Being a Working Artist Doesn't Always Work

I'm really proud of the work that I've done and all that I'm learning every day. I'm also proud to be part of networks of people who are creative. However, as I try right now to really take myself and my work seriously and move forward and somehow scratch out a living, I'm struggling struggling struggling, and it totally makes me get why so many creative people go into advertising.

It also makes me feel really defensive and frustrated and sensitive about the ways that we do go about making our money. There is a teeny tiny fraction of us who become art stars who become fabulously wealthy through selling, producing, or directing our work. Another slightly larger group make a living through our work, though not an especially fabulous one, working a variety of performance, gallery, or publishing or DIY sales circuits. The rest of us have a variety of day jobs as teachers, food service workers, academics, programmers, sex workers, homemakers, advertisers, craftspeople, retailers, and on and on. We apply for grants, fellowships, residencies; We sell prints, solicit donations, get fiscal sponsors, rent cheap space and take classes to keep the work constantly moving. We all hustle, whether or class status tells us that's what we're doing or not. We're trying to find a way to beat the system.

I feel so protective of my fellow artists and the things that they do to make it work. I feel protective of those who appear "sell out" when they finally start to actually make money for their work. I feel protective of those who toil away in obscurity, unwilling or unable to make commercially viable work, but equally unwilling to give up on their ideas. I feel protective of those who are unschooled by choice or by circumstance, and who may or may not even call themselves artists. And I am protective of those who spend years and years in artist finishing schools trying get experiences and credentials that might help them in the future. I feel protective of artists who have no idea if they are any good, and especially of those who just keep at it anyway.

I feel protective of artists because of the risks that they take that are so often considered worthless (unless they can be easily co-opted or branded) by capitalists and anti-capitalists alike.

As I write this I'm feeling privileged to be among the ranks of this hugely varied group of people in the world, and that knowledge is helping me understand how to be ok with being broke for a little while longer until I figure out the next scheme... And the next...