Can I make a living from my art without killing the romance?
The Drift's advice column #3
Welcome to the March installment of Sophie Haigney’s advice column. Send your submissions to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.
Dear Sophie,
I’m in my early thirties and an artist working for another, more successful artist. I’ve had some meaningful career successes, but financially I’m worse off than my parents were at my age. In a strange way I feel downwardly mobile economically but perhaps upwardly mobile socially, through the art world I inhabit. I enjoy my life and the work I’m doing, but it often means accepting a level of financial precarity. I tend to romanticize artists who lived modestly for years before things clicked, but lately the world feels less romantic and more pragmatic. At what point does one decide it’s time to pivot? Is that a decision you make now, in your early thirties, or later? Should I double down and pursue an MFA, or move toward something more stable and become a “Sunday painter”? I also think about this in terms of relationships. I’m not expecting anyone to rescue me financially, but it seems increasingly common — at least in dating culture — to foreground financial stability. When people list things like contributing to a 401(k) as a “green flag,” it makes romance feel oddly transactional. So I guess my real question is: how does someone live as a romantic in an increasingly unromantic time?
— Trying to Stay Romantic
There was a theme in the letters I got this month: financial anxiety and the arts. Recently, various online discussions about money and freelance writing have circled similar questions, with people bitterly debating “$2 a word” and whether in some circumstances it’s okay for really tiny magazines not to pay contributors. In most of these conversations, people were talking or yelling or, really, tweeting past each other; they have different goals, different lifestyles and desires, different financial cushions, and different ideas about what “making a living as an artist” entails. And so little new emerges each time this conversation recurs, except more frustration about the state of things, which we all agree is bad. Spring cleaning, tax season, the imminence of resurrection, and the perennial quandary: how can I make my art, and also make some money?
The answer is that it’s literally harder than ever, and also that it has never been that easy. Just check out some dead writers’ letters and see how many times they were asking parents for money; scheming to write a bestseller that never came to be; complaining about a book advance; or wondering about the riches they might find if they turned to television. George Plimpton bounced a fifty-dollar check to Terry Southern in 1962 for a short story in The Paris Review, if you don’t think it’s always been a little bit of a bad deal to write for magazines. But add in the death of print media, the decline of universities, the threat of A.I., the overall state of the job market — and the idea of pursuing any career in the arts, or adjacent to them, is scarier than ever.
Given all of this, I’ll say: it’s always perfectly fine to seek out a career that will translate into 401k contributions, to take the day job, to ease the financial precarity. There’s no shame in that, and there’s certainly sense. Being an artist of any kind is not, in my view, inherently “better” or “worse” than most other paths in life. It’s not even egregiously precarious in the grand scheme of work. When measured against the standards of professional class affluence — by those of us who feel, as you say, “downwardly mobile,” with doctor-or-lawyer-or-tycoon parents — being an artist looks bad, financially. When measured against lower-wage work, a career like the one you have been building might already look comfortable — not to mention animated by the joy of doing something you love, as well as the social rewards you point to. A lot depends on your vantage point.
You say, “I enjoy my life and the work I’m doing, but it often means accepting a level of financial precarity.” And I would just say: it does and it will. It’s about tradeoffs, and you have to decide what those are. They might change over time. There can come a point, or points, when you will know or feel or see, when looking at your bank account: this isn’t working, I need a job that pays me better, so what kind of job will it be? I can’t say if you’re there yet — it doesn’t sound like it, based on the tone of your letter — but I also want to give you the permission to feel that way if or when you do. One way I like to think about it: your artistic career and life will have phases. There can be points when you go to an office every day and there can be points where you accept less money to do work you love. Your desires might dictate some of this, as will circumstances. But the tradeoffs will always be there.
It’s hard to accept that living a certain kind of life isn’t going to make you rich, or even comfortable, unless you’re really lucky. Lucky feels like a juvenile word and it’s not quite precise, but it is capacious. In some cases financial success in the arts boils down to “the luck of the draw,” or who you are born to be, whether you’ll get an inheritance or help from family or a partner or a partner’s family, and even this kind of luck is more changeable than many people seem to believe. (“Families are always rising and falling in America,” to quote Leo in The Departed, misquoting Hawthorne.) There is much more to luck, though, than birth and marriage. Talent is unequally distributed and it’s not always rewarded. More often than not it isn’t. People write really good books that people don’t buy because of the cover or an accident of timing or because people don’t really buy books like they used to. People paint beautiful stuff no one ever looks at. Then, conversely, some book you know is bad is rumored to get a really big advance, and someone you don’t like starts a Substack and it takes off. It doesn’t feel fair, and it’s not. We are required to make peace with this again and again, which can be painful; like many painful things, coming to terms with fortune is worthwhile.
But your particular question belies not only a desire for financial security, but a desire for an artistic and intellectual life that transcends the cold machinery of money. You ask how to hang on to the romance of an artist’s life in an “increasingly unromantic time.” And while there might be romance in making art, in looking at it, I wouldn’t romanticize the bohemian ideal of the artist’s life. It’s not really romantic to be threadbare; nor is it necessarily unromantic to put some money in your 401k. I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about the artist’s life this way. The question I would ask, if I were you, is not how to live romantically, but: do you like what you’re doing day to day enough that it outweighs the sense of financial precarity you feel? And relatedly: is there something you could do, on the side or in general, to lessen that burden? Finally and most importantly, I would ask: are you making the art you want to make? Are you writing or painting or playing music or acting or doing puppetry to your own standards of satisfaction? The most important thing — whether on Sunday or every day — is to do it, and to do it well. If there’s any romance, it’s in that achievement.
Which brings me to another question I got this month, a very simple and short one: “Should I do The Artist’s Way?”
And to that my answer would be an enthusiastic yes. Not because Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is some kind of cure-all; I find the tone of the book to be difficult, off-putting, eye-rolly at times. But what I like about it — what I like about a lot of programmatic self-help stuff — is that it’s something to do. The deal with The Artist’s Way is that for twelve weeks you wake up, write three pages by hand, and pick an “artist’s date of your choosing” every week, which could mean walking around for two hours without your phone, or looking at one painting for twenty minutes, or going to a concert solo. You do some other exercises throughout the week and a lot of thinking about creativity. I do not think this program will totally transform your life, as Cameron claims. But it might, and more importantly it’s a practice. It’s about orienting yourself toward doing something every day. If you are interested in living an artist’s life, the best thing you can do is do it.
If you enjoyed this installment, send Sophie your own question by writing to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.
