Art vs Commerce Part III: A Good Living
On paying bills and other things real artists don’t do
And, but, so — where do I find myself today?
I find myself mired (or so it currently feels) in the commercial world. I am not living as an artist. I have chosen commerce over art. While, on the outside, it might seem like I am living some version of a creative life — I am not producing widgets or furniture, rather words and pictures and ideas purpose-built to evoke specific feeling and/or action — I am, in fact, spending my days furthering the goals of large corporate entities, goals which are ultimately financial, and which benefit me financially, sure, but contribute to the goodness of the world in negligible ways. They sell more stuff, and the selling of their stuff enables them to pay salaries to their employees, who are decent people who perhaps wonder the same things I wonder (“what is the point of all this?”), and I guess there is something sort of generous in that. But still, when I find myself sitting in a room trying to come up with clever ideas about how to get people to give up their email addresses in exchange for whitepapers, or when I’m at the park with my daughter, playing baseball, and instead of being fully present to appreciate that reckless loose-limbed way she runs through the grass after a ball find my mind wandering off to contemplate how, exactly, we might compel IT decision-makers at a conference to stop at a tradeshow booth and hear all about the exciting advances in data backup technology I feel profoundly like an arch-enemy to myself and my family and the whole wide world, generally.
Sometimes, when I do the work that I do, I am not only unfulfilled, I am drained of something essential. Lifeforce, lifeblood, elan, marrow, whatever.
But, you know, it’s a good living.
So why isn’t a good living good enough for me?
What hubris to be all depressed about a living as good as this!
But.
I’m not not an artist. I am a writer. I wrote a book.
I’m writing this right now.
I have envisioned for myself a Life of Making Art, and, for the entirety of (and in parallel with) my professional life, I have worked hard to make that vision a reality. My first novel was published last fall. I’ve written a semi-respectable number of stories and essays and articles which have appeared in a variety of semi-respectable publications. I have — at different times, driven by different impulses — pursued various other forms of artistic expression, from making films to drawing comic books.
So why all this complaining?
I look at myself, now, and this is what I see: a man who has been working for close to a decade in the white-collar world of marketing; who has, in the course of his artistic striving, spent a majority of that time not creating art, but contributing to the commercial pursuits of others (ie. paying his bills). And while the paying of those bills has enabled me to build a wonderful life that involves a wife and child and home and general financial security and the opportunity to travel and regularly experience many of my favourite things, like going to the movies and eating popcorn, attending sporting events and eating popcorn, shopping for gourmet organic popcorn at places like Whole Foods, etc, I still often struggle with this question, which is fundamental to my sense of self and in many ways defines my existence in this world of family and friends and popcorn:
Am I an Artist?
To which you might respond: isn’t that a decision that you should make for yourself?
But, yeah, okay, fine — I’m sure lots of people self-define as artists. But to live as an artist — that feels, to me, like something much different. It often seems like I’m in a perpetual state of aspiring to be an artist; that perhaps being an artist is a sort of unachievable goal, like journeying to the end of the world only to discover that the world has no end, that the peculiar shape of our planet has brought you right back where you started, that the end of the world is not a literal place, rather an idea, a belief, that indeed you can only go to a place that feels like the end of the world (the jungles of Indonesia, the plains of Antarctica) because the end of the world was inside you all along.
Which is why it makes sense, I think, to view the choice in terms of whether or not one lives as an artist. You can act as an artist in your spare time, sure. Make art, think about art, wear a funny hat, whatever. And, if it suits you, you can claim that this makes you an artist. I can rightfully (and proudly) claim to have done that. But to truly live as an artist, one’s commitment — in time and effort and spiritual energy — must be disproportionally invested in those artistic pursuits.
But there are complexities and nuances to living as an artist. Most artistic pursuits, which are necessarily very personal, aren’t necessarily very lucrative. One might find great satisfaction in making elaborate collages from pressed flowers, or writing fan-fiction haikus, but the market for such art is likely very small, and therefore, too, one’s capacity to subsist through the practice of making it. Save for a lucky few (very lucky, very few), most artists don’t make a comfortable living through the exclusive practice of their art.
At least that’s what I have convinced myself is true.
Next Week: Art vs Commerce Part IV: Is There Such a Thing as Commercial Art?
