The Death of the Artist: Why Creators Can’t Make a Living in the Digital Age

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:00 --> 00:04:38)
I'm Dustin Grinnell , and this is Curiously.

In this episode, we're talking about something most artists don't like to talk about: money. How they make it, and why it's become harder than ever to make enough to live on. To explore this idea and more, I talk with cultural critic William Deresiewicz about his 2020 book, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive In the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, in which he writes about how modern artists are struggling to make a living in the age of the internet. To write the book, Derežović interviewed 140 artists, including novelists, playwrights, poets, creators of documentaries, films and TV shows, and visual artists, about how they're making money from their art despite the demonetization of their work and the challenging economic conditions, like high rental and housing costs, wage stagnation, student debt, and more. None of this is news to me, having been writing and publishing nonfiction and fiction for the last 10 years.

I've self-published 2 novels, published my third with a hybrid publisher, my fourth and fifth books with small presses, and I've published dozens of articles and essays with various magazines and literary journals. It may surprise you, but I make very little from this published work. Royalties trickle in, which amount to tens of dollars a quarter, Publish articles pay $30, maybe $150, but usually zero. A few years ago I wrote a piece of journalism for Vice, which took me a few weeks to put together, and I made $300. Last year, when I published my novel The Empathy Academy, I sold 128 books in the first few weeks at $17.99, which is about $2,300, but I only made $450.

The rest of the money went to retailers, mostly Amazon, printing and distribution fees, and the Postal Service. This summer, I pre-sold 56 copies of my new collection of short stories, The Healing Book. At $24 per copy, that's about $1,300 in sales. I get 8% of the profits, which means I'll make about $100. Not only do I make little from this work, it often costs me a lot.

To get work publish-ready, I hire editors, designers, illustrators, and the like. In 2023, I'm publishing 3 books: a collection of short stories, a poetry chapbook, and a collection of personal essays. And I've spent over $9,000 hiring creative freelancers, and it's only October. I'm currently having a children's book I wrote illustrated. The book needs 20 illustrations at $100 per illustration.

That's another $2,000, and that's before prospective publishers consider the book for publication. Other costs abound, like entry fees to awards competitions, review services, and countless $3 charges to submit to journals. How do I pay for all of this? Well, I hold down corporate writing jobs that pay my bills and provide the capital and stability to support my creative life. Why am I divulging all of this?

Because I think it's important for all of us, artists and the public alike, to start openly talking about our financial lives. So that we can get a clear picture about how artists and the arts economy is doing. In The Death of the Artist, Deresiewicz got over 140 artists to open up about their financial lives. And what he found is pretty bleak. Making ends meet has never been easy for artists, but it turns out that most creative professionals are just trying to keep their heads above water in the digital era.

Even many quote-unquote successful artists are still struggling to make ends meet. Terezowicz's book validated a reality that I'd been living for over a decade. A feeling I've had, like a glitch in the matrix, a splinter in my brain, that something's deeply off about the economics of making money from art in the 21st century. Initially, I thought Terezowicz's book was going to bum me out. Who wants to read about how difficult it's become to make a living in the thing you love doing?

And yet, reading The Death of the Artist was unexpectedly encouraging. Derezywicz is like a diagnostician. Through his research, reporting, and insights, he identified and clearly showed the problem, the illness, so to speak, so we can acknowledge it and try to find potential solutions. I learned that most successful artists and creators of our time are not waiting for publishers, studios, and music labels to catapult them out of obscurity. They're self-generating their opportunities.

Dustin Grinnell00:04:40 --> 00:04:42)
William Deresiewicz, welcome to the podcast.

William Deresiewicz (00:04:42 --> 00:04:43)
Thanks for having me on.

Dustin Grinnell00:04:44 --> 00:05:12)
Yeah, so I invited you on the podcast to talk about your 2020 book, The Death of the Artist. The subtitle is How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. I read the book a couple times and I was pretty floored by it because what you did is you talked to 140 or so artists, I think it was, from playwrights to novelists, filmmakers and writers, and people involved in the arts—

William Deresiewicz (00:05:12 --> 00:05:16)
producers and journalists— and, but yes, mostly artists.

Dustin Grinnell (00:05:16 --> 00:05:16)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell00:05:16 --> 00:05:42)
And you asked them, how is it going? Uh, how are you making a living? Is it going well? What's the arts economy like? And that's what I really liked about it, just 'cause you went right to the source and you sort of gave the reality of what it's like to be an artist in the digital era. So I mean, the first thing I wanted to know is how'd you come to the topic? What was the origin of the book for you?

William Deresiewicz (00:05:42 --> 00:09:36)
So I started to think about kind of this new entrepreneurial creativity when I moved to Portland, Oregon from the East Coast in 2008. And it was kind of the rising crest of the food cart movement. And I, you know, and I loved it just as somebody who lived in Portland, all the, all these young people running around like doing kind of creative but entrepreneurially creative things like food carts or small businesses that made, like, I don't know, wallets from recycled plastic or, you know, that kind of thing. But it immediately raised the question for me, like, where are these people going to be in 10 years? Like, how is this sustainable?

So I started to think about all that, and I started to write about— but in kind of an abstract, general sort of quote-unquote cultural criticism kind of way— about where I thought the creative economy, and specifically the arts economy, was heading. With the emergence of this phrase that was on many people's lips at the time, creative entrepreneur. It's a phrase that I was pretty skeptical of. But again, to kind of take some shortcuts in the story, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic that came out in 2015 that was called— they called it The Death of the Artist and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur. I just wanted to call it A New Paradigm for the Arts because what I had come to in the course of thinking about this, like how did we get to the creative entrepreneur, is that the arts economy, and therefore the whole nature of what it means to be an artist, had gone through several different phases, or I call them paradigms, throughout history.

