How Artists Make Money
& How Money Makes Artists

A cultural and critical history of how society supports art, and what that means for the people who both make and appreciate it

It may not be the worst time in history to get paid to make art, but it certainly is the strangest. The institutions and markets that have been supporting the arts are undergoing massive changes, some even disappearing. Meanwhile the tools to make art and find audiences have never been more accessible, and there are more people than ever making art.

How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists is an attempt to reckon with the history of money in the arts — from Titian to Taylor Swift — and how that complicated relationship is changing. The book analyzes past and present financial dynamics in the arts to show the practicalities of how artists make a living and how that, in turn, affects the reception and perception of artists and their work: the impacts art has on wider society, how economic realities affect aesthetic judgements of art, what kind of people are able to work as artists, and how political and cultural ideas about the nature of art affect what kind of resources are made available to it.

Explore how art has become central to our understanding of humanity by tying art to what makes the world go round: money.

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