Current Contemplation: A New (Art) Career in a New Town

David Bowie by his painting "Portrait Of JO" (1976)

[plays: "A New Career in a New Town"]

This post is dedicated to Ike, Alex, Anna, Alan, Shane, Tim, Mitchell, and all my other friends in the Arts who have inspired me to become a better artist (and allowed me to talk your ear off) - and to you, if you've ever felt the artist's struggle of starting a career while balancing "artistic integrity" with "making a living".

NOTE: An addition to this post has been added at my follow-up blurb entitled "Art Decade".

As a young artist fresh out of art school, the future looms in front of you.  You plan on starting a new career in a new town.  You are a serious person who cares about influencing society for good.  You have a statement you want others to hear, and there's a natural desire to get your work out there.  You also want to make things about, or offer your artistic services to, projects you are passionate about.  That you believe in.  Let's face it, you're an aspiring philosopher and creator - an idealist with a lot of ambition and practically brimming over with ideas.  As Bowie so succinctly stated in a 2002 GQ interview, "I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture I was living in." [x]

But there's a problem between now and that distant dream of being the Next [Insert Famous and Influential Artist Who Contributed to Culture Here].  Or should I say several.

For one, there seems to be an unspoken agreement that you have to be willing to work for free in order to make the right contacts.  Or at least to get your work seen by the right (and/or most) people.  No one will pay you because your services and work aren't in demand.  Of course, no one will know about your services and work until you get paid in order to start a platform.  Okay, you say, sure, you'll work for free to pursue your dreams and just get your work out there at first.  Do it for the exposure.

But wait a second - with Instagram, YouTube, and all the media we have today, isn't there already enough exposure? How can I possibly make my work stand out against all this white noise? Not to mention that you also need to make a living.  And how are you supposed to do that if all you get in return for your hard work is "promotional value" for your art in a sea of advertisements, Pintrest boards, and cat videos?

And what if in the middle of pursuing your artistic dreams, commercial pressure will force you to tailor your vision to the taste of the fickle public? Or even worse, what if you are unable to create your art at all?  What if you have to compromise your artistic sensibilities to become a full-time waiter just to try and pay the bills? And your dream of art and changing the world dies with the start of saying, "What would you like to order, sir?"

This spiralling conundrum is one that young artists like myself seem to face.  But I want to challenge that today.  Let me start with the fact that this outlook on art is rather new and rather odd.

In days long past, patron arts were the only way to create any type of long lasting art-form.  Religious leaders could commission artists like Michelangelo to decorate churches like the Sistine Chapel, kings could pay for beautiful compositions, and the wealthiest noblemen could indulge in fine clothing.  As a result, these elites had control over what was made and how it was distributed.  Not only that, but the quality of work produced was phenomenal.  Beautiful works like The Aeneid would take a lifetime to complete, and cathedrals like Notre-Dame in Paris would take several generations.

However, this type of art that reached the public was negligible in quantity.  People could participate in small ways in their local communities and their religious service attendance, but most were illiterate and unable to access much artwork.  That isn't to say there wasn't a thriving, intelligent culture of the masses.  But that type of artistic culture was usually based in local traditions and small pieces.

Fast-forward to the 20th century and the start of Bowie's career.  During an interview  in 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman, Bowie described his musical beginnings in an environment much like those of yore:

I wanted to be a musician because it seemed rebellious, it seemed subversive, it felt like one could affect change to a form.  It was very hard to hear music when I was younger, you know? When I was really young you had to tune in to AFN radio to hear the American records.  There was no MTv and there was no - it wasn't sort of wall-to-wall blanket music and so therefore it had a kind of a 'call to arms' kind of feeling to it - This is The Thing that will Change Things.  This is a dead dodgy occupation to have.  It'd produce signs of horror from people when you'd say I'm in rock 'n' roll.  It's 'oh my goodness'.  Now it's a career opportunity...

This concept of art now being a "Career Opportunity" is further expounded upon in a 1990 interview on Countdown when he stated:

...when I was thinking about being a painter it never occurred to me that I was gonna want to be a paint to make a big killing, you know, and make a lot of money. Because that wasn't what was happening then ... I mean our whole idea about painting being a career opportunity - it just wasn't there. And that seems to have happened over the last 10 or 15 years....But now guys very-approach it very seriously as a career opportunity - you know, it's as serious as banking these days ... for a lot of kids, you know. It's a whole different ball game.

Thus, the idea of art as a Serious Career Opportunity where money can be made, is a relatively new concept.  It's one which considers art as something to be pursued with the end goal of making a lot of money simultaneously with the end goal of shaping culture.  So what exactly does this new ball game look like?

