How to make a living as an artist

Contemporary artist here, with gallery representation. I also teach on, arguably, the best undergrad "fine art" program in the world.

It is worth pointing out what this artist's practice actually is. The audience here might be afraid of conjectures around the subjective phenomena of "taste", so let me propose this:

That thing that everyone complains about here when you make an interesting app, put it up, and there's a cheaper Chinese produced version of it within a month that's got a better ranking in the app store than yours? That's what this guy is doing in art terms. The "product" is derivative, and frankly, so is the hustle. That's not why most of us make art, and his work wouldn't stand up to scrutiny by my undergrads (much less the "art world" in general) who are typically optimizing for innovation in the field.

I would argue that this guy doesn't really need to be an artist, in the same way that we don't really need the 50th knockoff of the same app. Sure he can do it and I guess good on him for making some money from it, but those are separate questions compared to those of most artists. He could use those same skills he discussed to sell used cars or vapes or something. Or maybe just be a programmer and "ship"? Notice that he doesn't even attempt to explain what is novel or contextually relevant about his work, or even where his desire to do it, as opposed to selling any other product, comes from?

Personally, I use my teaching to create economic space for myself to not need to be in thrall to a flippant and cruel "market". I have some basic rules for my gallery (no sales to arms dealers, no sales to oil industry, leaning that way towards AI/tech tbh) but one of the reasons I have a gallery, in addition to lightening my cognitive load of all the admin and sales in general, is because I suspect it would damage my capacity to make cutting-edge work if I knew how the sausages were made. It's most certainly not the only way to do it, it's just how I've landed. I usually advise my students starting out to follow the Phillip Glass method (really, the 1970s-90s method): get a part-time job that pays the most you can get but that does the work that will kill your mind the least, so you have at least 1 extra day and the mental space to do your 'real' work with that 1 day plus the weekend. Then over time, if you get paid for the art, cut down on the part-time job, and repeat. I will admit it is getting much harder to do this now, so my advice may be outdated.

Anyway, I'm being snarky, and he would correctly argue it's gatekeeping. But just a bit of context for the discussion here.

I've seen too many times in real life people who do arts and want to try to sell it not understand that once you switch from a hobby to a business, you need to spend at least 50% of your time on the business/marketing/logistics/etc side of things, hence failing miserably. The best possible outcome that I've seen is that they miraculously hit a nerve on the first hit, become famous, and at some point realize they need to pay taxes and do so in a decent timeframe.

So I found this article great to explain those things, and also how it's not just "you", but it's "the part of you that people need to buy" to make it into an actual business the thing that it's important. I'll be sharing it a bunch, I'm so happy fnnch wrote this!

He also did some neat obscene works, like his classic Eat my ass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C78HBp-Youk

> A jeweler might have high material costs (gold and diamonds), an artist moderate material costs (paint and canvas), and a greeting card company low material costs (paper), but they all have "material costs".

There is a great line in the book Narconomics [0] that compares the "value added" of creating high end paintings to narcotics. He points out that the input (paint, coca leaves) are VERY cheap. The end product (high end paintings, cocaine) is very expensive.

(I believe he makes this point to show that raising the price of inputs slightly has no real bearing on the price at the end given the size of the margins)

0 - https://amzn.to/4r8fIJP

But that isn’t really true, per se. It depends on your definition of “people” – the mass market? High end collectors and galleries like Gagosian? Very different audiences, and appealing to one is probably the opposite of the other.