8 |
Business as Work |
An artist after many phone calls got an appointment with a local art dealer. The dealer kept him waiting for an hour, looked through his portfolio, and told him, “Come back when you’re dead.”
— SAM PROVENZANO
Do you realize what would happen if Moses were alive today? He’d go up to Mount Sinai, come back with the Ten Commandments, and spend the next eight years trying to get published.
— ROBERT ORBEN
You are talented and creative. You rarely block, and when you do block you know how to move yourself along. Your moods are not incapacitating, and you haven’t stepped over into madness. Your personality is sufficiently integrated so that your necessary arrogance doesn’t prevent you from having successful relationships, your nonconformity hasn’t made you a pariah, and your skepticism hasn’t bred in you a nihilistic darkness. You work happily in isolation but can also move into the world and have a life. You have, in short, met many of the challenges of an art-committed life.
Are you home free? No, unfortunately, not by a long shot. The next challenges you face are as great as any encountered so far. They are the multiple challenges of doing the business of art: making money, developing a career, acknowledging and making the most of your limited opportunities, living with compromise, dealing with mass taste and commercialism, negotiating the marketplace, and making personal sense of the mechanics and metaphysics of the business environment of art.
Many an artist grows bitter in this difficult arena. Many an artist flounders and fails. Many an artist succumbs to the competition. Only the rare artist sits herself down to examine these matters, consciously and carefully, for they are often painful to consider. But you have no choice but to examine them. If you are an artist, you want an audience. And if you want an audience, you must do business.
The business of art requires care and a significant amount of time. Typically artists neither love this kind of work nor do it well. But if you are not your own supporter and promoter, coach, business manager, market analyst, salesperson, best business friend, and maker of luck, then you are likely to have a marginal career at best.
Many artists never admit that they are in business for themselves, even as they pursue their fiction sales or their concert bookings. Others admit that a marketplace exists but argue that it shouldn’t be permitted to dictate to them. Both positions, the former a kind of denial and the latter a kind of rebellion, stem not so much from the artist’s inability to do business — for in her day job she may work with a budget of millions or a staff of twenty — but from a variety of complicated factors, among them pride, anxiety, and sense of mission.
Why would your sense of mission, for instance, prevent you from doing business? For the simple reason that your mission is to do art, not commerce. The people who can promote you do commerce, not art. You know that the publisher, the gallery owner, the network executive, and the Hollywood producer are merchants. You know that the literary agent looking for a romance novel or a mystery story is looking for a certain kind of merchandise. As the painter John Baldessari put it, “For a dealer, the only reality is the rent. A lot of ambiguities about artist-dealer relationships would be cleared up if art dealers were called art merchants. That’s what they do. They sell art for money. They are not messengers from god with divine knowledge about what’s art and what isn’t. They show you because they think they can make money from what you do.”
You’re also likely to believe that the public should be given what it needs, not what it wants. This vision flows from your love of your medium and your respect for traditions. You hold, in short, to a heroic ideal and a code of ethics. Zelda Fichandler, longtime manager of the District of Columbia’s Arena Theater, explained: “While a theater is a public art and belongs to its public, it is an art before it is public, and so it belongs first to itself, and its first service must be self-service. A theater is part of its society. But it is a part which must remain apart since it is also chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, and irritant.”
This is the ideal; but for a regional repertory company, an orchestra, a dance company, or an individual artist, the reality remains that the audience pays the bills. In this regard Fichandler added, “The only criterion for judging a production is the power of the impression it makes on the audience.”
This statement is not so much a contradiction as a recognition that two positions exist, the artistic and the commercial. Between these two positions an abiding tension persists. The eighteenth-century American painter Gilbert Stuart complained, “What a business is that of portrait painter. He is brought a potato and is expected to paint a peach.” The artist learns that the public wants peaches, not potatoes. You can paint potatoes if you like, write potatoes, dance potatoes, and compose potatoes, you can with great and valiant effort communicate with some other potato eaters. In so doing you contribute to the world’s reservoir of truth and beauty. But if you won’t give the public peaches, you won’t be paid much.
Repeatedly artists take the heroic potato position. They want their work to be good, honest, powerful — and only then successful. They want their work to be alive, not contrived and formulaic. Norwegian painter Edvard Munch declared: “No longer shall I paint interiors, and people reading, and women knitting. I shall paint living people, who breathe and feel and suffer and love.”
The artist is interested in the present and has little desire to repeat old, albeit successful, formulas. As painter Jenny Holzer put it, “I could do a pretty good third-generation stripe painting, but so what?” The unexpected result of the artist’s determination to do his own best art is that he is put in an adversarial relationship with the public and with those who sell to the public. In that adversarial position he comes to feel rather irrational. For what rational person would do work that’s not wanted?
