64 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
synonym for nothing.” As the novelist
and essayist Alexander Chee explains,
“There’s an illusory ‘made it’ point, the
point at which the writer no longer has
to worry about money. It doesn’t exist
unless you were born someone who didn’t
ever have to worry about it.”
Maybe you think all this is simply
what happens when improvident art-
ists, determined to do what they love,
finally face reality. Deresiewicz wouldn’t
entirely disagree; art is “not a job, not
in the sense that anybody asked you to
do it,” he writes. But artists “do deserve
to get paid for doing something you
love, something other people love.” Nor
is there anything corrosive to the artis-
tic program in seeking your just reward.
“Wanting to get paid does not mean
that you’re a capitalist,” he writes. “It
doesn’t even mean that you assent to
capitalism. It only means that you live
in a capitalist society.” He quotes the
cartoonist and writer Molly Crabapple,
who once argued that “not talking about
money is a tool of class war.”
There’s still plenty of money to be
made in art, or writing, or music. It’s just
not being made by the creators. Increas-
ingly, their quest for personal artistic
fulfillment is part of someone else’s racket.
W
hen did money and art go their
separate ways? Before there was
a culture industry or an art market, there
were the whims of élites, who saw art
as just another outlet for their largesse.
Art—at least the traditions that com-
prise the Western canon—was once be-
holden to religious authority and po-
litical power, not critical of it. Being an
artist was a job like any other. Michel-
angelo painted the Sistine Chapel be-
cause he was commissioned by the Pope.
Shakespeare was supported by wealthy
patrons. Even famous, sought-after art-
ists couldn’t integrate themselves into
the upper classes.
In the eighteenth century, art be-
came a unified concept, “a distinct realm
of social activity not subordinate to any
other,” Deresiewicz writes. Art, in the
wake of the Enlightenment, became a
kind of “secular religion” and, conse-
quently, artists began viewing them-
selves as independent from the pow-
erful or the holy. The archetype of the
starving artist emerged, the visionary
straying from the crowd, sacrificing
economic well-being in order to carve
out something new and special. The
Muses were no longer part of an anti-
quated religious cosmology but forces
for creativity. And yearnings that may
once have strengthened one’s spiritual
devotion found aesthetic outlets: “In-
stead of looking in the Bible, you read
Dostoyevsky, or listened to Wagner, or
went to see an Ibsen play. Libraries,
theaters, museums, and concert halls
became the new cathedrals, places
where you went to court the old emo-
tions of catharsis, transcendence, re-
demption, and joy.”In America, the New Deal’s mobi-
lization of artists helped enshrine cre-
ative expression as a public good. The
institutionalization of art resulted in
new standards and types of credentials
(M.F.A. programs began only in the
late thirties), as well as more nuanced
distinctions between professionals and
amateurs, high culture and low. The
twentieth-century proliferation of
American music, writing, film, and vi-
sual art was nurtured both by the state—
American culture became a key export
during the Cold War—and by new in-
dustries that had arisen to manufac-
ture, distribute, and sell such wares. The
sheer size of these industries up until
the two-thousands guaranteed the live-
lihoods of a range of people—execu-
tives and managers, but also those en-
gaged on the technical side of things,
to say nothing of the mid-level hope-
fuls and critics’ darlings whose careers
were essentially bankrolled by a com-
pany’s superstars.
The Internet was supposed to free
the artist, and to democratize and
de-professionalize the practice of art.
In some measure, it did—while also de-
monetizing art itself. Perhaps our shift
in values can be traced to the emer-
gence of file-sharing networks, like Nap-
ster or LimeWire, when a generation
of consumers glimpsed the convenience
and ease of digital culture. I remember
feeling faint the first time I used Lime-
Wire, and convincing myself that this
was the proper state of things: music
was meant to be free and accessible.
Who needed a CD collection if you
had a decent Internet connection and
an up-to-date computer?
The sheer volume of stuff on the In-
ternet scrambled our sense of how art
and artistic labor should be valued. As
Deresiewicz constantly reminds us,
“price is a signal of worth.” Further-
more, it was easy to focus on the ex-
ploitative record label, and rally behind
the artists’ cry that their creativity was
being stifled. It became much harder
to feel scorn toward the company that
was selling us our Internet connection
or headphones or portable listening de-
vices, even though they had almost com-
pletely infiltrated our lives. The shift to
digital replaced the fusty, out-of-touch
old business model with a new one that
didn’t seem like a business at all. It was“News flash—shoulder-surgery patient’s wife can’t do anything right.”