And not to start with this whole history at the beginning, but, you know, artists were artisans once, and then the whole bohemian kind of thing emerged. And then they became professionals, really, after World War II, a whole professional apparatus. And now this new thing was happening that people wanted to call creative entrepreneurship. And I wrote this piece, and like I said, I really kind of was staring at my navel. It was just whatever I'd happened to, like, pick up in my net, you know, kind of trawling the culture over the previous few years.

And I got a fairly robust response from a fairly wide range of artists saying, like, hey, I think you're onto something here. So that's when I thought, I think there's a lot of room to run in this topic. This should be a book. But it took me a while to figure out what the book was really going to be about. And I thought it would be more kind of cultural criticism and even criticizing artists for being sellouts.

And I, I realized, like, this is bullshit and you need to talk to people. And I started to talk to people, and my rule was that I didn't want to talk to anybody famous. Like even famous enough so that like I saw a piece about them in the Times or at NPR. I knew enough to know that the typical artist was not famous. Like even of the small fraction of art of people who want to be artists and who may call themselves artists who are actual working artists, and that's already a small fraction, a small fraction of that small fraction are the ones that we've heard of or the ones, you know, who really get any kind of exposure, let alone the big stars.

Dustin Grinnell00:09:36 --> 00:09:53)
Yeah, so you went right to the source, and were you surprised by what you heard? Because it sounds like what you heard was artists living differently than what you call techno-utopian narrative, right, was saying. You know, it was like they were struggling, and hence the title of your book.

William Deresiewicz (00:09:53 --> 00:10:26)
Yeah, there are two stories. What I call the techno-utopian narrative is the story that Silicon Valley has been peddling about making a living as an artist in a digital economy. I think it really started with Steve Jobs came back to Apple and they kind of dreamed up this whole new marketing campaign that was about how are we gonna sell these expensive products to people? Well, we're gonna convince them that if you're a real creative genius, and by the way, you are because everybody is, you just don't know it yet, then you need our wonderful machines, not those stinky, you know, PCs and stuff. The Think Different campaign, right?

Dustin Grinnell (00:10:26 --> 00:10:26)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell00:10:26 --> 00:10:30)
Everybody's an artist. He had Albert Einstein and—

William Deresiewicz (00:10:30 --> 00:10:30)
Exactly.

Dustin Grinnell00:10:30 --> 00:10:31)
Put up against Picasso.

Dustin Grinnell (00:10:31 --> 00:10:32)
Yeah.

William Deresiewicz (00:10:32 --> 00:12:51)
And so the story became not just everyone's a potential artist by these machines, but also everybody's a potential artist and you can make a living doing it because the gatekeepers are dead. You can appeal directly to the audience. You can put your stuff out there. It's all free. You know, the internet is free.

And I started to hear this, and I even started to hear this from a few young writers I knew, and how great this was. And I immediately smelled a rat because it seemed already clear to me— I mean, Napster was 1999, okay? Napster was the first kind of piracy machine. How are you— how's anybody going to make a living doing this? Like, how are you going to get anybody to pay you?

And then you did start to hear this from artists, first with musicians, and they tended to be attacked for it because the audience didn't want to hear this. They didn't want to hear that getting all your music for free might actually not be an ethical thing to do. So there's the Silicon Valley story, and then there's the artist story, which is, yeah, We can circumvent the gatekeepers, nobody's paying us, and you, Silicon Valley in particular, are screwing us. So when I went into the book, it was not to figure out which story was true, because it was obvious that the artist's story was true. What I was really curious about, and this goes back to me looking at the food carts in Portland in 2008, was like, given the fact that it's got to be really hard to make a living now on the internet as an artist, How are people doing it?

Because presumably some people are doing it. And it took a while for me to, you know, sort of— I had to work sort of through personal connections and then kind of connections to those connections and connections to the connections to the connections. First of all, because I didn't want famous people. And second of all, because I was asking people to, like, tell me some really intimate things, like, compared to talking about people's sex lives. Which everybody apparently seems ready to do, especially in the younger generation.

Dustin Grinnell00:12:52 --> 00:12:54)
Money, yeah, especially for the artist type.

William Deresiewicz (00:12:54 --> 00:12:59)
Yeah, especially for artist type, because you're not supposed to think about money, correct?

Dustin Grinnell00:12:59 --> 00:13:02)
Yeah, it's more— it's less pure to do so.

William Deresiewicz (00:13:02 --> 00:13:16)
Yes. So to finally answer your question, I was not surprised to learn that things were tough, but I learned a lot that was interesting, and some of it, I guess, surprising about how people actually do it and all sort of the ins and outs of what that involves.

Dustin Grinnell00:13:16 --> 00:14:00)
And not only they're doing it, they're doing it in really tough contemporary conditions, which you laid out, which is not just the difficulties of the internet but housing crisis, student debt. Yes, it's just really hard to live, uh, inexpensively these days. And so if you can't lower your expenses and spend 10 years taking a financial risk, you know, not making much money, putting up all that upfront investment. I mean, a novel can take 3 years, a documentary can take 3 years. You have to do that on speculation, and you have to do that and still have a home and still survive. So you went and talked to these artists, and you found that the ones you talked with were doing it. How were they doing it?

William Deresiewicz (00:14:00 --> 00:15:36)
You know, production is cheap because of all these digital tools to, like, you know, make songs and film and, you know— well, production isn't actually that cheap once you really get into it. A lot of the software and equipment is not cheap. But even if we stipulate that production can be relatively cheap and distribution is, in theory, free because you just put stuff on the internet, What these journalist idiots who are looking at this from 20,000 feet don't understand is, as you just suggested, those are not the two main costs of making art. The two main costs of making art are, first of all, staying alive while you make it, and second, becoming an artist in the first place. So that means rent and other living expenses, and it means usually some kind of school.

