Artists have always created with and without financial compensation.
We make our art as calling, as medicine, fueled by our personal and collective tectonics, the slow and subterranean truths of this human journey. Artists made art thousands of years before capitalism emerged and will make art thousands of years after capitalism recedes.
Art-making is permanent, enduring, a fact of human existence. The free market is recent, brief, and constructed, one of many possible arrangements.
Capitalism is a momentary guest. Artists are permanent residents.
This helps me reframe my artist-economy relationship.
Not: How can I shift my practice to fit the “realities” of the free market?
Rather: How can we artists make allowances for the temporary, opportunistic, and often childish practices of capitalism?
The short-sighted toddler of capitalism fails to support much essential work, art included. (It is not shocking that a system so young and self-interested misses the bigger picture.)
It is up to us, the quiet and eternal ministry of artists, to be discerning, far-sighted, and wise, to be the grown-ups.
Every artist who slogs through an hourly day job
Every artist who teaches art in order to make art
Every artist with five revenue streams (restaurant, freelance, grants, selling work, crowdfunding)
Every artist who limits expenses in order to earn less and create more
Every artist who pivots from grants one year to a salaried job the next
(and I have been each one of these at some point)
We all make the toddler of capitalism do something it is too foolish and myopic to do itself: Allow an artist to live and create art.