I like to imagine this 1990s Bowie surfing his iconic BowieNet, which was a groundbreaking ISP in its day [x]

Firstly, the field the game is played on has completely changed.  The state of art and its relation to media has been revolutionised in the last decade.  Again, I look to Bowie when he stated in an interview about his Reality (2003) album, "I’m not sure that many people these days want to get something out of music - they just want something on in the background, whilst they’re walking down the street, you know."  And it's true.  We live in a world where as long as there's something to consume, we will do so happily whether it's trash or treasure - and as long as it's free (or cheap to come by).  As a result, we're inundated with cheap media to the point where we are unable to critically think about what we consume.  As Bowie articulated:

We live in a world where every headline is famous for 15 minutes. You know: “At War With America”, “Britney Spears Wears A T-Shirt”, “Saddam Is Still On The Loose” - they all get the same space, the same time. It creates a situation where all news seems equally important....If you have an inquiring mind, you can really pick through it all and find some semblance of the things that you want to find. But I think, for most people, the process is just so fundamentally overwhelming that they’ll accept whatever they happen to be looking at that evening.

[....] I wonder about the great sense of indifference that seems to be creeping into the culture. I think at least partially it has to do with the paralysing factor of having to wade through so much information to arrive at some approximation of what is really happening. But it also has something to do with this feeling amongst people that the power has totally been taken away from them, that whatever they say is not going to affect the course of events. (Pegg, 2016)

And this problem - of flooding the market with a barrage of mediocre media to the apathetic masses- is huge.  It's one that I personally have considered when I think about adding my voice to the millions of people who clamour on social media.  But is uploading a picture to Instagram just white noise? Or is it the same as participating in the grand tradition of Art? Maybe.  Maybe not.

Regardless, let's say you make something worthy of being called art and you share it online.  There's still another problem - that of who your audience is.  And this problem of the Internet (and social media culture) is one that Bowie saw decades ahead of his time.  In a 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman, Bowie stated:

I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg.  I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society- both good and bad - is unimaginable! I think we're actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying! 

[The] Internet now carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious - and chaotic and nihilistic.  [....] I think when you look back at, say, this last decade, there hasn't really been one single entity, artist, or group that have personified or become the 'brand name' for the 90s, like it - it was starting to fade a little in the 80s, and in the 70s there was still definite artists and the 60s there were the Beatles and the Hendrix, in the 50s there was Presley - Now it's subgroups and genres - it's hip-hop, it's girl power, it's a communal kind of thing.  It's about the community.  It's becoming more and more about the audience because the point of having somebody who 'led the forces' has disappeared because the vocabulary of rock is too well-known.  It's a currency that is not devoid of meaning anymore, but it's certainly only a conveyor of information now, it's not a conveyor of rebellion.  And the Internet has taken on that, as I say. 

[....There is nothing cohesive about the Internet in the same way there was cohesion in the youth revolution in music] because I think that we at the time, up until at least the mid-70s really felt that we were still living in the guise of a single and absolute created society where there were known truths and known lies and  there was no kind of duplicity or pluralism about the things that we believed in.  That started to break down rapidly in the 70s and the idea of a duality in the way that we live and there are always 2, 3, 4, 5 sides to every question - that the singularity disappeared.  And that, I believe has produced such a medium as the Internet, which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation. 

[....] I'm talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envisage at the moment.  Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in sympatico it's going to - it's going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.  But it's happening in every form! 

This prophetic statement could not be truer.  This fragmentation and creation of niche audiences is something that new artists are at a loss for what to do with.  Sure, you can grow your fanbase, but you'll never have the far-reaching influence of the Beatles with your pop-remix-song-cover YouTube channel.  As Bowie stated in 1990, "I think it's a great struggle for any artist that really have a strong integrity with what they're doing. I think this is probably - even though we have more media, more access to media, more communications now, it's probably harder now to get good music played than it ever was in the 60s! .... Very difficult."

So should we lament the fact that the field we play the new artistic ball game in has changed? That we will no longer have a few pieces of high quality art that influence the world over? No.

Bowie was excited about what the Internet would bring - both good and bad.  And as artists, we should be too.  We can't change the fact that the Internet is here to stay.  So we should be focusing on the positive benefits of such a medium, and how we can use them to our advantage.  This includes being excited about the fact that we have more access and opportunities than ever before to create and showcase our art.  We should celebrate the fact that the playing field has changed.  The creation of and access to art no longer belongs to the elite few who could pay for such a luxury, and it allows more representation of diverse narratives.

