The Thing Quarterly, John Baldessari edition. Courtesy of the Thing Quarterly. Photo: Michael O’Neal.

Artists and other creative people who organize their lives around the arts have long dealt with the problem of the lack of money by utilizing the same resourcefulness they apply to making art. They have formed cooperative living and studio arrangements; started their own businesses; become grant-writing virtuosi; begged, stolen, borrowed, and even invented currencies. This situation is nothing new, and yet the conditions of today’s art world have prompted a new existential crisis for artists.

For an aspiring artist, thinking about one’s artistic practice as an entrepreneurial venture to be branded and marketed is becoming the default professional mode. The art market—in which large amounts of capital circulate in the constellation of mega-galleries, swanky art fairs, and high-powered collectors and investors—has grown to an unprecedented degree yet is inaccessible to most artists. There is little public support for governmental (i.e., tax-based) funding for the arts on a mass scale. Individual giving largely happens through websites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo that operate on a transactional basis, in which the projects with the most attractive rewards receive the most funding. While it’s natural for artists to try to figure out how to make a living from their art—which includes turning toward entrepreneurial strategies—it is frustrating that these new professional paradigms are becoming accepted as unquestioned truths, with any alternative deemed unrealistic. The many different kinds of art careers, art worlds, and art lives aren’t being considered, especially as models with which to debate, challenge, and improve the current state of affairs.

As I consider this art-world landscape, I avoid words like precarity or neoliberalism not because they are not useful to describe contemporary conditions, but because their ubiquitous deployment tends to abstract the problem in a way that is not helpful.

Read the full article here.

Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen. 100 Posterworks, 2009-2013; printed poster; 11 x 17 in.

In a recent review in the New Yorker of the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition of local art, Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, Peter Schjeldahl singles out BFAMFAPHD as puncturing the effervescent mood of the exhibition, saying that, “The collective BFAMFAPHD (the initials of academic degrees) spreads a homeopathic wet blanket on the show’s high spirits with statistical documentation of the hard lots of current graduates—the staggering number of artists, debt burdens, iffy prospects. The bonus bummer of a group discussion among veteran local artists, in the show’s catalogue, circles the drain of Topic A in the daily life of art anywhere: real estate.” While I don’t really care too much about the over-celebration of Brooklyn as a creative context, this snarky tidbit has a little bit of truth—the hard lots of current graduates is indeed a quite epic bummer and not just in the over-capitalized art scenes of New York.

But besides being concerned about the harshing of Schjeldahl’s mellow on the wonders of Bushwick, and I didn’t see the show, the questions around who can afford to be artist in today’s economy and concurrent debt crisis is a central concern to today’s generation of artists. How can we talk about this situation openly, honestly, with some well-deserved finger-pointing around the exploitation of artists by institutional culture and a little self-reflexivity about why artists do indeed deserve to get paid (all artists? for what kinds of services?) and who should pay them?

With the recent efforts by collectives BFAMFAPHD asking “What is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees?”, W.A.G.E. Fee Calculator which aims to set standards for artist compensation based on organizational budgets, and from a slightly different angle Brooklyn Commune, “a report on the state of the performing arts from the perspective of artists” (all New York-based) providing perspective with some hard numbers to back it up, it’s an exciting time to think about artist-driven efforts to research and fundamentally change the systemic exploitation of artists.

Read the full article here.

The Thing Quarterly, John Baldessari edition. Courtesy of The Thing Quarterly. Photo: Michael O’Neal.

Artists and other creative people who organize their lives around the arts have long dealt with the problem of the lack of money by utilizing the same resourcefulness they apply to making art. They have formed cooperative living and studio arrangements; started their own businesses; become grant-writing virtuosi; begged, stolen, borrowed, and even invented currencies. This situation is nothing new, and yet the conditions of today’s art world have prompted a new existential crisis for artists.

For an aspiring artist, thinking about one’s artistic practice as an entrepreneurial venture to be branded and marketed is becoming the default professional mode. The art market—in which large amounts of capital circulate in the constellation of mega-galleries, swanky art fairs, and high-powered collectors and investors—has grown to an unprecedented degree yet is inaccessible to most artists. There is little public support for governmental (i.e., tax-based) funding for the arts on a mass scale. Individual giving largely happens through websites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo that operate on a transactional basis, in which the projects with the most attractive rewards receive the most funding. While it’s natural for artists to try to figure out how to make a living from their art—which includes turning toward entrepreneurial strategies—it is frustrating that these new professional paradigms are becoming accepted as unquestioned truths, with any alternative deemed unrealistic. The many different kinds of art careers, art worlds, and art lives aren’t being considered, especially as models with which to debate, challenge, and improve the current state of affairs.

Read the full article here.