What rational theater director would put on plays that the public won’t come to see? What rational filmmaker would make personal films no distributor will take? What rational composer would attempt a composition for a full symphony orchestra, understanding that she’ll never hear it performed unless she pays an orchestra to perform it? It appears more rational to sign a vow of poverty or to run full-speed into a brick wall than to engage in such frustrating activities.
The public and players in the marketplace smile indulgently at you, the artist. They, after all, are rational; you are irrational. They comprehend the bottom line; you are dense. But you understand, perhaps outside conscious awareness, that their supposed rationality is a particular sort of lie. Todd Gitlin, a student of marketplace dynamics and the notorious bottom line in television and publishing, wrote about this putative rationality:
Again and again, as I walked into corporate offices in Century City and environs, I was told to put aside my naïveté and recognize that television was about making money, period. But often enough the success record compiled by such ostensible geniuses of economic calculation, by their own lights, is abysmal. Just because executives intone allegiance to their peculiar version of rationality doesn’t mean that they deserve to be regarded as rational. Corporate publishers are always throwing money away — on giant advances, overprinting, glitzy salaries, slush funds, and bright ideas.
You may feel stupid as you process the advice you get. For instance, Judith Applebaum and Nancy Evans, authors of How to Get Happily Published, advise the writer that “it is largely within your power to determine whether a publisher will buy your work and whether the public will buy it once it’s released. Failures abound because hardly anybody treats getting published as if it were a rational, manageable activity — like practicing law or laying bricks — in which knowledge coupled with skill and application would suffice to ensure success.”
This advice, which, like bottom-line logic, wears the mantle of supreme rationality, is almost certainly false advice for the poet, for the writer working on her version of Ulysses, for the painter painting in a new idiom, for the screenwriter with a serious screenplay to sell, for the actress looking for serious roles in film. It is advice that can only be translated as “write peaches, not potatoes.”
Only if the writer’s product is wanted in the marketplace are there rational ways of seeking a publisher and selling the work (although, as author Peter Benchley put it, the matter still rests squarely in the hands of the “gods of whimsy”). But it is largely outside the power of the writer attempting to create literature to determine whether a publisher will buy his work or whether his novel will do well in the marketplace once published. Serious fiction, like serious theater and serious music, simply sells poorly.
As you look around, you see that commercial art not only sells, but it even has permission to be bad. Noncommercial art not only doesn’t sell, but it must be singular to have even the slightest chance. Understanding that such an enormous chasm exists between the commercial and the artistic, you frequently begin to formulate two different sets of career goals. You determine that while you would love to make money from your cherished art, you will also pursue other financial avenues. You make an agreement with yourself to attempt to do at least some commercial work.
In making this inner arrangement, you think of yourself as a professional. This is a new and frequently burdensome piece of identity to wear. The professional dancer determines to dance in anything. The professional actor determines to act in anything. The professional writer determines to write anything. You commence with commercial nonfiction or commercial fiction, audition more for commercials than for live theater, take advertising assignments and put your art photography away. In the extreme you let go of art altogether. Swing-era musician and arranger Sy Oliver described his experience: “I was a professional arranger who used to do whatever the situation called for. There are different types of musicians. There’s the storybook musician, the guy who loves music and hangs around all night and jams as long as there’s someone to play with. Then there’s the professional musician, who is in the business to earn money, period. That’s me.”
Naturally you feel uncomfortable as you work out your own brand of compromise. But compromise is necessary, and you are challenged to make peace with your decisions. The cynical artist, the unimaginative artist, and the pragmatic artist have compromised from the beginning. If you agree at a late date to compromise, you are challenged to integrate that significant change into the web of your being. At the same time, you’ll still long to have your best work supported, recognized, and valued, even if it can’t pay its own way. Henry F. B. Gilbert, the American composer, expressed this wish as follows: “True Art seldom pays for itself; at least not for a long time. And the finer it is the less likelihood there is of its paying for itself. Money, advanced to a composer to free him from the necessity of earning it, should be regarded in the light of an investment; not as a material investment which shall eventually bring returns in kind, but as a spiritual investment which shall eventually bring rich returns of an artistic or cultural nature.”
Artists regularly compromise to survive. As one screenwriter said of his life in Hollywood, “They ruin your stories. They massacre your ideas. They prostitute your art. They trample on your pride. And what do you get for it? A fortune.” Visual artist Tim Rollins, describing his South Bronx neighborhood art program for learning-disabled, emotionally troubled teenagers, argued for his brand of compromise: “We at the Art and Knowledge Workshop are a little like the old Communist countries — we started out radical and ended up entrepreneurial. But I would much rather shake hands with the devil than be a martyr for some idea of purity. It’s better to make certain political compromises than not pay the kids and lose them to the economy of the streets, which is mainly drug dealing.”