Right? And those are both really expensive, which means that you can't do the bohemian thing. You can't kind of live cheaply, live on the margins, part-time minimum wage job, focus on your art, and, you know, work 20 hours a week, which is the way people did it when places like New York and San Francisco were cheap, which they were. Like, you know, Greenwich Village was this cheap bohemia from basically the beginning of the 20th century through the '70s. And that's why, I mean, it was the same Bohemia, you know, Eugene O'Neill in the 1910s and Bob Dylan in the 1960s.

Dustin Grinnell00:15:37 --> 00:16:09)
Yeah. So you say that it sort of favors the privileged or people— I mean, the way I've made it work is I don't come from a privileged background, I guess, from an economic standpoint, but I have a 9-to-5. And so that's where I get my financial stability. And, or you could do gig work, be an Uber driver, and you can suffer the instability of that type of work as well. So you're finding like a very shaky existence for artists in your reporting.

William Deresiewicz (00:16:09 --> 00:16:15)
That's exactly right. I mean, you can do the 9 to 5, but it's hard to find time and energy beyond that, I'm sure.

Dustin Grinnell00:16:15 --> 00:16:18)
Yeah. It's a tough pill to swallow in a way.

William Deresiewicz (00:16:18 --> 00:16:43)
Yes. Yes. I mean, it's hard. You know, the cliché is that you have to be— whether it's the 9-to-5 and then you, you know, start writing your novel when you get home, or the gig work hustle, it only works if you're young, healthy, and childless. You know, that's the cliché. And of course, you know, one of those three you're definitely going to stop being, and usually, you know, often more than one. But you asked me how people are doing it?

Dustin Grinnell00:16:43 --> 00:16:44)
Given the headwinds, yeah.

William Deresiewicz (00:16:44 --> 00:19:55)
Everybody puts together a different mix of work in their field, some of which may be, like, their soul work, the work they really want to do, which probably means that it pays less. And some of it might be in their field, but kind of more commercial stuff, like business writing or something like that, or working for an arts organization. A lot of artists have jobs working for arts organizations. And then some of it might just be, you know, quote unquote, a day job where it's just unrelated. But there are lots and lots of sort of different kinds of little things that various kinds of artists can do, whether it's sort of, you know, nonprofit support like grants and residencies or teaching of various kinds, which can mean K through 12, it can mean college, it can mean online teaching, you know, giving courses to adults, all kinds of different things.

But beyond that multiplicity, the big thing that almost everyone has in common, especially younger people coming up now— I wouldn't say this is necessarily true of older, you know, people in their 50s and 60s, but they're kind of coasting on sort of the legacy situations that they created for themselves before the internet came along— is, and this is how they talk about it, you aggregate an audience, In other words, you build an audience and then you monetize the audience. In other words, you find a way to sell it things, generally things that aren't digital because digital content has been demonetized. And the way you do both of those things is through social media platforms. So that means constant production of, once upon a time would've been blogs, now maybe it's Substack. If you're a visual artist, it's Instagram probably, or maybe now it's TikTok.

And I don't know where Twitter is these days, but certainly for a long time, people were building their audience on Twitter and before that on Facebook. So it's, you know, the aggregating the audience and you don't just aggregate it once, right? You build your audience and then you have to keep, you have to hold onto it while literally a billion other things are competing for its attention. So you have to constantly feed it product., right? Not necessarily finished work, but just something like I said, you know, maybe it's a blog post, maybe it's like a process drawing, whatever.

You do that on social media platforms and especially do that on crowdfunding platforms. Almost all of the young artists I talked to were either on Kickstarter or Patreon or both, often both. And, you know, that's what people do. And it takes a tremendous amount of time and energy and it doesn't produce a lot of money. Most of the people I talked to who were willing to tell me the number, and I think most of them were, they were making less than $50,000 and often less than $40,000 a year, sometimes less than $30,000.

Dustin Grinnell00:19:55 --> 00:20:06)
You talked about in the book how one of the artists you spoke with talked about this idea of going beyond the book. In, uh, doing things that are creative, entrepreneurial.

William Deresiewicz (00:20:06 --> 00:20:08)
Yeah, that was that same guy, Nash.

Dustin Grinnell00:20:08 --> 00:20:14)
Yeah, you know, he'd go to a local restaurant and do an event for 10 people for $150 a head or something.

William Deresiewicz (00:20:14 --> 00:20:14)
I—

Dustin Grinnell00:20:14 --> 00:20:57)
the thing is, is that you have to self-generate your own opportunities, and you have to be a mover or shaker. But, and you have all access to all these, these resources, but that still means you have to do it, and that's really hard. It takes a lot of time and effort and energy, and you have to be your own publicist and your own marketer and your own graphic designer and build your own brand and maintain those 1,000 true fans or whoever they are. It's incredibly exhausting. It's hard enough just to make the art, to find your voice, to develop, to evolve, to find residencies and money, and now you have to do the entire thing. And I'm frankly surprised I don't know how anybody does it at all.

Dustin Grinnell (00:20:57 --> 00:20:57)
It's—

Dustin Grinnell00:20:57 --> 00:21:17)
I'm on the edge of burnout every day. Yeah, you know? And I know others who are as well. It's just very emotionally challenging. And it takes a real amount of resilience and grit to kind of do your thing, make whatever you want to make, but then also keep yourself afloat and alive and happy throughout the whole process and not just give up.

