In his previous book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, William Deresiewicz, a former professor of English at Yale, addresses an obvious problem: the economics of higher education are turning college into job training. His solution is, if not radical, at least democratic. Saving higher education, he believes, means affirming that everyone, regardless of class or capital, should have access to books and art and a spot in the forum. But in his newest book, The Death of the Artist (Henry Holt and Co., 2020), Deresiewicz argues the opposite point. In order to save art, he now claims, most people should not make art—a well-meant but wrong-facing solution.
Like the problem of higher education, the problem of the art world that Deresiewicz addresses is material: capitalism has obliterated the economics of art and left artists to flounder. His interviews with musicians, visual artists, writers, and film-and-TV creators (a chapter devoted to each) form a sort of descriptive ethnography: behold, the artist in late capitalism! This is the bulk of the book, a hundred pages of artists talking about capitalism tearing away at what they love. In fact, the interviews are so engaging, and Deresiewicz is such a skilled rhetorician (he possesses the self-conscious ex-academic’s ability to sound authoritative but not often patronizing or officious), that it’s almost possible to overlook the fact that his solution is for nearly everyone to stop doing art.
That’s the conflict: The Death of the Artist is valuable as an archive of the material, relational, and emotional effects of economic precariousness on people who make art. As an oral history of an economic emergency, it makes for compelling, sobering reading. And like Excellent Sheep, the book offers a set of legislative changes that, though stopgaps, would be helpful in real ways: “breaking up monopolies; raising the minimum wage; reversing decades of tax cuts; reinstituting free or low-cost higher education; empowering workers, once again, to organize.”[1] But married to those sensible reforms are a dedication to the market and a conviction in the exclusivity of art and artisthood that is surprising and available for critique—especially right now, as the cracks in the neoliberal economy lengthen and gape. This makes The Death of the Artist especially interesting: it pushes up against but does not escape the boundaries of market logic, the walls of what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism.
It’s worth looking first at the way Deresiewicz illustrates the problem and its causes. “Art is shaped by money,” Deresiewicz writes, “by the material arrangements under which it is produced…. When those shift, art shifts.”[2] Funding has dried up as the metamorphoses of the neoliberal economy (the consolidation of megacorporations, the proliferation of gig work, the emergence of advertising-driven internet ecosystems, the exchange of buy-once for subscription models of revenue) have been reiterated in the artistic economy. There are fewer and larger publishers, movie studios, and galleries, who have winnowed their rosters. The professional artist has ceded cultural space to the amateur, who is relatable, accessible, and, above all, a consumer.
For the companies who sell the new digital tools of artistic production, this is a very good thing. According to what Deresiewicz calls the techno-utopian narrative, a little economic turbulence is just the cost of innovation—in fact, this is the golden age of creativity, a sort of pax techne. Whereas modernism holds that creativity is a form of genius or historical attunement, creativity in the technonarrative is something purchasable. The technoproduct, the laptop or creative software suite, becomes talismanic. Everyone is creative, but creativity must be unlocked with a thousand-dollar bundle of glass and microprocessors.
Unsurprisingly, the professional artists Deresiewicz interviews disagree: if it’s easier than ever to begin doing art, it’s much, much harder to survive doing it professionally. Like other precarious workers, artists are required to perform much more labor for much less pay, in a process similar to what Leigh Claire La Berge has recently classified as “decommodified labor.” Besides the actual work of making art—recording a new album or writing a new novel—the artist must complete a second and third shift as a brand manager and community-outreach frontperson: “Artists need ‘crazy drive,’ as one of them put it. They need to work ‘25/8 not 24/7.’”[3] As would-be consumers of art become producers, encouraged to spend their money on the products to make their own, amateur art, professional artists have fewer people to sell to, and the already tight market becomes hypercompetitive: only the inexhaustible survive.
We’ve arrived at Deresiewicz’s solution: if the market is seducing everyone into believing they can be artists (in order to sell them things) and thereby squeezing out the professional artists, then we ought to make sure only professional artists, the real artists, are doing art. Deresiewicz doesn’t want to discard the market—he considers it the best tool for the distribution of merit and funding—which means the vast majority of people should be exclusively consumers, not producers, in that market.