The visual artist Sandro Chia argued that the artist, free to tackle any kind of work in the privacy of his studio, is still a slave to the system into which he is born:
An artist is free to do whatever he likes in formulating his work, even the most extravagant things, but he is not allowed to say one word against the economy because the economy will punish him in the cruelest way. It has always been like this. At one time, it was the Pope or the emperor who chose the artist and decided how much he was valued. Now, it is done by a headless entity consisting of auctions, rumors, the media, newspapers, art magazines, interviews, and so on. If you’re out, you’re out — you simply don’t count. There is no opposition, no different opinion. Anything that happens must happen within this system.
You set limits for yourself as to how much you will compromise. But when your editor tells you that your next novel could be your breakthrough book — a real blockbuster — if only it possessed a tad more excitement, you must look at the line you’ve drawn in the sand and think hard about drawing it over again, nearer to mass taste, or carving it in deeper exactly where you’ve drawn it.
Is there a formula for compromising? Does the writer gain permission from herself to write a potboiler if she pledges to do a serious novel next? Can the successful actor keep his star in ascendancy in pop movies and still determine to make every fourth movie a significant one, even if it is a money loser? The pressure to compromise is enormous. A Pablo Picasso self-portrait sells for $47.85 million. Two books by Ken Follett are purchased for $12.3 million, and three by Jeffrey Archer are bid on at $20 million. Jack Nicholson makes a fortune on Batman, and Steven Spielberg makes a fortune on E.T. Whether these figures are generated by astounding art or by astoundingly commercial art, they send shock waves through the artist’s system. And so the artist is sorely tempted to draw the line closer to mammon.
Of course it may then hurt the artist’s feelings to be labeled commercial, for she understands that she is being criticized for selling out. Even an artist with the tiniest audience can find herself having to dodge this charge, even as she starves to death. As Herbie Mann, the jazz musician, put it, “If you’re in jazz and more than ten people like you, you’re labeled commercial.”
The artist may unconsciously decide to avoid this tense business of compromising by doing art for which there is no commercial market whatsoever. He may guarantee that he will not have to deal with the world of commerce by choosing, say, to write poetry. Of course he writes poetry because, first of all, he loves it and needs to write it; but he may also harbor the understanding that his choice allows him to remain “pure.” He can then play the role of uncompromising artist with a certain smugness — and a certain sense of relief.
Because the marketplace frustrates you, you may simply avoid attending to business. Because the challenges you face in taking care of business are taxing and complicated, you may feel exhausted and defeated before you begin. You know that to have a career you must negotiate a maze full of obstacles, a maze designed, it would seem, to test your courage, principles, heart, and soul. This is a dizzying prospect that you approach with a touch of vertigo.
It is true that making a dollar is hard for everyone, artists and nonartists alike. As the performance artist Eric Bogosian put it, “The artist today has it harder, but so does the truck driver and the doctor because, economically, it sucks out there.” For the artist, though, the path to a dollar is particularly mystifying. Is it more important to be good, to be mediocre, to be well connected, to be white and male, to be black and female, to be lucky. . . or what? Even if you decide to step fully onto the path to commercial success, what exactly is that path?
Such questions confound and infuriate the artist. But you are nevertheless challenged to come to grips with the fact that the answers to these questions matter to you. You will see that your business has two sides to it: the mechanical side, which many artists’ self-help and marketing books address, and the metaphysical side, which is what we’ll look at next.
The mechanical and the metaphysical come together for each artist as that artist’s career path. That path is a function of the artist’s personality, the product she determines to sell, the goodness or appropriateness of that product, the array of compromises she is willing to make, her historical moment and cultural milieu, her group associations (as a Chinese American actor or an African American painter, for example), the decisions she makes (about teachers, mentors, and so on), and luck.
Let’s look at a painter’s career first. On the mechanical side, you attend an art school or a university art program, have art school shows, learn to send out slides of your paintings and to contact gallery owners. You maintain mailing lists and attempt to find fair and regular representation for your work. You frame your paintings if you can afford to. You try to become known to purchasers of art. You prepare for shows, sign contacts, garner commissions, deliver your paintings to buyers, and so forth.
