“What did you do this summer?”
In grade school, I remember having lots of good answers to this question — vacations, acquired skills, new experiences; but somewhere between high school and college, the question began to put me on the defensive. That’s because I realized that what it really meant was; “did you get a job? Were you making money and thereby contributing to society and being a responsible grown up?”
I’ve never really had a summer job. But I do work. I drive my siblings to music lessons, I help at art camps, VBS and youth groups, and I make things. Sometimes I can sell those things and get some money. Sometimes I give them away. Sometimes no one else even gets to see them. Being an artist often involves putting a lot of time into something that may or may not ever make a profit.
It seems that in today’s culture, having a job that makes money, no matter what you’re doing, is seen as more productive than making things or performing services for free. Employment status and income have become the measure of whether you’re thriving or failing at life. On one hand, this value system makes sense because having a job with a steady income means that you can support and feed yourself without relying on someone else’s money. It’s true that I can only afford to live the way I do because I have a family who is willing to support me economically in exchange for my participation in family work and social life.
But what do you do as an artist who has to be self-sufficient or even support a family? In order to survive, you have to be able to market your work. Many artists go to great lengths to promote themselves on social media, and as media platforms change, they may even need to hire someone else to help them keep up. Their work and money go not into making something of value, but into selling it.
In a capitalistic society, the fact that people are willing to pay you for your work is an indicator that you are making things that people want or need. If you are not making money, how do we know if you are contributing anything of value to society? If no one will pay for it, no one wants it, right?
Wrong. And that’s my main problem with using employment and income to measure contribution to society. There are things in life that people want and need but do not expect to have to pay money for; like love or friendship.
Art can often straddle this line of being treated as a commodity and being something people expect to get without paying for. People often like and want art, but are unwilling to pay money for it because its benefits cannot be quantified economically. Because artists tend to value art for the sake of what it can do for people rather than how it can make them money, they are often willing to make it available for free, and people expect this. In a society that measures success by employment and income, this can lead artists to be devalued and taken advantage of.
How should we respond to this problem? One approach is to never give your art away for free; to gain respect in society by treating your job as an artist the same as any other profession—and insisting that others do the same. If you wouldn’t ask an accountant or lawyer to do their job for free, don’t ask an artist. People with this mentality focus on equipping artists with business and publicity skills so they can compete in the marketplace. They seek to remedy the devaluing of artists by proving that they can be just as much a part of the economic system as anyone else.
While this strategy may be the only way for artists to feed themselves, I see it more as a necessary evil than a way to restore the worth of artists’ work to society. In the end it is just trying to fit art into a system that its value is outside of. Attempts to quantify its monetary value are arbitrary at best and vary greatly between artists. Some sell their art for the bare minimum that allows them to eat and keep making art because they want it to be affordable for ordinary people. Others sell paintings for millions of dollars, appealing to elite audiences who can afford to spend that much money on something that meets no direct physical needs.
A pro-tip I often hear is if you're having trouble selling a piece of art, just jack the price up a few hundred dollars. Seriously, it works. No one really knows how to put a price on art, but they will use the price tag to determine its value.
People like or dislike art for highly personal reasons. Sometimes people have to encounter a piece at the right time in their personal experience for it to resonate. This makes the economic yield of art highly unpredictable. I've had someone pay a hundred dollars for a quick drawing ripped out of my sketchbook and I’ve painted a wall-length mural for a bottle of lemonade. Neither piece of art made any economic sense to make, but they had emotional and aesthetic value to the people or community that received them. Trying to quantify art’s value in economic terms might mean that a lot of worthwhile art cannot be made at all.
Instead of changing our attitudes toward artists by treating their work like any other profession, I think we should change our attitude towards work itself by acknowledging that earning a profit may be a practical necessity, but it is not the true purpose of work. Instead of measuring contribution to society with income, we should instead value work that cultivates our abilities and resources in a way that enriches our lives and surroundings.