Before tech, making a living in the arts was hardly a utopia

People in the arts and creative media have been bemoaning the impact of new Internet and digital technologies upon their careers and businesses. Many of the criticisms I agree with, and have covered elsewhere on this blog - see Google's news vision misses "boots on the ground" (2010) and Amazon cracking down on newsletter recommendation services? (2017).

But I take issue with statements like this, portraying the pre-1995 arts and media world as an unfettered opportunity to connect with audiences and build successful businesses:

... The cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now, and there isn't much left. At this point literature has been "captured" by the University, but it's for a good reason: you can't survive as a fiction writer without it. People complain "but they're so insular" but the truth is: they don't have an alternative. You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.

This is true of other industries too. Music: you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician. You might also be the guy who was the resident expert on classical music for the neighborhood at the store, who would recommend operas conducted by Karajan and the best recordings from Deutsche Grammophone (I remember those guys). Art: you could paint signs or design posters, back when there was a real demand. Writing: you could write for the alternative weeklies (I'd read those) or be a regular journalist, writing as little as one story a day. Movies: you could be a video clerk (I also remember this). And those 'subcultures' were incubators. Quentin Tarantino graduated from the video store in a sense. Who can follow him, if there are no video stores anymore?

As someone whose first job in media was working for an independent record label, wrote for a weekly newspaper arts section, worked as a movie theatre projectionist in Harvard Square, wrote music and performed as a musician, and now operate a profitable independent publishing company, I have a few thoughts to share.

In many areas of the arts in the 20th century, "the cultural infrastructure" was dominated by oligopolies: local broadcasters with allotted bandwidth, record distributors who only worked with certain labels, an insular book industry that favored certain types of literature and nonfiction and poetry, and magazines which promoted a "cultural conversation" but overwhelmingly favored artists who happened to live in or near New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo.

Some great art came out of that environment, but there was a lot of garbage that made its way past the gatekeepers because of broken incentives, bias, and outright bribery. 

The artist's "day job" is nothing new

Few artists made a living solely from their art in the 20th century. Almost everyone had a day job - Phillip Glass driving a taxi, Cormac McCarthy doing odd jobs, Gene Wolfe editing Plant Engineering magazine. And those are the ones who eventually hit escape velocity.

The interesting stuff was happening at the margins - the alternative weeklies, the independent presses, the music scenes in second and third tier cities, the artists in remote locales driven to do what they needed to do and hopefully could connect with audiences, albeit small ones. 

I was a participant in these scenes as a creator and a consumer. The photo at the top of this page was taken from the top of my apartment building in Kenmore Square, Boston, in 1990. Kenmore Square is a luxury dead zone now, but 35 years ago it was the center of Boston's underground music community with venues such as The Rat and record stores like Nuggets and Planet Records. 

 Later, I lived in London and Taipei. I can tell you making a living as a musician or indie publisher was extremely hard. Everyone had day jobs (hopefully in an arts-adjacent industry) and expected little or no remuneration for their creative activities. Recording an album or publishing a fanzine or operating a small music venue cost real money, too, and sales could hardly be expected to cover these costs. 

Why bother, if we couldn't make money? We did it for love ... of creation, of camaraderie, of community. Getting read or noticed was the immediate reward, creating something that influenced others was the gift that kept on giving, sometimes years or decades later.

As for the claim that literature has been captured by the University, I don't know what to say. For the most part, university presses (and university employment) are not reliable sources of funding for creative projects.

Moreover, despite the rapacious nature of Amazon, it does provide an opportunity to bypass the oligopolies of old. Every year, out of the millions of new books that are published on Amazon (or spewed out by AI), several thousand great new books by self-published authors rise to the top of Amazon's algorithm. It provides an opportunity for talented new authors to start careers or at least a promising side gig that might turn into something big. They don't need to be in New York, playing the game involving agents and slush piles and paying a PR agent to suck up to the books editor at the Village Voice.

Text and Images copyright ©️ Ian Lamont