On the metaphysical side lie all the following considerations: What are you painting? Is it the right moment for what you’re painting? How many painters can your culture sustain, and how many painters are vying for the available slots? How does your personality help or hinder your ability to sell your art? In quelling your anxiety about the demands of the marketplace, do you rush away from contacts or toward them? In your historical moment, is it providential to be a woman painter, a Midwestern painter, a Primitive painter, or an Italian American painter? How do you think of art — as craft, decoration, entertainment, sacred product? Are your stars crossed or uncrossed?
The metaphysics of the matter combine into a prescription for failure or for success. On the one hand, you may be the wrong person doing the wrong art at the wrong time. On the other, you may be thrust by accident into a museum exhibit that becomes the hottest show of the decade. This is exactly what happened to Nathan Oliveira in 1959, when, at the age of twenty-seven, he found himself included in the Images of Man show at the Museum of Modern Art with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Alberto Giacometti, a fortuitous event that secured his stardom.
Because you are painting in a style, a size, and colors that are popular, you may find yourself (by accident or by design) at the forefront of a popular movement. At a certain propitious moment, your work is reviewed by the right reviewer or appears in the right show. The impact of this is not lost in the next instant but, because of your personality or connections or sheer luck, you capitalize on the opportunity. All of a sudden you matter, and your soup cans, black abstractions, or superrealistic images of cordless telephones become all the rage.
For the suddenly successful artist everything may come together in a kind of synergistic explosion that catapults him from anonymity to celebrity. Artist advocate Caroll Michels described this interactive moment: “Curator tells dealer that critic wrote an excellent review about artist. Dealer checks out artist and invites artist into gallery. Dealer tells curator that artist is now part of gallery. Curator tells museum colleagues that artist is part of gallery and has backing of critic. Curator invites artist to exhibit at museum. Curator asks critic to write introduction to exhibition catalog in which artist is included. Dealer tells clients that artist has been well reviewed and is exhibiting at museum. Clients buy.”
Can this success take place only if you are calculating, only if you put yourself in the right spot at the right moment with the right product? Not necessarily. But the moment is altogether more likely to happen if you are the kind of person who will naturally think of hiring a publicist to keep your name alive, if you naturally stir up controversy, if you understand trends and fashions, if you offer up peaches, if you enlist everybody’s aid in your cause.
Let’s look at the novelist’s path. From the mechanical point of view, you attend a creative writing program, begin to send out your first stories, and get published in your student magazine. You work on your first novel, try to interest a literary agent in it, submit clean manuscripts and appropriately stamped return envelopes. You study the market, network at writing conferences, sign contracts and meet deadlines, work with editors, publicize your work, struggle to move from your small press to a larger publisher or from the mid-list to the front of the list.
But what is your first novel about? That is a matter of first principles. Is it meant to be frankly commercial? Is it a genre piece in a popular style? If it is neither commercial nor part of an established genre, will it be lucky enough to strike that synergistic moment when agent excitement, editorial excitement, reader interest, and media hype come together in a firestorm of buzz?
For one writer, the greater part of success may be calculation. He will frankly write commercial mysteries, understand the formula and the market, give each story its own spin but not spin it away from what’s expected. For another writer, success will be a matter of luck. The right agent accepts his imperfect manuscript; the right editor buys it and supports it. The story has something that ignites interest at that historical moment. Reviewers fan the flames, and the public chooses his book as the one serious novel they will read that year.
This sort of accidental good fortune is recounted too often in the biographies of well-known artists to be ignored. You may have the fortune, for instance, to have the sort of roommate Dostoyevsky had. Upon reading Dostoyevsky’s first short novel, Poor People, his roommate literally ran with it to Russia’s preeminent literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky. Belinsky read it, loved it, and single-handedly made Dostoyevsky’s name.
But Dostoyevsky’s good luck was not just to have that helpful roommate or to be championed by that powerful critic. It was equally to have written a naturalistic and conventional novel first. The Double, Dostoyevsky’s second novel, was stranger, modern, existential, and psychological, and gravely disappointed Belinsky. It was too fantastic, Belinsky complained, saying that “the fantastic can have its place only in lunatic asylums, not in literature; it is the business of doctors and not of poets.”
Had The Double come first, it would not have been championed by Belinsky, and Dostoyevsky might have had no early successes, or, possibly, any later ones. Norman Mailer confesses to this same kind of luck at the beginning of his career. By writing a conventional novel about World War II, The Naked and the Dead, one that could be readily accepted in the marketplace, he became famous overnight. He then had permission to write in his own voice and still be published.