William Deresiewicz (00:21:17 --> 00:21:42)
I agree. I agree to all of that. And I talk about it in the book. First of all, and it just drives me crazy that— let's just take a step back and say that Americans in general, they may not realize this about themselves, but they hate artists. They really hate them passionately. Like, they love the ones they love. They love Taylor Swift or whoever their favorite musicians are. But if you survey Americans about their attitudes about artists—

Dustin Grinnell00:21:42 --> 00:21:43)
What's up with that?

William Deresiewicz (00:21:43 --> 00:24:06)
But there's this weird disconnect, like, there are people behind. You don't have art unless you have artists. Well, what is up with it? I think artists are seen as lazy, useless dreamers. And I think there's resentment against the idea of people daring to do this thing that reads as very self-indulgent.

Like, who are you to think that you can just follow your dream? Who are you to think that you can do this kind of airy-fairy, artsy-fartsy thing when I'm miserable in my— I'm being a responsible citizen by having a job that I hate. And so part of it, as I just said, part of that whole sort of imaginative fantasy complex is that artists are lazy or that artists don't work very much. I actually met this guy on an airplane who, when he found that I was a writer, said, "Oh, you're a writer. I bet you work—" 6 hours a day, 4 days a week.

And it's like, where did he get this idea from? I've known— because my brother was a doctor, I've known a lot of doctors in my life. I have not met anyone who works harder than the artists that I interviewed. You know, they work as hard as doctors do when they're doing their training, you know, but they don't do it for 3 years. They just keep doing it.

They work all the time. They work up from when they get up to when they go to sleep, like you said. And they're not earning any kind of doctor's salary either. Young, healthy, and childless. Tremendous, as you said, grit, self-belief, an unbelievable ability to withstand rejection and disappointment, because mostly it's rejection.

I talked to a writer, one of the people I profiled who seems quite successful. And I said, "How are you so successful?" And she said, "You know, people ask me that." And I send them— She had written something for The Washington Post that involved creating what she called her failure resume, which was a spreadsheet of all the opportunities that she pursued and whether she got them or not over a period of like 5 years. And there were about 600 items on the list. And she'd been successful 18 times. So that's a 97% failure rate.

Dustin Grinnell00:24:06 --> 00:24:09)
That's about it. It's about 1 to 3%. Yeah.

William Deresiewicz (00:24:09 --> 00:24:30)
Yeah. But she'd been successful 18 times in 5 years, so she looked successful. Right. And they were significant successes. But the point is, like, you really have to have some fortitude to send out, you know, to query 25 agents to represent your novel, which she did, you know, and not give up. Until she found the agent that wanted to represent her. Mm-hmm.

Dustin Grinnell00:24:30 --> 00:25:05)
Yeah, I have 2 short stories coming out in a couple months now, and they're part of a collection of short stories that I'm publishing this year. And so I'm trying to individually publish the short stories, and there's 13 of them. And I have folders for each of the 13 stories, and inside is a document called Publications. And there's a list of publications that I've submitted to. And each of those 13 stories has a list of 60 journals, journals, magazines, websites. So 60 times 13. So 780. Yeah.

William Deresiewicz (00:25:05 --> 00:25:06)
So, yeah.

Dustin Grinnell00:25:06 --> 00:25:14)
And so that means I'm submitting every day, a few times per day, every single day, 365 days a week. And I think I have like 3 hits this year. Right.

William Deresiewicz (00:25:15 --> 00:25:16)
So which is great.

Dustin Grinnell00:25:16 --> 00:25:30)
But it looks like, wow. Yeah, good for you. But it's pure rejection. It's— Yeah. So I definitely take your point. Artists seem to work incredibly hard. They also work with a lot of uncertainty as well, 'cause you don't—

William Deresiewicz (00:25:30 --> 00:25:31)
Tremendous uncertainty.

Dustin Grinnell00:25:31 --> 00:26:11)
You know, it's not like replacing a hip, you know? A novel can go an infinite amount of ways. A film can go an infinite amount of ways. So you have to sort of apply craft and make creative choices and iterate and workshop and so on and so forth. So those are just emotionally, psychologically challenging conditions in and of itself. Forget the practical aspect of making money and having a house and all the rest. So yeah, and still artists get a lot of flack, don't they? Even as children, don't they? Like, uh, you show artistic talents and it's— maybe that gets a little weird or strange. Um, yeah, then maybe they have to talk to somebody if they show like a sensitive artistic temperament, you know.

William Deresiewicz (00:26:11 --> 00:28:59)
And really each stage of it is distinct. And I, I think I have about 6 stages in this sort of generic artist biography. And the first stage is what happens when you're a kid. First of all, so many of the people I talked to told me that they knew that they were going to be an artist, wanted to be an artist from an incredibly young age. Like, not even 12 or 8 sometimes, but 5 or 3.

You know, somebody told me that they were, like, reading at 2 and writing at 3. And, you know, this is, you know, if you're a pharmacist or whatever, you don't set your heart on that when you're 3 years old. When you're 3, you think you're going to be a fireman or a ballerina, and then generally don't end up doing that. But these artists already knew from the beginning and they stuck with it. And then as you just said, the other thing about the artist childhood is that they get no support, no support from anyone, including the school system for who they are.

And I talk about this. Some of the artists I talked to were also really successful academically in a traditional sense, but the correlation is completely random. There's no correlation. Some of them were, a lot of them weren't. And the school system has no way— it should, but it doesn't have any way to recognize, validate, and nurture artistic ability.

It doesn't fit into the boxes. And this has only gotten worse with the sort of teach-to-the-test kind of regimes, box-checking regimes that we have now. If you're artistically gifted but maybe academically not doing well, maybe because like a lot of artists you have ADHD, then you can be seen as dumb, as slow, or just as problematic. You know, and your parents don't want you to be an artist. Often if they are artists, they don't want you to be an artist.

