Art is Not a Coffee Table
When I went to the Berklee College of Music, there was a saying among the students: “if you graduate, you did something wrong.” I got my degree with honors in 2004.
My time in Boston was unpleasant. I worked two jobs to pay for tuition and rent and still lived on the verge of homelessness for much of it. I had no piano in my run-down apartments and the two hours I could schedule three days a week at school was nowhere near enough. I worked in bars and drugstores in the summers to save up for my first month, last month, and security deposit that loomed in the coming September. The affordable rent was an hour-long ride on the T into the city, making me too isolated to mingle when I wasn’t doing homework or working a job. I’d barely been able to make friends, much less make connections or harness my skill. When I graduated, the job connections at school were all unpaid internships, minimum wage, or in Korea. I could not afford to live in Boston without student loans and the bills were showing up the month after I graduated. Empty-handed, I moved back in with my mother, got a day job at CVS and night job delivering pizzas, and started the grind.
I remember getting four letters in the mail one day. One letter was a rejection letter from the dean of a graduate school for music, saying I needed practical experience and publication. The other three were student loan bills. I worked two jobs and scraped by in Tempe, Arizona. I could not afford LA, New York, or even Atlanta or Austin. I filed for bankruptcy and managed a gas station for eight years to try and get back on my feet, sitting on a pile of music with no musicians and only the old electric piano I learned on as a child. The dream was dead and buried.
In poker, one thing a player learns quickly is bankroll management. A player should never sit at the table with less than fifty big-blinds or else even a modest string of bad luck will wipe out their stack before their skill can earn them a profit. Kickstarting any industry is nothing if not risky, and one needs to be bankrolled properly to handle unforeseen circumstances and fluctuations in the market. Even with a solid plan, good fortune is necessary to run a successful business and that fortune comes in two forms: money or luck. In poker, a player might be fortunate enough to be sponsored in a game for a cut of the profit but to do that, the player needs to have a reputation for winning, which requires the ability to play and win… which starts with a good bankroll. Spend money to make money. Have money to spend money to make money.
Capitalism destroys art. The fact that the term “art industry” exists without irony should be an indicator. By its nature, industry is concerned with economic production of commodities and art is absolutely not economical. The commodification of art completely misses the point of it.
At its core, artistic expression is a risk. Unlike casual speech or careful prose, art is pure, abstract expression (not to be confused with “abstract expressionism”). In its best form, the skilled artist is able to take what is on their mind and translate it exactly into a tangible and communicable form. For a perfectly skilled artist, the risk lies not in the inaccurate portrayal of their intentions, but in the unpredictable response of the art’s audience. Because of this, pure expression from the artist will always have a significant chance of being met with adversity, controversy, and scandal. This adds a tremendous amount of risk to the reception and reputation of the artist, and what is the enemy of investment? Risk.
In for-profit industries, one of the factors under constant scrutiny is the risk to return ratio. To run a stable business, one must reduce risk and increase return. For a commodity to be most readily consumed, it needs to pose the least risk for rejection from the consumer. Because of this, the consumer is constantly analyzed, catalogued, and targeted so that the industrialist can modify their product to suit the needs and desires of their market. When one is talking about bottled water, clothing, or coffee tables, this constant tweaking of the product is understandable: those products are objective and ultimately submit to their function. Art is not a coffee table, it is the pure expression of abstract human communication and any attempt to target an audience is a deviation of art’s entire purpose. Risk must be present for an artist to create works of art, while industry wishes to eliminate risk in order to create works of appeasement. The two terms should never occupy the same sentence, much less the same phrase.
Yet in the race to commodify everything, even art, even the archstone of humanity, is caught in the giant, scary cogs of the bullshit machine. If the risk of investing in one’s art is not worth the return, the artist is denied sponsorship, denied exposure, and denied the opportunity to express themselves. Like poker, there are only two ways around a lack of sponsorship: personal wealth or luck. The wealthy have the bankroll to subsidize their risk; they are the people who sit down at a two-dollar big-blind table with a grand in chips and proceed to bully everyone else out of their hands. The lucky are just that: they are the ones who sit down at the same table with thirty bucks and get dealt pocket aces four times in a row.
Capitalism does not understand products that do not serve an immediate material function on which it can capitalize. By that right, it sees the work of an artist as useless until there is a market of ready consumers. This drives down the value of artistic statement, regardless of its possible relevance to society and in turn, the artist’s life becomes an unnecessary struggle. To reach their potential, an artist has to immerse their life in their work. This means proper education, proper tutoring, hours upon days upon years of practice, and long periods of contemplation. Art is not easy work and a serious artist needs this space and time to focus. This cannot be done when everyone in the band works two jobs with conflicting schedules, or the author cannot get into the headspace to write because they can’t afford their medication, or the sculptor cannot pay for molding plaster. Untreated mental illness, uncertain housing, and unstable employment are needless barricades in this path, one that the lucky can stumble through unscathed and the wealthy can pay to remove like a shoddy freemium game.
For those without luck or wealth, fame becomes the necessary goal. Fame means profit, profit means bankroll, bankroll is a buffer against risk, and managed risk is the only way that the artist can continue to immerse themselves in their work. However, fame in itself requires approval, and approval requires either the blind fortune of saying the right thing at the right time, the wealth and sponsorship necessary to convince people that they want your product, or the compromise of your artistic identity to create something that will appease your consumers.
And what happens to the rest? What happens to the vast majority of unrecognized skill, unrefined talents, and unamplified voices who do not have uncanny luck or access to startup capital? They wait for the ship that often never comes in. I got lucky when the woman I married got a good job in a stable field, after my bankruptcy cleared off my credit. I don’t work long hours anymore. I have time to harness my craft and money for a good editor. I spent yesterday writing out the synopsis of a series of books I am working on while I’m cooped up for the pandemic. Then, when I finished, I stared at my laptop and thought about how I lost fifteen years of creative potential simply because I was poor.