THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 63
Online, it might be easier for artists to catch a break—but not to turn a profit.
BOOKS
STARVING ARTISTS
How can we pay for creativity in the digital era?
BY HUA HSU
ILLUSTRATION BY IGOR BASTIDAS
I
n November, 2012, the Minnesota
Department of Revenue notified the
musician Venus DeMars that her tax re-
turns would be audited. DeMars, a re-
spected fixture in the Minneapolis rock
scene, had performed since the mid-nine-
ties as the lead singer of All the Pretty
Horses, a moody, glam-inspired rock
band. She and the group had released half
a dozen albums and toured throughout
the United States and abroad. Her ac-
countant had deducted business expenses,
such as money that had gone into tour-
ing and performance. But it quickly be-
came apparent that the audit didn’t arise
from any arithmetical errors. At stake
was whether she was, indeed, an artist.
The state tax authorities found her
claim dubious. In their view, someone
putting most of her money into an en-
deavor that produced very little return
couldn’t possibly be doing work. De-
Mars’s deductions were therefore illegit-
imate, she was told, and she owed nearly
thirty-six hundred dollars in back taxes.
Her legal fight took a year and a half and
cost around twelve thousand dollars,
which fans and fellow-artists helped her
cover. In the end, the Department of
Revenue relented; it even paid her a tax
refund of around seventy dollars.
People generally don’t become artists
for the money. In fact, they are probably
drawn to art as a refuge from thinking
about money in the first place. What
they don’t bargain for is an inquisition
calling into question the very reality of
their day-to-day work as an artist. The
vast majority of American artists are like
DeMars, essentially freelancers who gen-
erate little in the way of profit. Accord-
ing to a 2018 survey conducted by the
Music Industry Research Association,
MusiCares, and the Princeton Univer-
sity Survey Research Center, American
musicians earned a median income of
twenty-one thousand three hundred dol-
lars from their craft the previous year. A
2014 study by an arts advocacy organi-
zation showed that only ten per cent of
America’s two million art-school grad-
uates make their primary living as art-
ists. Among those grads surveyed, work-
ing artists reported a median income of
just over thirty-six thousand dollars. Be-
fore the implementation of some provi-
sions of the Affordable Care Act, in 2013,
it was estimated that forty-three per cent
of artists lacked health insurance.
In the past, it was easy to blame the
gatekeepers, such as publishing houses
and record labels, for skimming off the
profits that artists’ work generated. But
those institutions are now in decline.
There are more people writing books
and recording music than ever before,
more ways to find potential fans who
might support your passion for calligra-
phy or painting portraits of other people’s
pets. Every post on Twitter or TikTok is
an easy, cost-free path to discovery for
an upstart comedian, actor, or cinema-
tographer. In “The Death of the Artist:
How Creators Are Struggling to Sur-
vive in the Age of Billionaires and Big
Tech” (Holt), the critic William Deresie-
wicz considers how we arrived at a sit-
uation in which it’s easier than ever to
share your creativity with the world, and
harder than ever to make a living doing
so. He interviewed roughly a hundred
and forty writers, musicians, visual art-
ists, and filmmakers about their experi-
ences working in the so-called “creative
economy.” Most spend a disproportionate
amount of their time effectively running
a small business, focussing on winning
the attention war through “the overlap-
ping trio of self-marketing, self-promo-
tion, and self-branding.” Even established
artists spend their days fielding requests
to work for free or, worse yet, for “expo-
sure,” which, Deresiewicz writes, is “a