You know, the world tells you that you're— it's bad enough to be an English major. It's like when you tell an adult that you want to be an artist, they just— it's like every adult has gotten the memo. Right. To whenever you meet an aspiring young artist, it's your job to make them feel stupid and to try to discourage them. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell00:28:59 --> 00:29:01)
And tell them there's no money in it. And yeah.

William Deresiewicz (00:29:01 --> 00:29:03)
Yeah. What good is it? Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell00:29:03 --> 00:29:44)
Right. It's surprisingly true, even from, like you said, parents who are artists already, they discourage it. Like, my dad is very— he's self-employed, he's very entrepreneurial, but he thought it was probably not a very good choice to be a writer. But I guess what choice? Is that what you found when you're talking with the artists is that it wasn't easy getting into it?

Practically speaking, it's been hard as they're working and yet they do it anyways. Like what keeps them going? What's the motor? You said a lot of them just, it's a compulsion. It's they just have to do it, you know?

William Deresiewicz (00:29:44 --> 00:32:06)
It's really hard, and I love to do it." And I mean, there's no other way you could possibly do this if you didn't feel that way. If there was any doubt or anything else you can do— I mean, I remember Steve Van Zandt saying this about the guys who were in his bands back in Hesbury Park. It's like if you had another option, you took it. Right. But I should also say, part of the life cycle is that moment in your 30s that a lot of people reach where they do have to make a decision, or they feel they have to make a decision.

Some people will continue their whole lives, either because they're delusional and they think they're going to get their big break, or because this is who they are and they can deal with the poverty and they're just going to keep going.. But a lot of people, maybe because they want to have kids or maybe because they're not young, childless, and healthy anymore, or not young anymore, they feel a waning of their energy. It's becoming very discouraging. They do kind of step off the path and sort of get a legit job. And generally, the time to do that is when you're in your 30s, because older than that, it's going to be really hard.

And I say this in the book. I think that's a completely valid choice. And that choice should also not be stigmatized, which it is from within the arts community. It's like, you gave up, you know, now all the people who told you you should never have done it, now you kind of have to go to them and shame-faced, like, oh, as if they were right all along. But I don't think they were right all along.

Dustin Grinnell00:32:06 --> 00:32:29)
You talk about these conditions that have changed during the digital era, making it much harder to make a living these days, and the kind of loss of the middle-class artist. You know, I'm wondering what, in your analysis, what does that mean for a society when we don't have that layer of artists in the middle.

William Deresiewicz (00:32:29 --> 00:37:15)
So let's explain that a little bit. One of the biggest themes that emerged from kind of the macro analysis, because the micro and macro, first macro, then micro, this is the sort of big picture and this is how individuals are negotiating the big picture. And one of the biggest features of the big picture is the loss of the middle. And that can mean Midsize galleries. It can mean recording artists, musicians who are below the level of the big blockbuster stars but are able to kind of just sustain a respectable career.

It means midlist authors. Again, not the celebrity kind of giant, you know, 6 and 7 figure advances, but also not the like tiny independent presses that really don't give you much of at all. It means mid-budget movies, which used to be the kind of— like, these used to be the movies that won all the Oscars. It was like serious but also decent Hollywood production values, you know? I don't know, Terms of Endearment or whatever.

It doesn't matter whether I like these particular movies or not. I think some of them were good, some of them were not. But that kind of classic, like, Hollywood movie for grown-ups, you know? All of these have been lost to what people call the blockbuster effect, which is that the big have gotten bigger and the small has gotten smaller. And this is partly just an effect of the physics, almost the dynamics, the logic of the internet, of how it works.

It's the logic of virality. The more visibility you have, the more visibility you get. So either you become a star or you fall into complete obscurity. One statistic that I cite is that in the '80s, 80% of revenue in the music business went to 20% of the acts. And this was like the days of Michael Jackson.

It's not like they weren't big acts. 80% went to 20%. Now 80% goes to 1%. 1%. Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, I mean, they keep breaking records, but meanwhile, the kind of musician who would have been able to support themselves with you know, decent album sales, maybe just 10,000 albums, and, you know, a moderate amount of touring.

They're now touring themselves to death and still not getting by. And then part of it is also just the general kind of separation of the top from the rest of society. So in the world of, you know, the so-called art world, the world of high-end visual art, paintings and sculptures, it's not a digital economy. But you have these giant gallery leviathans like Gagosian that have been consolidating and growing and basically eating all of those mid-level galleries. It used to be rare for a dealer to operate in more than one location, and Gagosian has like 19 locations in 7 countries.

And what'll happen now is that an artist will kind of start at that lowest level, like the artist-run gallery somewhere in Bushwick or something, and then a mid-level gallery will take a chance on them. But as soon as they become hot, Gagosian or one of the other monsters will poach them. And because of what's happened to real estate, say in New York, the mid-level galleries can't survive anyway. So what happens, right? You asked me what happens when that's lost?

Well, what happens when that's lost is that, I mean, I think it's that mid-level where all the good stuff happens. You know, it's the people who are good enough to find some kind of audience, like the musicians who, you know, who managed to get out of that sort of open mic situation but are either not commercial enough to be a pop star or don't want to be. They're able to have some integrity or make a film that has some integrity. I'm afraid that, you know, TV, which was the exception in the last decade and certainly the decade before, and, you know, Netflix Actually, it wasn't Netflix, but a lot of them, you know, there were all those, like, little auteur comedies, like Louis C.K. and Maria Bamford and Pamela Adlon write Better Things.

And there were a whole bunch of these really great— you know, Zach Galifianakis had that show Baskets. Like, what the fuck is this thing? But it's, like, really weird and interesting. But that was all kind of during the Wild West period of streaming, when the streamer companies were taking chances. They didn't know what was gonna work.

