You Don't Have a Starve (to Be an Artist)

Recently I met with Bill Ivey, the former chairman for the National Endowment of the Arts. He told me that we sometimes think the alternative to the Starving Artist is what he calls the Subsidized Artist, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. Art needs money. We can deny it all we want and pretend starving makes for better art, but starving o

People need to eat and pay the rent. “An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint,” said artist Ben Shahn. “A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.” Whether an artist makes money off his work or not, money has to come from somewhere, be it a day job, a wealthy spouse, a trust f

The “starving artist” life sentence has us accept that creativity is undervalued in our society. It suggests that those of us who rely on creative gifts to make a living can expect to be poorly paid, and the rest of us are entitled to exploit them or short-change them in money terms, and undervalue them in human terms.

Some artists tend to think making money is either a system you sell out to or something to be avoided altogether. But in reality, it’s neither. If you don’t make money, you won’t have any art to make. We must seek to better understand the business of being an artist. Ignoring this reality is the fastest route to stop creating altogether. To be an a

The first step in letting go of the Starving Artist mentality is to let go of who we think we are or must be, even if we have no idea what new identity awaits us. What’s out there, however scary it may be, is almost certainly better than staying where we are now.

But this opens up an important question: certainly important to me, because my ability to feed my family depends upon it. If I turn my art into a gift… how do I live? Of course this is not my unique, personal problem. It’s not even a  new  problem. It’s the universal problem faced by all artists, throughout history. 

I had a friend who, for the longest time, talked about putting his artwork online and trying to make a go of it as a professional (or at least semiprofessional) artist. He talked about it for years; he saved up money; he even built a few different websites and uploaded his portfolio. But he never launched. There was always some reason: the resoluti