad old days in Just Kids when Patti Smith could move to New York City and pay her rent with periodic part-time shifts as a bookstore clerk — allowing a full-time devotion to her art and creative community. Nostalgia-culture helps us view this recent past with rose-colored glasses, certainly. But even in casually chatting with some of the older members in my community orchestra (none among them Patti Smiths, per se), folks recalled moving to NYC and working odd jobs, telling me “we NEVER worried about making rent. It left us free to figure out what we really wanted to do.” Financially solvent and time rich, some of these folks pursued music, while others later became teachers or white collar workers in other sectors.
I would personally love to have the option of a “working-class,” “low-skill” job that offers enough for me to cover my expenses, AND the time / brain space for being creative. But in order to earn enough to live with some measure of comfort (e.g. health care, sob), our jobs demand more of us these days, wanting not just our time, but our hearts, souls, and passions [one person on the group chat noted that her workplace asked her to detail her “life dreams,” to which she wished to respond “none of your business!!”]. The higher your salary, the more you are likely to see your job as core to your identity.3 Evidence suggests if I choose a high paying job, I will be overworked. If I choose a low paying job, I will be underworked.4
Housing and childcare costs continue to grow prohibitively in most cities, and it feels harder than ever to have the time and money to be creative, even recreationally. No matter which work model you choose, the leisure required to make creative work is not a plentiful commodity.
My devil’s advocate friend on the group chat noted that household wages are higher now than they once were – which hearkens to this idea that we’re in a “VIBECESSION.” Everything is fine, but we just think everything sucks.5 It is true that the absolute value of our wages is higher at this point in history, but: (1) higher wages don’t translate to affordability — the ability to pay for, say, childcare, or a home; and (2) more critically for our purposes, higher wages do not translate to more time, the baseline requirement for creative work.
When I indulge in gloomy thinking about my finances, I do not compare my wealth to the factory laborer or agrarian worker of long past eras [who actually worked way less than we do today]. I can only compare myself in relation to the world around me. The long tail of Reaganism has led us back to a place where the rich enjoy unimaginable wealth and freedom, while the rest of us slobs slog it out. And in that sense, yes, the vibes are bad even though the economy is doing gangbusters for the top-drawer set.
Now with all that said: you’ll be disappointed to know, having read this far, that I have no intention or ability to tie up this conversation with a big bow. As I consider my next career move, and the need to retain space for writing, singing, making, doing, and talking about art, this is simply the vantage point from which I stand, taking in the lay of the land.
Listen to this week’s radio show playlist, whilst you contemplate and maybe comment your thoughts?? Would love to hear ‘em.
And, to be fair, debated, in that perhaps the “creative middle class” was merely a late-20th -century flash in the pan?
Yes, I am bringing in that chestnut about labor being taxed higher than capital gains! It’s never not relevant
Pointing to this fascinating Pew study. Higher income workers are also more likely to work outside of work hours, with upper- and middle-income workers more likely to say they work too many hours (30% and 26%, respectively, vs. 12% of lower-income workers).
Data published in Harvard Business Review revealed that 62% of high-earning individuals work more than 50 hours a week, 35% work more than 60 hours a week, and 10% work more than 80 hours a week (admittedly from 2006 - i couldn’t find current updates to these figures). Meanwhile, as detailed in this great piece by Anne Helen Petersen which interprets the aforementioned Pew study, workers in lower-paid jobs are unable to get enough hours!
I hate this clueless-liberal-elite article from NYT so much. It’s like: “we wondered why ordinary people are so down on the economy, so we asked a bunch of Harvard academics, and concluded that it could be that people are just too dumb to know that they’re doing great!”