And that's gone now. I don't think we're going to see that again. I mean, people have said this, that like, you know, they figured out what works and what doesn't, and it's just going to be more blockbuster shit. It's going to just kind of become like Hollywood movies. So that's what I think we're losing, is the ability for serious artists to sustain a career in a way that enables them to continue to produce work and develop as artists and, you know, enrich our brains.

Dustin Grinnell00:37:15 --> 00:37:29)
Is there an artist that you talk to springs to mind who stuck with you in terms of their ability to combat the challenges, or someone who just delighted you, or who is maintaining hope and optimism and kicking butt? Or—

William Deresiewicz (00:37:29 --> 00:40:57)
Like, I was really moved talking to these people. Like, they were really impressive human beings. And I didn't filter my interviewees based on whether I liked their work. That was another important principle for me. Because it wasn't about, can the kind of art that Bill Deresiewicz likes survive?

It's like, if it has an audience, if this person has an audience, that's good enough for me. In some cases, I really did like their work, but it was their quality as human beings. Precisely in the way that we've just talked about, their ability not just to stand up to adversity, but to stand up to adversity with a sense of hope, with a sense of optimism, with a sense of conviction, like, this is what I should be doing. I mean, this is just one example of many, but when I think of an artist who's really committed to poverty, there is that visual artist, Faïna Lerman, who lives near Detroit with her husband and her two little kids. They're probably not that little anymore.

And they live, like, on no money. They live on, like, $20-something thousand. And she said, and I quote this in the book, she said, you know, I said, so, like, how do you feel about your life? And she said, well, you know, I decided a long time ago that I was going to be a starving artist, that I was going to live hand to mouth, but I was going to be doing work that I love. And as she put it, I was going to be spiritually intact.

She said, "We don't have a lot, but we have a good life." And I just found that so moving and also so inspiring. So inspiring. Because we don't, like, by definition, we'll not hear about those kinds of people because they don't make a big splash. You know, if you make a big splash, it's actually not quite this simple an equation, but if you make a big splash, it's probably you're going to make a fair amount of money, at least for a little while. She's not even trying to play, you know, that game.

She's in this little bohemia they've got going in Detroit, and she's making her work for the people around her, and she doesn't worry about getting shown in a gallery in New York or what the people who went to art school at Yale think about what she does. So those sparks, they're still there. But another thing that I think is really unfortunate and fucked up about the way the arts work now is precisely that we're not going to really hear about them. I know that it's very easy to sort of idealize an earlier age and especially the '60s, music in the '60s. But I think about, I don't know, somebody like Bowie or Lou Reed or Dylan.

I mean, all of these people were discovered by the mainstream and seized upon and had tremendous material success, but they didn't do it by selling out. It's like they moved the rest of us closer to them. They changed our biochemistry. They changed the culture. I don't know that that happens anymore because yes, you can reach that level of stardom, but only by adapting yourself to the mainstream rather than the other way around.

Dustin Grinnell00:40:57 --> 00:40:59)
You have to pretzel yourself to that.

William Deresiewicz (00:40:59 --> 00:41:00)
Yes, they're writing to formula.

Dustin Grinnell00:41:00 --> 00:41:40)
That, that's exactly right. How did the book in general fit into your writing genre, the genre of criticism? It sounded like before you got into actually talking to people, you didn't quite know where it was going to go. But to me, it almost seemed like this kind of clear-eyed view of reality. I really liked it for that.

It was almost like forget about that Steve Jobs nonsense. Like, this is really what it's like. And I got a sense it was almost like an exposé for me. I was kind of like, oh, this is— yes, this is very validating because I'm doing exactly this. And he hit the nail on the head, and I found it encouraging in that regard.

William Deresiewicz (00:41:40 --> 00:43:27)
And I liked the way that it kind of took me outside of myself. You know, it wasn't just my own thoughts. I think that one way that it pretty clearly connects to criticism— I do book criticism, I used to do dance criticism, I've cared— I was an English professor before I became a full-time writer. So caring about the arts is something that I've done my entire adult life. When I started, I did think that there'd be more criticism in the book and it would be more of a kind of a cultural critic's book.

And I do have kind of like one long chapter where I kind of bracket that off and actually say what I think about all of this stuff. But that isn't mainly what it became. It became a book that, without being pretentious, is, I hope, in service to the arts in a different way, in exactly the way you just said, trying to tell it like it is, especially for artists. In other words, so that artists see that they're not crazy, that their struggles are not a result of their own failures. They're not alone.

Dustin Grinnell00:43:27 --> 00:44:35)
You know, you're not hoping, you're not deluding yourself. You're saying, oh, wow. Yeah. Demonetization. Yeah, it's really hard to live in these cultural centers because of the housing crisis.

So, okay, that's the reality. Now we navigate. Now we do things like go beyond the book. Maybe, and I read your book, the first time I read it was last fall. It may have something to do with me starting a podcast because just 'cause, you know, I mean, you've got to expand, you've got to build a brand, so to speak, as much as that makes everyone miserable.

I think it's part of it. Yeah. And build that following. So I think you did that. Good.

Yeah. Good. Yeah. And also maybe starting a conversation about talking about money. Like, can the public start talking about money?

Can artists start talking about money? I think you even confessed in the book that you had started out as a purist in a way. Yes. This relationship between art and money. And I myself was the same way, but It seems like maybe you want that to change and you think that should change.

William Deresiewicz (00:44:35 --> 00:44:57)
By the way, I, uh, I happened to be in Raleigh, North Carolina the other week giving a couple of talks, and one of them was for a high school class, a design class at a magnet school, an arts magnet. And these kids are still being fed the same line about, you know, you can do it and just put yourself out there.

