Artists, work and the lack thereof

Edward Winkleman is currently playing host to an impromptu state-of-the-working-artist symposium over at his blog. I’ve already put in my two cents (somewhere around the point where participants are starting to getting delightfully snippy about class issues, bless), but would like to elaborate on the issue at hand: namely, what should artists be getting from their educations to better enable them to survive in the real world.

Deborah Fisher, formerly of SELLOUT, has offered one of the more interesting positions in the course of the discussion:

The goal of a college is not the goal of a trade school. A college degree shouldn’t get you anything practical at all. What it should get you is intellectual freedom from practicality. Ideally, a college graduate is a critical thinker who can back away from a problem and see it in the largest possible way, applying lots of different lessons in each unique real-world context to come up with the most workable solution to each problem.

She’s also taken her fair share of flak for that outlook as well, largely on account of her ostensibly elitist privilege that allows her to happily pursue whatever intellectual ends her little head desires while, elsewhere, loads of art students are forced to take on whatever loveless tasks they can to make ends meet because that’s just the way the world works.

And frankly, as a counter-argument, that’s a load of crap, because it completely misses the point of what Deborah is trying to say here. For the record, I’m far from wealthy but still agree whole-heartedly with her perception of my six years of fine art education as a valuable weapon in a longer-term survival strategy, rather than something that automatically translates into a conventional salaried job.

It’s not necessarily an attractive place to be, mind - it means having a sweet, well-paying residency one year and living at home the next, taking whatever small freelance work comes your way in hopes of keeping your head above the water. The whole thing rather puts me in mind of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, a wonderful archetype of the hard-boiled detective surviving on his wits, the odd stroke of luck and very little else. With his powerful intellectual leanings always close to the surface but forever alienated from the criminal world around him, he presents a compelling metaphor for the contemporary artist. And as much as Marlowe cynically grouses on about his poor mode of living, it never occurs to him to find another way to live - a life of investigation is precisely the life his mind chooses to pursue, no matter how unconventional it may be.

I think much the same mindset tends to dictate the artist’s patchwork life as well. Conventional employment is not necessarily a solution to the walking cliché of the starving artist; the problem requires creative thinking to find alternate ways to both live and work (and hopefully, if we’re lucky, get a bit of play in as well). There must be better ways to sustain an artist’s practice.

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