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

If an artist starves to death before the world comes around to appreciating her genius, is that a good thing?

What often allows great work to get the attention it deserves is not a matter of only talent or luck but a matter of the will. Can you stick around long enough to see your work succeed? Do you have enough grit to take a few critical hits and keep going? Or will you get discouraged at the first sign of failure?

Michelangelo’s insistence that the priest call him by his last name was a power play. He was not just another hired hand; he was an artist, a title he spent his life redefining. So the clergyman’s condescending request made the artist set the record straight. Michelangelo was more than a manual laborer, and the priest’s refusal to acknowledge this

The idea that “people will do it anyway”—that if you’re a real artist you’ll make art no matter what—can be the product only of naïveté or ignorance or privilege.

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.