Dustin Grinnell00:44:57 --> 00:44:58)
Not by their teacher.

William Deresiewicz (00:44:58 --> 00:49:00)
Yeah, yes, that's right. You can do anything you set your mind to and don't think about money. So this narrative continues to need to be combated. So that original piece in The Atlantic in 2015 called "The Death of the Artist" was definitely written from that purist position. And one of the first interviews I did, I said I had to work starting with people I knew and then working out from there.

So I contacted an old student, someone I'd been— many years ago and was working as an indie film director. And he called bullshit on it. He said, you know, you're peddling the same line. And it really kind of turned my head around. And that's when I stopped thinking that the book would be, you know, there'd be a lot of criticism of the kinds of sellout things that artists were doing now.

It's like, people need to find whatever way they can to make a living. We need to be honest about money in the arts. I need to be honest about money in the arts. Of course there's money in the arts. It's like, how could there not be?

This is how things get done in this economy. It's like with money, through the capitalist marketplace. And I would say even more than that, it changed the whole way that I think about capitalism. I mean, I grew up like a typical lefty, just imbibing generic lefty beliefs without thinking about them. And of course, one of them is that the market is evil and capitalism is evil.

And I really started to I kind of look at my own relationship with the market. It's like there are definitely really fucked up things about capitalism, especially as it exists now, kind of neoliberal, unbridled, unregulated capitalism. But the market also brings us the things that we want. And what did we think the world was like before the market? And what do we think it's going to be like after the market?

Do we want other people making decisions about what we get to have? What's the alternative? Yeah. Yeah. And this may be an overly rosy way of seeing, and I'm trying to also distinguish between capitalism and the market because markets existed before capitalism.

And I think there's a really strong tendency on the left to just think the market is evil. Any kind of commerce, any kind of exchange, you know, it's inevitably corrupting. And it's like, no, when markets are functioning properly, they are transmitting signals of desire. They're the ways for us to get what we want, to tell other people what we want, and then to have those other people supply it so that they can get something in return. And there's nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing wrong with that. We have to keep the market in bounds. We do, I think, as creative people, do need to kind of keep an eye on, are they being corrupted? But No, I don't want to function. And if I could just say one more thing, I know I'm kind of going on here.

I think another thing that's played into this complex of thoughts is the recognition that the nonprofit side, the supposedly pure side of the art world, aside from the fact that there's all kinds of money there that nobody's talking about, plus like, okay, you're not going to take money from the Sacklers because of the opioid crisis. What about the other people you're taking money from? Where do you think they got it from? You think their hands are pure? Don't be ridiculous.

But also, the nonprofit world has its own corruptions. Like somebody who used to be— it was that same novelist. She used to be a playwright, and she just got fed up with all of the cronyism in the theater. Like, there's a committee that's handing out the grants, that's deciding what pieces to commission. They have their own investments.

They're helping out their friends or whatever it is. So this idea that if we can only get away from the market, we won't have— art won't be corrupted. In some ways, I think the market is more honest because at least it's about, do you have an audience there or not? Are people willing to pay for your thing or not? It's not like whose back you scratched, whose ass you kissed.

Dustin Grinnell00:49:00 --> 00:49:54)
The line from your book really stuck with me because I think I was developing a little bit like you said you were too, like maybe into this kind of anti-capitalist, anti-market, quasi-anarchist perspective. And but then I, yeah, I mean, reading the line where you said it's not, you're not anti-capitalist, you're just against unbridled capitalism. You're against like greed and like enormous profits. That are disproportional. And I definitely get that. And that actually helped really change my mind, which is cool. But I think one of the things you said too, to kind of come full circle maybe, is, you know, because the book is about the arts economy being pretty broken and artists struggling, so how do we fix it? And one of the solutions you put forth is fixing the whole economy. You know, you got to fix the whole economy before you fix the arts economy.

William Deresiewicz (00:49:54 --> 00:49:55)
And I wonder—

Dustin Grinnell00:49:55 --> 00:50:08)
unfortunately, that's a big solution. Just solve wealth and income inequality. And yeah, yeah, right. So what did you mean by that concretely? Like, where can we start? Where should we start?

William Deresiewicz (00:50:08 --> 00:53:35)
And there's some great ones. A number of the ones that I wrote about no longer exist. They tend to be hard to sustain. Then at a higher level, because you do need to scale these things, is things that you can do that might help the arts economy separate from the larger economy. And since the problem really is these tech platforms and how they've demonetized content, you need to address the tech platforms.

And the thing is that they've demonetized content in the sense that it's cheap or free, and therefore the people creating the content, the art, are not getting very much money. But that doesn't mean that the content isn't generating a lot of money. It hasn't been demonetized in that sense. Right? I mean, every time you have— we know this— every time we have some kind of interaction online, someone's collecting your data and someone is selling that data.

So the estimates that I saw when I was working on the book, which is now 5 or 6 years ago, is that something like $50 billion a year is flowing away from artists to the tech platforms that would once have gone to artists back in the bad old days of record labels and publishing companies and so on and so forth. So it's not like the money isn't there. The streaming rates, this is the obvious example, the streaming rates that the streaming services pay to musicians are low beyond belief unless you already know how it works. So we don't even know the real numbers because the platforms don't have to release them. But it can be as much as, say, half a cent per stream and as little as 700ths of a cent per stream.

Which seems to be what YouTube pays. YouTube is owned by Google. YouTube is where half of all music streaming happens. 7 hundredths of a cent per stream means a million streams, $700. Okay?