This is how The Death of the Artist breaks with Deresiewicz’s previous work. In his first book published after leaving Yale, A Jane Austen Education, he claims that anyone can learn to live out Austen’s virtues; in Excellent Sheep, he hopes for a higher education with no economic barriers to entry. In The Death of the Artist, however, Deresiewicz pumps the brakes: “So why shouldn’t we believe that everyone’s an artist? Because words matter. Everyone isn’t an artist for the same reason that everyone isn’t an athlete…. To claim that everyone’s an athlete would be to insult the people who actually are: who have gotten up every day of their lives, and trained and sacrificed and suffered, to earn the name.”[4] Of course, we do call all sorts of people athletes, including people whose relationships to physical activity are significantly more casual than those of the Olympians Deresiewicz invokes. The reductive rigidity of Deresiewicz’s sharp amateur/professional (or false/real) division reveals itself to be absurd when applied to the way actual people, whether artists or athletes, engage with their craft.
My point is that I think Deresiewicz’s defense of the market—and his subsequent insistence that most people should spend their time and money consuming, not producing, art—points to the limits of any market-driven solution. Art was made possible, he argues, by the emergence of modern, secular capitalism, which freed it from the oversight of traditional bodies (the church, the state, the aristocracy). He writes, “Art could free itself from ideological control…because artists were able to free themselves from economic control, to dispense with patronage by selling their work directly to the public.”[5] But does art’s entrance into the market really free it from ideology? Are artists, subjected to popular rather than aristocratic taste, any freer? If anything, the rich ethnography of the contemporary artist Deresiewicz assembles proves just the opposite: the market is every bit as ideological as systems of patronage, and often in subtler ways.
For example, the ideology of the market frequently manifests emotionally. There often is a compulsory optimism to art subject to market forces, given that the market tends to fund art that elicits positive feelings, which can then be deployed as catalysts for consumer activity. A few of Deresiewicz’s interviewees make this phenomenon clear. One artist, a singer-songwriter named Charlie Faye, found that survival as a musician meant abandoning her sad songs and ballads: they don’t sell, or at least they don’t sell to corporations for use in commercials and advertising campaigns. Making music licensed for corporate media, one of the last decent-paying gigs, means shaping a tight smile for a brand to wear.
In this way, happiness, as Sara Ahmed writes, “itself becomes a duty…becomes a disciplinary technique.”[6] The so-called free market is in fact a restrictive mechanism; just as the technonarrative declares cheerily that there’s never been a better time to do art, the market selects art that puts on a similarly jolly front. Ahmed points out that this compulsory happiness is bound up with other normative ways of living: compulsory heterosexuality, for example, and compulsory productivity. When artists are busy surviving by making happy media, they aren’t doing the interesting, diverse art that they became artists in order to create. Artists make art, speaking broadly, because it ignites them—it makes possible feeling, expression, community, politics. But in order to make a living, artists must produce corporate, watered-down art that blanches the fire, quashes the spark.
Likewise, markets exert a neutralizing effect; they select for the politically anodyne and aesthetically reiterative. However, Deresiewicz believes that “[m]arkets, when they function properly, are mechanisms for transmitting the signals of desire—in plainer language, for telling us what we want. What we don’t want is for art to be cut off from that, cut off from popular taste, for bureaucrats to tell us what to want.”[8] Here, Deresiewicz echoes and reveals the liberalism embedded in his other work. Excellent Sheep is a defense of the liberal arts, and to fund them Deresiewicz proposes mild reforms to the market, radical only to the American right: the taxation of the wealthy and of corporations, a reduction in military spending. In The Death of the Artist, he is more explicit: “Markets are not evil. They are one of the ways we get our needs met. They are also not synonymous with capitalism…. But you probably aren’t against capitalism, either, even if you think you are.”[9] Thus, to fund art “we need to put money in people’s pockets, but better to do it organically, not simply by fiat—better to do it, in other words, by restoring the entire ecosystem, by rebuilding the middle class.”[10] You don’t need a priggish suspicion of the popular or mass media to worry about the fate of art, especially art made by Black, queer, and other minoritized artists, confrontational to the tastes and conceits of the middle class. The middle class will fund art, sure, but will they fund art designed to unsettle the middle class?
