The Death of the Artist

I’ve been reading a book a week lately. Last week is was a doozy, William Deresiewicz’s The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. It’s not only a must for working artists today, but for everyone who is concerned about culture.

 It isn’t an easy book. I found I was grinding my teeth, anxious and panicky, but unable to put it down. The central question is something I’ve always had in the back of my mind: “how to keep your soul intact and still make a living as an artist.” 

Let’s not be wispy and nostalgic. The problem wasn’t simple in the era of priests and princes when the artist, not really a thing yet, was the artisan and worked to order. It wasn’t simple in the era of the ascendant bourgeoisie, either, when the artist was a starving bohemian. But today, it’s a kind of merciless survival at the hands of the Big Five in tech—Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook—who, at a market valuation of $5.5 trillion, are not only many times larger than the top media companies (Disney, AT&T, etc.) but larger than the GDPs of all but two countries. 

Their model, especially the content providers, is to digitize and distribute freely (YouTube, owned by Google), or to distribute at rates that put all but the megastars out of business (0.44 cents a stream on Spotify, 0.13 cents on Pandora), while simultaneously attacking copyright and other protections that make investing time and resources in things like an album or a novel any kind of sensical move at all. It doesn’t require much breaking down: it’s a form of theft. 

Then add to this other factors working overtime to make the new reality a perfect storm. Gentrification has crept into just about every major city in the world and driven rents through the roof—without even mentioning studio space, or the crumbling industrial warehouses artists used to find on the outskirts. 

Universities, too, are hiring no one, except maybe adjuncts, who they pay a few thousand dollars a course. It used to be that serious artists could be at university and access all the entitlements of professionalization—spaces safeguarded by gatekeepers, a regular paycheque, insulation from the real world pressures of the market. They could flash those three letters, MFA, and knock on the doors of places like the National Endowment for the Arts, today so shrivelled it “amounts to less than a third of what the military spends on bands.” Who’s going to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for art school these days, to get a shot at what, unemployment and impoverishment, post-studio conceptualization with few transferable skills? 

Don’t forget big tech’s mantra that everyone has become an artist. One of the powers of Deresiewicz’s book is just how straight a shooter he is. He writes,

Real talent is rare—a lot rarer than the pieties of progressive education, or the you-can-do-it boosterism of a consumption-driven culture, or our own vanity would have us believe. We assume that the more art, the better, but is that really true, especially if the vast majority of it isn’t very good, and almost no one sees it anyway? Amateur creativity can no doubt be very fulfilling, but how often does it actually make life better for anybody else? By all means, enrich the world with your incredible songs, if incredible they be, but before you start littering the Internet with mediocre art, here’s a list of things that you can do with your leisure instead. Spend more time with the people in your life. Volunteer in your community. Work for a cause. Read seriously what’s been written seriously, so you can make yourself better informed. Grow your own food. Make your own clothing and furniture. Take the money that you would’ve spent on your art hobby and spend it on art that was made by professionals. Any of those things would make the world a better place, much more so than doing your art. None of them are going to make you rich or famous, but neither is doing your art. 

What effect has digitization, rents, and de-professionalization had? What does it mean now that artists, like taxi drivers and line cooks, are forced to operate fully in the market, to raise pity funds for themselves on platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter, to “disintermediate” and go it alone in a gig economy, to brand themselves and seek out ever narrow niches...to be “creative entrepreneurs,” as Silicon Valley would have it? 

“We can imagine the effect of such a climate on artists’ nerves, not to mention their morale,” writes Deresiewicz. “The effect on art is also clear. Irony, complexity, and subtlety are out; the game is won by the brief, the bright, the loud, and the easily grasped.” 

Fortunately, the book doesn’t end on this dark note. The last chapter is called “Don’t Mourn, Organize.” It throws out many names and initiatives I hadn’t heard before: groups taking on piracy, Working Artists in the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), OurGoods, a bartering network for artists and designers, etc. He talks about the need to raise awareness and push for responsible consumption, as has been happening with food. “Just as there are animals and farmers at the other end of the food supply, so are there human beings—not corporations—at the other end of the art supply. I’ve been told that fans will ‘find a way’ to support the artists they love, but you don’t need to ‘find’ a way, because it’s already right there in front of you. Just pay for their goddamn stuff.” 

Like I said, the book is a bitter pill. Rather than induce a kind of torpor, though, I feel I’ve put on X-ray goggles.