I got my first paid subscriber ever and I sobbed.
Keep your starving artist mentality to yourself, please.
I think that one of the most dangerous and destructive things to creativity is participation in the notion of the “starving artist.”
I had a family friend, a painter, who made this her soapbox. She was the starving artist, the starving conservationist, constantly complaining and then romanticizing the struggle of someone who creates for nothing and accepts the inevitable poverty that it brings because that’s all that art is worth in today’s world: pennies and hardship.
For her, it was a badge of honor and the only discernible trait of “specialness” that she could find.
And I fucking hated it. Seriously.
“Nobody would CHOOSE the life of an artist. It doesn’t pay, and it never will. I only do this because I have to, it’s my CALLING to paint and be poor while I do it,” was my translation.
She and her mom later asked me to help set up a website to sell her paintings. There was a great deal of vagueness (which I found quite irritating) about how she wanted to market her work. Thinking a simple setup was the best solution for her current state, I suggested an Etsy page to get started.
She and her mother exchange looks. A stifled scoff and prolonged silence, but I’m not biting because I know what it means.
“Ooh. No. I don’t want to be on there. That’s not really my audience,” she eventually said, her nose scrunching.
“Okay then, who is your audience? Who do you think wants to buy your art?” I pressed, my annoyance escalating by the second.
A shrug and a hint of an eye roll.
“Gosh, I really don’t know. I mean, my work is high-end. I just know that I want high-end people to buy my art. So, probably not like the kind of stuff that’s on Etsy.”
I thought of a beautiful, upcycled velvet bomber I had bought for $60 back in my sophomore year of college from an artist in Australia. It had been reworked to cinch at the waist and had little silver studs that looked like constellations. People would come up to me in bars, on the street, to ask me where I got it. I mourn it ever since that fateful night it got stolen during a sloppy, jungle-juice-stained night on Polk Street.
Then I thought of my tarot card charm—the World—the one I found after hours of searching through sites like Mejuri, Bagatiba. It was the only charm that, to me, was in the spirit and likeness of the card’s meaning: culmination. Endings. I’ve worn it almost every day for the past four years.
If anything, it seemed an honor, an initiation to join the thousands of makers for whom Etsy was enough.
And besides: whether or not you’re on Etsy has nothing to do with how much people will pay for your work. You decided how much people would pay you a long time ago.1
In some ways, this might be a, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game!” type of situation—the “starving artist” identity is one forced upon this young painter by a world seemingly ruled by layered devaluations (moral, monetary, institutional) of human ingenuity and creativity.
In other words: I’m trying to be fair here.
Listen: I’m not blind to the way that the expansive access to constant consumption made possible by social media (driven and weaponized by capitalist extractivists) has commoditized and devalued human creativity, ingenuity, and expression. Don’t even get me started on AI art, musicians, actors. My poor, sweet mother cried when she found out about AI actors.
My beef is not with ACKNOWLEDGING the constraints and pain that artists feel as they navigate these systems and their very real roadblocks.
What I DO have BEEF with is the conscious, defeatist acceptance of it. Come on! Who’s fucking side are you on?!
If you are a human artist, a human who creates, then you MUST believe that art and creativity are inherently valuable.
Let me clear on what value means: it does not only equate to signing with an agency, acquiring 200K+ Tiktok followers, getting a Goop or Rhode brand deal, or having people become so obsessed with you that they’re in your Amazon shop.
Believing in the value of art is not only about you—it’s about everyone who will ever pursue the act of creating.
You have to believe that creation, expression, and artistry are just as much a service to humankind as “normal” things, like engineering, marketing, software development, healthcare, or counseling.
You have to believe that each person’s creative filter is unique and unable to found or replicated anywhere else.
You have to believe that artistry is a practice, a devotion, a contribution—and that it is absolutely worth the work and the money it costs to witness and possess.
And yes, the “starving artist” is something you learned to be true. It is a shelter that was given to you, a defense mechanism that was supposed to keep you “safe.” And in many ways, it has kept many of us very safe.
If you say your art doesn’t earn money, then it hurts less when nobody pays for it. If you say that your creativity is frivolous, then it cannot be mechanized into the functions of something “practical” or “useful.” If you declare that you CHOOSE to suffer, then there is nothing anyone can take from you. You’ve beaten them to the punch.
Why bother when it seems like Jeff Bezos and Amazon and Neuralink and the Kardashians are at every corner and opening of the internet telling us, “WHY? Why even TRY to command any sort of monetary or mental sovereignty when you can consume, for the small price of your soul?”
Maybe it’s not that deep.
But maybe, it also fucking is.
I got my first paid subscriber today, and I cried. I literally sobbed because the work is tough. Creating congruence between who you KNOW you are, and your external world is tough, especially if you grew up with people who believe that artists, writers, creatives—the ones who aren’t David Choe’s and don’t want to be—should be synonymous with struggle.
But I refuse to give up on myself or anyone who creates for a living. I pray for us all, and not from a deficit, wishing for some Divine intervention to save us all or help us hit the jackpot.
I pray that we only deepen into the internal well of worth. I pray for the unchained imagination to create wealth for us all, wealth that we give a fuck about, not what has been fed to us or what will help us ascend the ladder into the vapid, shallow numbness and imprisonment of consumption culture. I pray that we all get to know ourselves well enough to go after what we want and believe that it will be met with what it deserves. I pray FOR JUSTICE for creators, that we place risk and ingenuity and the sweat and blood of artistry be seen and compensated for exactly what it is.
I pray for us all. To whom? The gods that matter.
Anyways…
Do yourself a favor: break up with your starving artist friends and your starving artist identity. Thank them for everything they’ve given you and wish them well on their way.
You won’t need them where you’re going.
An interesting note: this painter DID end up landing a space at a prestigious art auction where you can, indeed, find lots of “high-end” customers, aka lots of rich old people.
Yet, the institution takes 50% of her earnings (WHAT!) and all rights to any of the paintings she brought to the auction, so she doesn’t even own her work anymore and can’t sell it on her site or distribute it in any way, shape, or form. I found this a bizarre turn of events. What does this contract say about the institution’s view of artists, let alone, burgeoning and “starving” artists? Or art itself? Fascinating, truly!