The precariousness of the artist Deresiewicz identifies is real, and he is entirely right that the imperative to monetize your hobbies is an alarming bit of ideology. It marks the encroachment of economic labor into the last zones of leisure, indolence, and uselessness, and it’s also an effective way to sell things. His solution to the problem, though, is limited by its refusal to think outside the market.
But what if we turn his solution around? What if the answer is not a restriction or rationing of art, but a profusion, a great excess? Art, says Deresiewicz, “ought to have financial value. No, people don’t deserve to get paid for doing something they love…but they do deserve to get paid for doing something you love, something other people love.”[11] Maybe we don’t deserve to be paid for doing what we love, but what about being paid in order to do what we love? After all, economic precariousness does not elicit better labor from artists or anyone else.
A possible objection: if we remove the stakes of economic survival, what’s to stop anyone with a whim from making a bunch of bad art? For one, I’m not sure how many people, left to their own devices, would want to make art, which is hard. But also: who cares? I don’t believe we should tie economic survival to the quality of one’s labor, artistic or otherwise, and it’s okay with me if that unleashes a torrent of bad art—after all, plenty of interesting things can be said about, and done with, bad art. The most generative ways to approach and think about art rarely rely on terms like “good” and “bad.” Once removed from the context of the market, which needs the language of merit in order to more easily assign economic value, those terms begin to seem pallid. Most of the writing on art that’s been significant for me—like the work of Maggie Nelson, Eve Sedgwick, and Elaine Scarry—tends to be less interested in evaluation and much more interested in emotion, description, and phenomenal experience. In On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry points out that one function of “perfect” art is to encourage us to lend similar attention and care to “ordinary” art, which upon a second or third encounter might reveal itself to be more complex; we might “discover that it is not ordinary.”[12] Good and bad begin to bleed into each other.
I’m glad The Death of the Artist exists. Its interviews are alarming and gripping, and it’s good to see someone like Deresiewicz, a white ex-academic, talking about the economics of art interacting with class and race: “Our major housing program for artists in this country is the displacement of black people. The very language of gentrification is racially coded. First a neighborhood is ‘gritty’—that means blacks or Latinos. Then it’s ‘edgy’—that means white bohemians. Then, with luck, it makes it all the way to ‘vibrant’—that means hipsters and yuppies.”[13] And there are good, practical ideas in the book, like a proposal from the advocacy group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E) for “a set of [artists’] moral rights: the right to have input into how the work is shown, to get it back for a couple of months every year, to block its use as a financial instrument.”[14] Just as there should be no empty houses, there should be no unshown artworks, nothing stashed away in warehouses. Art should be appreciated, not left to appreciate.
For as long as capitalism exists, it’s worthwhile to conjure ways to blunt its serrated edge. But it’s also worth thinking about how we might move the market away from our opportunities to make and encounter art. Anyone, everyone, should have the chance (that is, the time, energy, and economic stability) to make something, to fuck around with paint or on a laptop. Forget selling art in order to live; what about doing art in order to imagine new ways of living? What are we capable of when economic uncertainty no longer dominates our relationships to all forms of labor and creation? Precariousness feels like falling and confinement at once, and the feeling of confinement is especially acute right now. But works of art I love make me feel like I’m spilling over my own bounds. This is a feeling worth pursuing. Art is excessive, and I’d like to see an excess of art, art everywhere, made by professionals, amateurs, aspirants, and has-beens—anyone at all.
Notes:
[1] William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (New York: Henry Holt, 2020), 321.
[2] Ibid., 237.
[3] Ibid., 81.
[4] Ibid., 263.
[5] Ibid., 241.
[6] Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 7-8.
[7] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
[8] Deresiewicz, 321.
[9] Ibid., 24.
[10] Ibid., 321.
[11] Ibid., 20.
[12] Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 67.
[13] Deresiewicz, 100.
[14] Ibid., 311.