1 Percent of Artists Have Luck but 99 Percent Must be Determined
The late 19th-century American author Horatio Alger never devoted one of his “rags to riches” books to the story of a young artist. But these days, not a few entrepreneurs in the arts would want to hear that story.
How does an artist succeed financially against the odds?
The odds look daunting in the current economic climate. While the mathematics of the “1 percent wealthy versus the 99 percent of the rest of us” may be exaggerated and skewed, life at the top of the economic pyramid does seem like a different planet.
Take Facebook. When it filed as a publicly traded company on Feb. 1, it reported $1 billion in pure annual profits even before it starts selling shares. Next, look at Art Basel Miami, the annual art fair. Last December, the moneyed class showed up as usual, plunking down $1.5 million for a blue-and-white Ellsworth Kelly art object no bigger than a bread box. “Despite the flatlined economy, the art market has been roaring,” reported the Daily Beast’s Blake Gopnik. “In the first half of this year, total worldwide art sales hit a record of . . . $5.8 billion.”
The ordinary artist is not entirely cut out of these developments. Facebook reports that users swap 250 million photos per day, which could be called a type of art marketing or art appreciation. One graffiti artist, David Choe, 36, accepted private employee shares from cash-poor Facebook in 2005 in lieu of a fee when he painted murals in the company’s office in Palo Alto, California. Now, Choe’s stock is estimated to be worth $200 million. What is more, the Zynga computer game company, whose founders included art students, has also shot up on the stock market, since it provides most of the games Facebook users play.
Such rags-to-riches sagas in the art world are mostly a recent phenomenon. It began with the Pop art of the “Warhol economy” and now is driven by the high-end market of contemporary art. Along the way, stock market and Internet bubbles sometimes do not burst, and in those time, some visual artists are carried rapidly upward on the rising tide of wealth.
On his blog, Choe presented the life of artists as both a lottery and a kind of divine providence. “Have you had the dream where you ARE this guy?!?” Choe wrote. “And then some kind of happy accident happens, and as you’re in the middle of this glorious car crash, you stop to realize, that there is actually no such thing as an accident, and no chance encounters, and that everything has a direct purpose?”
Which brings us back to those “Horatio Alger stories.”
None of the Horatio Alger characters won the lottery, but there is a connection. In the stories, characters such as Mark the Matchboy or Ragged Dick typically meet a wealthy patron. The patron is impressed by their efforts at self-improvement. Then the patron gives them seed money. After that, the characters make the money work by way of persistence, inventiveness, frugality, and virtue.
The stories are considered hokey today. But two of their principles still are alive and well: seed money and virtue. To get the seed money, artists need to go out and put a best foot forward. They may find a wealthy patron, or simply land a day job that can accrue savings. Then, once some money is coming in, the artist must make the most of it by being productive and frugal. Virtue, plus creativity, may drive successful art.
Forbes magazine’s personal finance writer Kym McNicholas jumped on the David Choe story as a parable for freelancers and entrepreneurs, of which artists are typical. While most artists need cash, not stock, Choe had the luxury of obtaining some stock and holding on to it. Even in this, Choe was lucky. At first he said Facebook was a “ridiculous and pointless” company, but didn’t know any better. Facebook, too, was lucky. Many Internet and finance companies have paid employees in stock. Then everything went into bankruptcy.
“The Facebook story is making us collectively giddy and euphoric,” McNicholas wrote. “That could make us more susceptible than usual to scams and get-rich-quick plans.” The key to Choe’s success, Forbes suggested, was that he was doing what he loved. Meanwhile, he stumbled upon the stocks as barter for spray painting graffiti art across interior walls. How he uses his new-found fortune is the next question.
Today there are ample how-to books on artists developing a plan, a brand, a portfolio, and pursuing prizes, grants, exhibits, and galleries. As most artists will concede, however, success does seem to be a matter of luck—or of having the right connections. In the end, therefore, the one thing that remains in the artist’s control is what’s found in those un-cool, old-fashioned Alger books: determination, self-regulation, and enthusiasm.
Even in physics, the “rich get richer”—the particles and energies that have a leg up over other particles tend to increase in size without effort, creating giant galaxies and stars. In the art world, too, the rich get richer. The one resort for the other 99 percent of artists is to rely on skill, character, and enterprise. It seems very un-bohemian. But just ask Mark the Matchboy, who in fiction rose up by the boot-straps to financial security. That’s often how it works in non-fiction life as well.
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