So, point is, markets do not— they are not naturally occurring phenomena despite what the libertarians like to claim. They are always structured by government regulation. Here we have a market that is not functioning properly. And government needs to step in and regulate. That can mean breaking up the big tech companies so they have less power in the marketplace.

It can actually mean setting streaming rates the way that the government sets rates for the power company. And then there is fixing the whole economy, which is what we were talking about before, that, you know, artists would be decently okay even with the kinds of money that they get if it were possible to live, if we had healthcare, if we had universal healthcare that was free at the point of delivery, if we had, as I believe we should have, free higher education, if we did something— God knows what this would involve— but if we did something about housing costs, well, I mean, I guess it would start by involving building a lot more housing, bringing down the cost of housing in creative centers and in other places. That's what I mean. And of course, if we did all those things, everybody would benefit and not just artists. Did you—

Dustin Grinnell00:53:35 --> 00:54:08)
I hesitate to ask about artificial intelligence, but I mean, there's a can of worms for you. But yeah, and we're, you know, I didn't necessarily think AI was going to come for the creative class, but, uh, yeah, and now we make images and music and you can write a novel in, you know, a minute or so using some of these platforms. So as if the artistic community, artists, arts economy needed another challenge, I guess. But that is a big one.

William Deresiewicz (00:54:08 --> 00:56:30)
Yeah, well, I wrote a piece about this. Yeah, I read that. I think it was in Tablet, right? I think that AI could be really bad for artists economically. I think especially by replacing them in that— remember we talked about this— one of the big things that artists do to make a living is like less creative stuff in their own field, like business writing or graphic design or something like that.

That's the kind of thing that I think is most replaceable. I don't believe— I know this is a very shaky kind of prediction that history has proven wrong very often, although history is also proven wrong a lot of the tech hype. So let's not, you know, let's not forget that we were all supposed to be walking around with virtual reality goggles and 3D printing our, you know, our scrambled eggs. So I'm going to make a risky prediction, which is that I don't think that AI will ever be able to produce really good art, fiction, song, whatever. And my argument has to do with the fact that creativity is not a high probability choice, which is how these AIs work, right, by learning, you know, what's the most likely next word or whatever.

It's precisely the unexpected, the low probability choice. But I would also say that art is fundamentally about conveying kind of the taste of experience, and AIs are not capable of experiencing the world. They're just computer code that's correlating data. And even if someday, and maybe soon, they are capable of experiencing the world, because apparently they're like, they want to hook up AI to sensory functions and then maybe give them legs. And then I don't know why anybody thinks that's a good idea, but so they can move around in the world.

But even if AI will be capable of having something that we can meaningfully call experience, it won't be our experience. It won't be human experience. So I mean, I think it would necessarily be radically different from human experience. So I don't really see a time when people are going to think that they're going to be reading novels generated by AI. Except that unfortunately, we have seen that people are willing to accept cheap crap in replace instead of expensive quality.

Dustin Grinnell00:56:30 --> 00:56:35)
It might not be a serious work of fiction. It could be a blockbuster. That's right.

William Deresiewicz (00:56:35 --> 00:56:40)
That's right. Which is a lot of the reading that people do.

Dustin Grinnell00:56:40 --> 00:57:21)
I don't know what's gonna happen. We'll see. So, um, and I guess one of my final questions is kind of, um, you proved that the techno utopian narrative was, was false, right? You sort of put it down and you found the real story by talking to people who are actually making artwork. What's the new narrative? Like, what, what should be Everybody needs a way of making sense of their life and work. I mean, what is the— how do we go here in our heads? Like, what's the new narrative that could help be optimistic, that could help us deal with the challenging conditions?

William Deresiewicz (00:57:21 --> 00:58:44)
No, but I mean, I think the new narrative could be, look, this is the reality. The reality is that it's hard. You shouldn't assume that it's going to work out for you, but it's worth doing. I mean, so one element that I would love to change in the narrative, and it's clear that you would too, is the contempt that we direct and the discouragement that we direct to an artist. And I would also say that there's strength in numbers.

I mean, both in terms of getting together and trying to negotiate for a better deal, but just psychologically. Emotionally. I think artists, and a lot of the artists I talk to do this, I mean, there's this tremendous solidarity and kind of mutual aid. But going through this with other people, just being in connection with other people and being supportive of other people, again, psychologically and materially, you don't have to be alone and you shouldn't be alone. Because there's something about creating that is very alone, right?

Dustin Grinnell00:58:44 --> 00:58:48)
If you're able to say, what are you working on now?

William Deresiewicz (00:58:48 --> 00:59:12)
What's next for you? I'm not able to say yet. I'm working on a couple of book possibilities, but I'm just doing— I'm doing a lot of freelance writing for places like Tablet and Persuasion and Liberties. I'm sure these are journals that are on the tip of everybody's tongue, but you can find them. And, you know, if you put a link to my website, you know, I put all my stuff up there.

Dustin Grinnell00:59:12 --> 00:59:18)
Yeah, I will. Any other places that you would share as far as where people can find you?

William Deresiewicz (00:59:18 --> 00:59:45)
Well, I mean, I'm on Facebook and Twitter, and apparently I'm even on Substack now, although I don't actually write a Substack. But, um, but my website is the best place. And I have, I have a newsletter that's just— I don't write anything for the newsletter. It's just I send out links to my stuff when it comes out. And there's a sign-up box on my website. So I would love for people to join my mailing list if they want, want to be notified when new work comes out. Okay. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell00:59:45 --> 00:59:56)
Well, uh, yeah, thank you again for coming on and talk with me again. The book was The Death of the Artist, and I really enjoyed it very much and enjoyed speaking with you about it. Me too.

Dustin Grinnell (00:59:56 --> 01:00:13)
Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with William Deresiewicz, author of The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. Stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet along the way.