Below, Mason Currey shares five key insights from his new book, Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life.
Mason has worked as the managing editor of Metropolis, the executive editor of Print, and a senior editor at Core77. His freelance writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate.
What’s the big idea?
Making a life in art means chasing what you love without any guarantee it will pay off—and learning to survive along the way. Those struggles shape the work of art itself and remind us why we need artists more than ever. If you devote yourself to a project larger than yourself, you will reap rewards greater than money.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Mason himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. Art and money are strange bedfellows.
In my view, artists are individuals who know how to follow a hunch. They have a hunch that if they keep working in a particular area—whether it’s visual art or writing or music or something else—it will lead someplace interesting and worthwhile.
But following a hunch to the point that it becomes something interesting requires a lot of time, trial and error, and experimentation. Very often, it doesn’t attract any reliable income, especially when you’re starting out. So that puts artists in a funny bind: they feel called to do this important, unpredictable, often quite demanding work, but unless they’re independently wealthy, they also have to figure out how to pay for their lives.
That’s the dilemma that artists have had to grapple with throughout history. There’s a saying I grew up hearing that goes: Do what you love, and the money will follow. My implicit argument is more like: Do what you love and the money may or may not follow, and it is the artist’s job to keep going regardless. The great variety of ways that artists have contended with this dilemma provides an interesting window into their personalities and creative processes.
2. Hustling art funding is an art in itself.
Making a living as an artist often requires just as much creativity, flexibility, cleverness, tenacity, and outside-the-box thinking as the art-making process itself.
One of my favorite stories involves the young John Cage, who would become one of the most important and groundbreaking composers of the twentieth century. In the early 1930s, when he was 19 years old, Cage wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do with his life, and also wasn’t sure how to pay his rent in Los Angeles. What he knew was that he was interested in contemporary music and art—and he came up with a brilliant idea.
“Artists are individuals who know how to follow a hunch.”
He went from door to door in his neighborhood, pitching local housewives on a lecture series that he planned to deliver about modern art and music. He asked his landlord if he could use an empty room over his apartment building’s garages as a makeshift lecture hall, and he ended up selling enough tickets that he was able to pay his rent and give himself a robust self-education in modern art and music. It was through these lectures that he discovered the music of Arnold Schoenberg, who became his first and most important mentor, and really set him on the path of his life’s work.
Some of the other money-earning strategies I write about include: clerking at a bank, stealing and reselling valuable first-edition books, going on television game shows, selling insurance, selling mutual funds, selling encyclopedias door-to-door, selling organic cookies, breeding Old English bobtail sheepdogs, practicing family medicine, gambling, shoplifting, mopping hospital floors, and taking tickets at the Museum of Modern Art.
3. Money is the ultimate constraint.
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to making a living by making art. Everyone has to figure out their own unique path forward and their own collection of strategies, based on their personality and temperament, their creative ambitions, the opportunities available in their field, and whatever their individual financial circumstances are.
The good news, though, is that figuring out how to pay for your art can have a clarifying effect about what kind of artist you want to be. Artists thrive on constraint, and money is the ultimate constraint—it forces you to really think about what you’re trying to do and how you can do it with the resources you have. This can prompt some brilliant solutions.
“Figuring out how to pay for your art can have a clarifying effect about what kind of artist you want to be.”
A great example involves the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. In the 1950s, before he ever made a film, Godard had a day job working at the construction site of the world’s tallest dam, in Switzerland—about as far away from the world of cinema and moviemaking as you can imagine. Even so, he managed to turn it into an opportunity. He had the idea to make a short documentary about the dam’s construction and then sell the documentary to the construction firm, figuring they could use it as promotional material.
So, Godard convinced some friends to lend him a 35mm film camera, and over the summer he shot and edited a 25-minute film titled Operation Concrete. Remarkably, his plan worked: When he showed the film to the construction agency, they were so impressed that they paid him a large enough sum that he was able to bankroll himself for the next two years, which were crucial for his film career.
4. “You’ve got to climb through these things to the other.”
This quote comes from the Canadian post-impressionist painter Emily Carr, who is now celebrated as a national icon in Canada but, like so many artists, was never really recognized in her lifetime and just barely made ends meet. In Carr’s case, she tried to fund her painting by acting as a landlady, renting out rooms in her house—and she hated, hated, hated this arrangement. For a time, she was so desperate for rental income that she slept in the backyard in a primitive lean-to so she could turn the entire house into rental units. Even when she was able to move back into the house, she always resented the work of being a landlady and what she called the “groveling” attitude her tenants seemed to expect.
Carr’s journals vividly chart her misery, which for a long period prevented her from painting at all. But her journals also contain sparks of resolve. Here’s one where Carr is asking an important question. This passage begins with a long, bitter complaint about her landlady duties, and then it pivots to the following passage:
“Now go out, old girl, and split bark and empty ashes and rake and mend the fence. Yet—should I? Or should I climb higher, shut my eyes to these things and paint? Rise above the material? No—I think you’ve got to climb through these things to the other.”
That is a wish that kept coming up in my research: to rise above or transcend the irritating, everyday, real-world of money and obligations. Emily Carr’s answer is that there is no avoiding all that stuff, and you have to buck yourself up, keep moving forward, and trust that it’s all a part of your artistic development—because it is.
5. The world needs artists, especially now.
The current moment in history, and especially in U.S. history, feels characterized by a lot of negative forces—in particular, forces of resentment and distrust and a pervasive stinginess. As a society, we seem to be less optimistic and less generous toward each other than perhaps ever.
“[Artists] represent the opposite of this resentful, stingy energy.”
Part of the reason I love reading about artists and thinking about their work and how they funded it is that they represent the opposite of this resentful, stingy energy. They are individuals who have the courage, self-possession, and optimism to follow their instincts wherever they lead, even when they lead someplace highly impractical, because they know that there is a real richness there.
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