How Artists Make Money
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 ever to want to get paid to make art, but it is certainly one of the strangest. Institutional and market forces that have been the backbone of support for artistic endeavours for almost all of our living memory are changing massively, if not withering altogether. At the same time, access to both the tools to make art and the audiences to appreciate it have theoretically never been more accessible. It is all reminiscent of that old Turkish curse: if it’s hard enough living through interesting times, never mind trying to make a living.
How Artists Make Money (working title) is an attempt to bring some clarity to this void. Through a combination of historical analysis, contemporary examination, biography, criticism and philosophy, it explores not just the practicalities of how artists make a living in pursuit of their work, but how that in turn affects the reception and perception of artists and their art: the impacts this work 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.
From challenging popular conceptions of what constitutes a successful artistic career to picking apart the values of contemporary society through the way it values art, How Artists make money aims to examine the centrality of art to our understanding of humanity by connecting it with another crucial force in modern society: money.