… and I’m glad she is.
Brenda Goldstein got the brilliant idea of asking a financial planner to help her figure out what her art career is doing and has published the wonderfully frank and informative results in the latest issue of Fuse Magazine [31:4]. As you might imagine, it’s not a pretty picture, but one that fits the vast majority of artists. Taking Care of My Future is a stunning work of “capitalist realism” for which we should all be thanking Ms. Goldstein.
Of course it used to be the case in the arts that a certain amount of duplicity about finances was common, and perhaps even not unreasonable. Once could say things like, “art (substitute in here any of the arts, publishing, theatre, etc) is a gentleman’s game” and mean it because there used to be “gentlemen” who played at “games” like culture. But today “gentlemen” are in short supply and such as we have play less “in” culture than “with” it, in terribly market-driven ways.
No, the days of doing one thing very well for money (or inheriting it from someone who did) and dabbling in the arts, or the sciences even for the passion of it are long gone.
In today’s economy where the MFA is the new MBA and fine arts is among the fastest growing post-secondary programs, more and more people are flocking, mysteriously, to a career that is without economic base, or, for the vast majority, future.
By the way, has anybody else noticed the coincidence between the enormous transfer of wealth from the older generation to the younger that supposed to be taking place right about now and the market meltdown? With savings, stock investments, insurance and pension funds dwindling, that’s just not going to happen now. If the wealth accumulated by the middle classes in the post-WW2 period was blurring the class lines and leveling the playing field, no more.
Of course everyone is talking about money right now, including artists. But still the talk is all tied up in the past. Money evidently can be found to pay presumably wealthy collectors for Titians that should rightly be in the public domain but not for art schools (though they be bursting at the seams). [source]
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Previous posts on Why Artists are Poor, the exceptional economy of the arts, the book by Hans Abbing: Part 1 Part 2
– some notes –
Not that anyone these days should be begrudged the ability to make a living, but financial planners are an odd lot, for they make their daily bread by channeling away a part of yours. Of course they justify this skimming by the savings they are helping you accumulate, and it is true they will help lay out your financial picture in black and white (and often embarrassing red), bring sobriety to how you think about money, and encourage you to have discipline. But still, the wealthy barber did not retain a financial planner and most business people would not hire one who wasn’t going to capture money that would be otherwise lost and have budgets that are not stretched to the max by the end of the month. Still, in the best of all possible worlds, everyone could afford one and would have one.
“Capitalist realism” is a termed coined by artists Gerhard Richter in the 60s when he was just starting out, related to a performance he did, sitting in a business suit in a shop window. Richter prudently moved on to painting and is now among the highest ranked (and top earning) artists, living or dead.
The MFA is the new MBA is a phrase coined by Daniel Pink in an article of that title in the February 2004 Harvard Business Review. Mr. Pink was refering in particular to a trend among corporations to recruit MFA students right out of school to work in their design and marketing departments, which is to say that the MFA is not the new MBA at all, but a talent feed for MBA driven businesses. That said, many people have picked up the meme and run with its more prosaic resonance, that creative thinking has become as, if not more, important as business sense. If that were true, it would seem that artists, along with every other upstart with delusions of inhabiting the halls of priviledge, are about to be put firmly in their place.
Then again, maybe we’re just not working hard enough. Between January 1969 and January 1970, Pablo Picasso completed 167 paintings. He was 87 years old. The paintings may be a bit tired, but evidently Pablo was not. Nor was the market for his work.