"David Bowie leans out of a window to pass autographs to fans during a visit to the Brixton area of London on July 6, 1989. Bowie was visiting his birthplace for the opening of a community center in Brixton that he helped fund." [x]

This brings me to the second component of the changing ball game: the players.  The relationship between the players and audience of the ball game have changed.  The role, relationship, and significance of artist to audience has been radically altered.

Once upon a time, to be an artist meant that you had "artistic integrity".  This meant two things: 1) Referring to a work of art (any medium) that holds true to the creator's original intended design/meaning 2) Referring to the artist's character and strength of will to stand by their intended vision.  Usually these two objectives are seen as being against the public's (or audience's) tastes (if not definitely at odds with studio executives who hope to cater to the public's preferences).

As Bowie stated in an un-aired 60 Minutes interview, "I'm just an individual who doesn't feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I'm working for me."  [x] And in a 2003 The Word interview, "“All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it." [x] 

But although the concept of artistic integrity still holds true in terms of creating a vision the artist is happy with, what - and more importantly who - determines the meaning of that vision has changed.  Bowie saw this coming back in 1995, when he stated, "What it comes down to is that my interpretation of my work is really immaterial....it's the interpretation of the listener or the viewer which is all important [to the meaning of the art]. Authorship is in question now." [x]

Yet another insightful observation by Bowie, the concept he describes was something I studied in one of my film classes last year.  Who gives the piece of art its true meaning? What matters more - the artist's original intent or the audience's interpretation of it? Who is the true Author of the piece if both turn out to be equally important? The shift of where meaning is derived to a given art piece is further elaborated on by Bowie in the 1999 Paxman interview:

...I find [the Internet as] a terribly exciting area - so from my standpoint, being an artist, I'd like to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.  There is a breakdown personified, I think, by the rave culture of the last few years, where the audience is at least as important as to whoever is playing at the rave.  It's almost like the artist is to accompany the audience and what the audience are doing.  And that feeling is very much permeating music - and permeating the Internet [....] Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in sympatico it's going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.  But it's happening in every form! It's happening in visual art.  The breakthroughs at the early part of the century with people like Duchamp, who were so prescient in what they were doing and putting down.  The idea that the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it and add their own interpretation and what the piece of art is about is grey space in the middle.  That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.

Here again, Bowie shows his eerily ability to predict the future.  That grey space is exactly what we as artists can be, and should be, excited about in the 21st century.  It means that art is now more than ever about the community.  As Bowie once stated, "...the interpretations I've seen on some of the songs that I've written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in." [x] Perhaps the "glory days" where the authorial intent - the lone artist's vision - was the only thing that mattered are long gone.  But now, instead of a solo piece, we can collaboratively work together as artists and audiences to discern real Beauty and Truth in art.

Thus, we as a whole are not merely struggling artists weighed down by an over abundance of mediocre art enjoyed by niche audiences.  Instead, we as artists are in a space where we have more opportunities than ever to consume and create art with other artists and audiences in a collaborative spirit.

David Bowie playing with Arcade Fire at the Fashion Rocks show in 2005 [x]

That's all fine and dandy, you might say, but what about the final problem? The problem of maintaining one's artistic integrity while still making a living? That's where this final point comes in: that the rules of this ball game have completely changed.  How to determine the winners and losers (or who is successful and who is not) has been altered.  This is done by the fact that in the 21st century the line between a commercial and patron art is blurred.

I still remember learning about this distinction during a film class years ago.  According to the professor, a patron art is any type of work or service (a painting, a classical music concert, a museum, etc.) that can not subsist on sales (tickets, downloads, etc.) alone.  A patron, or benefactor, is needed in order to assist with the cost of materials, labour, etc. for the art.  This is in comparison to what I am calling a commercial art.  A commercial art is any type of work or service that can make a profit on sales alone (like most films, popular music, etc.)  A producer or studio may help with the cost of producing the product, but they expect a monetary return on their investment, unlike a patron or benefactor.

As Bowie previously described, there's now an expectation that approaching the Arts as a career opportunity can make big bucks (with or without a benefactor).  That's not to say that patron arts have died (theatres still exist, after all), but our reliance on them as the sole financial means to create art has certainly diminished in favour of commercial value.

That, as young artists, leaves us with very limited choices.  After all, the arts are now a career opportunity (as serious as banking).  And like any other job, there's now a belief that the success (the integrity and value) of your work in your field has a correlation to the amount of money you make from it.  In the arts, that means you can only be one of the following Four Figures:

1) Make good art and make a lot of money

Considered the best option, typically a regarded as the glorified figure: The Genius

2) Make good art and not make a lot of money

The second best option, typically regarded as the tragic figure: The Starving Artist

3) Make bad art and make a lot of money

The third best option, typically regarded as the despised figure: The Sell-Out

4) Make bad art and not make a lot of money
The worst possible option, typically regard as the unfortunate figure: The Perpetual Waiter

But obviously, this formulaic outlook is incorrect on several fronts.

