How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists
Whatever you might think about the relevance of political boundaries to the greater human condition, the nut of the idea here is basically true: who ‘we’ are, whatever the we, is pretty tightly wrapped up in our stories about ourselves, our myths and ideas expressed in whatever arts happen to have sufficient public attention.
David Berry • How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists
Interesting Point
This is the birth of the artist as we understand it today: someone possessed of a vision and talent that makes them stand apart.
David Berry • How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists
The Black death as a catalyst for the emergence of artists. As the number of artisans went down, the demand went up. It is basic economics
To make the artists worthy of the money they were paid and the patrons worthy of having the money to dole out, art had to have powerful moral and spiritual implications. This is, in the basest terms, what separates artist from artisan: an artisan can make you a good thing, but an artist will make you a good person. For that, you can justify almost
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Artist vs artisan
It’s partly a mistake of our modern conception that we would even call the things they made ‘art’ or the people that made them ‘artists.’ For the people of the time, the artifacts were more properly understood as functional, like wallpaper or record-keeping or, most grandiose of all, offerings to the divine.
David Berry • How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists
'Art' in the way we think of it now, is a modern concept. How did the more contemporary concept come to be?
It’s tempting to think of art as outside of our practical needs: art does not hold up walls or keep us warm; it derives its value from our perceptions of it. It exists to prove we are capable of appreciating things beyond their practicality. We can see again how it is directly opposed to the inherent efficiency of money: if art were so crass as to
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Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, Dutch economist and visual artist Hans Abbing
David Berry • How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists
Look up this book
part of the point of sharing art is to give people something that cannot properly be valued.
David Berry • How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists
What does the author mean by valued? I mean art is tricky to assign a value to, it really depends on who is doing the valuing. One person's trash is another's treasure after all.
But if the point of art is to know ourselves, and the point of an artist is to make art, we’d better know what money has done to us.
David Berry • How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists
The drive to create still stands outside of money: people will squeeze it into the cracks of their lives, sacrifice comfort or even necessity, fight and claw and carve out time to make something, to share their understanding of the world. They shouldn’t have to, but goddammit, they do.