put an artist
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I tell you what, writing these manifestos is addicting. Here’s my second one:
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I, and what I suspect most artists, need to thrive: time and security.
I’m not short on inspiration or ideas, I have plenty of motivation. My challenge lies in trying to balance the time demands of making art with a job that commands the majority of my attention. (And don’t you buy that myth of the starving artist. It’s hard to make good work when you’re worried about the rent.) Cultivating creativity A sense of well-being is a wonderful incubator for creation. If you’ve ever noticed how many of the writers, artists, and actors that we’ve heard of come from money or have “married well”, you know what I’m talking about. They have the security to persevere till they get it right. To try new things. To fail. You can’t get that from a one-time grant or a three-month fellowship. Grants and fellowships are fantastic but...they also create a feast-or-famine cycle that sucks time, energy, and attention into applying for the next grant. Dependable, long term income allows an artist to make plans. It’s the reason publications and startups and museums want monthly subscribers, not only one-time purchasers. The promise of financial regularity opens the door to innovation and ambitious goals.
Ok ma’am. How are you gonna do that? I realize this sounds like a bit of a fantasy, but dream with me for a minute. I want profitable corporations, organizations, and institutions to put artists on the payroll - and not in a position like a part-time social media manager but literally as artists. Folks who contribute to the kind of vibrant, creative society we all love by making their art. We could have artists working for Airbnb or Microsoft or Blackrock or fill-in-the-blank, explicitly not turing out work on demand (“make the logo bigger!”) or extolling the virtue of the brand but making their normal bodies of work, in their own studios, exhibiting and selling through their normal channels. The companies wouldn’t control the subject or style, but their support would absolutely contribute to brand, institutional legacy, and corporate culture and act as a real path to community involvement. Of course there would be details to work out - how do you structure something like this? What does the hiring process look like, what are the measures of success? Can you fire an artist? How philosophically aligned do the artist and the company need to be? It won’t be 100%, of course, I mean, other than the self employed, how many of us have the luxury of working for companies we agree with 100% of the time? Since the artist will retain ownership of the work, do fellow employees get first dibs on purchasing it? Questions to be answered, sure, but those are small things. We can figure that out. We’ve been to the moon, for goodness sake. And the rewards to our culture would be so worth the effort. What exactly are you asking for? I’m not talking 6 figures, annual bonuses, and golden pensions. I am talking contracts that are measured in years rather than months, and in an amount that economists describe as the ‘minimum for emotional well being’. I’m not proposing this for small businesses or mom and pop operations (ok, I am proposing this for hedge funds, private equity, venture capital firms, and super profitable “small” businesses like those). But the 5000 or so firms in America with over $200M annual revenue? Come on, now. Some of them can swing it. You and your crazy ideas Ok, fair. But this is certainly not a new concept - the Federal Art Project in the 1930s had artists on the payroll, but good luck getting a bill like that off the ground these days. Yes, it’d require some negotiation, but it’s certainly not impossible to imagine. I did. PS - Also we need health insurance.
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v1. June 13, 2024. I reserve the right to edit or revise this at will. Tricky things, manifestos.