Here, I refer to one of my all-time favourite Bowie quotes, ""I don't begrudge any artist for getting an audience. I'm sorry, I never found that poverty meant purity." [x] Ironically, he said this during a period which many accused him of being a sell-out - but whether or not he was, I believe the point still stands.  Monetary gain and artistic integrity are not related at all.  In fact, there's Biblical precedent for this outlook in the Book of Job.

When Job's material wealth and family are all taken away from him, his three friends give several suggestions for why this might be.  In Job 4:8, Eliphaz suggests that Job is merely reaping what he sowed, "As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same."  Here, an outlook that the wicked will receive just punishment, so misery must be deserved is outlined.  However, Job's response in 6:20-30 rejects this idea, since he (rightfully) claims that he has done no wrong, but is still being punished.

Then in Job 8, Bildad suggests that the innocent will temporarily suffer, and if you're wicked you will suffer forever.  But if you plead to God for mercy in order to restore your good life on earth, then you will receive it.  However, in Job 9:20 Job rejects this outlook too.  He outlines how you can't view God as a machine who will respond in certain ways according to the corresponding human action.  He also points out that if this outlook was true, there would be a lot more people suffering, and the wicked would never prosper.

Finally, in Job 11, Zophar suggests that bad things are going to happen no matter what, but you should actively do good things anyway (and "put away your iniquities"), out of fear of retribution.  Yet again, Job counteracts this in Job 12 when he reiterates his claim of innocence and God's ultimate power over all things.

Thus, as evidenced in Job, the earthly prosperity (or suffering) of people has literally no bearing on if they are leading wicked or righteous lives (whether outwardly or inwardly).  That isn't to say events are random (Job's description of an arbitrary, unpredictable God in Job 12 is later rebuked by Elihu in Job 32-34).  But it is indicative that human perspective on the larger Reality that God has created isn't vast enough to encompass His Good Truth.  Earthly measures of success are not always accurate to those of spiritual success.

Therefore, Bowie is right to point out that as an artist (old or young) you shouldn't feel boxed-in by the four previously mentioned "Figures".  Financial success and true artistic integrity have no bearing on one another.  As Duncan Jones, filmmaker and Bowie's son, stated in a New York Times interview, "[his] desire to balance mass entertainments with smaller, personal expressions came directly from Mr. Bowie.  'One of the things my dad always said is that it’s O.K. to do one for you and one for them,' Mr. Jones said. 'He taught me a lot of things, but that’s certainly one of the many that I took to heart.'" [x]

Therefore, as an artist, I don't think you should feel like a sell-out for demanding compensation for services rendered.  And you also shouldn't aspire to be the starving artist who at least as his so-called "integrity".  Even patron artists like Michaelangelo expected to get paid for painting the Sistine Chapel - and there's no shame in paying the bills on time.  Especially not when your artistic integrity truly lies elsewhere.

Now, "artistic integrity" can be redefined because of the fact that the relationship between players - and even the field itself - in the "different ball game" has so drastically changed.  We should look to find true "artistic integrity" as that found in the meaning we - artist and audience - give the work of art regardless of monetary compensation.  And the truth of meaning should be evaluated based upon how close it comes to conveying something Divine to us.  Again, I quote Bowie from his 1995 interview:

I'm not really a believer in art and music being institutionalised or put in galleries and stuff like that. I think art is something for the use of the public. It's for the public to interpret it and use it almost like a sustenance for life. So it's the interpretation of the listener or the viewer which is all important. [x]

So what does this whole new ball game mean for the young artist? It means that our previous assumptions about what it means to be an artist and the space we create in must be radically changed.  No longer should we slide down that slippery slope of logic stated at the beginning of this essay.  Instead, we should celebrate.

We have the ability to create what we are passionate about with unprecedented access to both the tools we need to make it and the free time with which to do so.  We are able to reach people all over the world and to be reached by others all over the world.  And we are able to have true artistic integrity whenever we share our art in an act of community rather than isolation, seeking to find Divine Truth within our works.

Our field for playing the game may have changed, but that shouldn't stop us from being ready to boldly go where no artist has ever gone.  We're jumping into unexplored territory in regards to what it means to hold true to one's "artistic integrity".  It's a whole different ball game. And all that comes with it - good and bad - is ours to mould, to discover, and to enjoy.