(The phrase, with its proletarian perfume, is coming back into vogue.)Īrtists are workers and want to be paid for their work. This statement is a rhetorical lie – or maybe a plea to “please read my book, I have another 300+ pages to go” - because Deresiewicz will spend much of The Death of the Artist describing how many artists have been clear for decades that they are cultural workers. No one likes to hear this.” Art is Work is stenciled on the doorway of the late I NY designer Milton Glaser. If art is work, then artists are workers. Chefs often do what they do out of love, but no one expects to eat for free.… Even if you do not have a boss, it’s work. Nor does the fact that it isn’t a job, a matter of formal employment. The fact that people do it out of love, or self-expression, or political commitment doesn’t make it any less so. He wrote this book to understand what happened.Įarly on in his volume, Deresiewicz tells a rhetorical lie. Changing expectation fuels Deresiewicz’s alternating fury and discouragement, and a certain amount of snark.
#3. THE WPA SPENT MONEY ON THE ARTS. SOFTWARE#
Late 20th- and early 21st-century corporate consolidation and the ideology that “information must be free” on the internet – an argument made primarily by software developers who were cushioned by comfortable “knowledge work” salaries – has dislodged any expectation of security, even for people who were previously able to make a living in the cultural sector. Current economic structures in the American cultural sector manifest an ever-receding horizon for artists of every age and in every discipline. William Deresiewicz has been listening to those conversations, aware that this is more than a crisis about building and sustaining the pipeline for young people entering the field. A livelihood in the arts resembles a lottery with particularly dismal odds. Yet even as artists throw in the towel or, in this pandemic time, are laid off from even endowment-rich, stable institutions such as museums and orchestras, there is no scarcity of aspiring, well-trained, and gifted artists to line up behind them. As one choreographer recently told me, living from grant to grant and gig to gig turns into a cycle of “produce, rinse, and repeat.” The shiny, celebrity-heavy top of the arts pyramid reveals itself as the place where First Ladies pen bestsellers, where pop stars have their grocery shopping reported on in the years between hits, and where Oscar winners tell billions of people watching a telecast not to give up on their dreams.
As the executive director of an arts service organization, Boston Dance Allliance, which provides information and resources for dancers across genres, I recognize their precarity: the hustle of piecing together a portfolio of gigs, writing replicative grant and residency applications, the time spent wondering wistfully whether they would be more successful if they pulled up stakes and moved somewhere else.
Not a month goes by when I do not have a conversation with a young artist about how a career in the arts seems unsustainable.
The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz. If the cultural sector in the United States returns to the ways things were organized in February 2020, with all the inequity and unsustainability that implies, we will have failed. The shared baseline of these conversations is that there are no good old days to go back to.