The classical musician’s career, taking the mechanical and the metaphysical together, revolves around her early choice of instrument, early virtuosity, early support, early teachers and successes in conservatory and at the right competitions, and her ability to carve out a concert and recording career as a soloist or to win a seat in a first-rate orchestra. It may include teaching at a university, teaching at a conservatory, or teaching private lessons and may involve the soloist in a hundred or more nights on the road each year. She may experience tremendous performance anxiety or little, learn new repertoire pieces slowly or quickly, obtain a Stradivarius, and nurse lingering wrist and elbow injuries. But, as with painters, writers, and every other artist, the metaphysical is bound to mix with the mechanical.
If, for instance, she learns from her teacher to hold her fingers and move on the piano bench like Glenn Gould, and playing in Glenn Gould’s style is out, she has hurt her career. If she learns to play with flat fingers, and flat-finger playing is out, that style will hurt her at competitions. Even more important, if her teacher is influential, that connection will vitally help her career. The young musician who is the protégé of a well-connected teacher may be said to have a significant leg up on her peers. As Robert Bloom, oboist and oboe teacher, put it, “If one teacher is a little more persuasive than another, his student gets the orchestra job, and if one teacher gets a reputation for having his students get the jobs, then students go to that teacher. It is a very, very uncomfortable and commercial situation.”
The career path for the actor, the metaphysical and the mechanical taken together, often has at its center what Julius Novick called the “temptations of fame and fortune, of Broadway, television, and the movies.” The young actor imagines himself striking it rich. While he is attending the right classes in the right city, working in live theater and on the outskirts of film, television, and commercials, gaining agency representation, making personal and professional connections, and auditioning, his eye is fixed on the gold ring: on discovery, on breakthrough opportunities.
He may also want the opportunity to act steadily. He is then faced with the decision about where to live. Should it be New York, Los Angeles, or a city like Chicago with good regional theater? The actor who opts for regional theater may work more regularly and in more interesting pieces than his brothers in New York or Los Angeles, but he may naturally feel that he is missing his chance at stardom. Howard Witt, an actor with nine productive years in regional theater, explained: “There are certain things you have to give up when you come into a regional theater. You have to give up the idea that you’re going to become famous, that you’re going to become rich, that you’re going to be recognized, even in the profession. I have an old saying that my mother had two sons, one joined the Foreign Legion and one went to Arena Stage, and neither was ever heard from again.”
As a matter of principle, would you rather act regularly or be a star? Which decision flows more naturally from your personality? And what part of your personality do you want to access: the part that can do business or the part that prefers to have a good time? Paul McCartney explained the dilemma faced by the Beatles: “The main downfall is that we were less businessmen and more heads, which was very pleasant and very enjoyable, except there should have been the man in there who would tell us to sign bits of paper. We got a man in who started to say, come on, sign it all over to me, which was the fatal mistake.”
Or consider the experience of John Hill Hewitt, the nineteenth-century American composer: “My ballads are (or rather were) well known throughout the country; for I have not published for many years. Why? For the simple reason that it does not pay the author. The publisher pockets all, and gets rich on the brains of the poor fool who is chasing ignis fatuus, reputation.”
You can learn the rules of the game. You can learn from Rodney Gordy of Motown Records: “Knowing who needs what is the key to success.” You can embrace or recoil from the advice offered to young songwriters by Tom Vickers of Almo-Irving music: “Bathe the listener’s ears with pleasant sounds that people will want to hear over and over, don’t scrub them with abrasive material.”
You can learn these and a hundred other lessons from books, from history, from your own experiences and the experiences of your peers. But to understand the metaphysics of the matter you must look into your soul and into that mysterious place — is it in your own being? Is it in the culture? Is it in the stars? — where lucky accidents are born.
Let’s examine the differing paths of two hypothetical short story writers. The first doesn’t secure a career for himself. The second does, although not the one he would have predicted. Let’s take it for granted that both writers are talented and creative. Talent and creativity are not the issue. The issue is the metaphysical one of the interrelationship among product, personality, and marketplace.
As a young man our first writer, Joseph K., decides that he needs to write short stories. He loves the stories of Yevgeny Zamyatin, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Grace Paley, Eudora Welty, and Franz Kafka, loves the compression and precision of the form, doesn’t much revere poetry or the novel, and isn’t interested in literary criticism or nonfiction writing. He calls himself a short story writer and determines to spend his life writing. From a business point of view, the path he has chosen is an unfortunate one. How much can a short story writer expect to earn? How much do even the highest-paid short story writers earn? But these are not questions Joseph K. puts to himself.
His own stories, as he begins to write them, bear a family resemblance to those of Kafka. We may guess that he is not a people-pleasing sort of person. We would not expect him to have a calculating way about him with respect to the marketplace. We would not expect him to agree with Truman Capote, who said, “I never write — indeed, am physically incapable of writing — anything I don’t think I will be paid for.” We would not expect him to agree with Samuel Johnson, who said, “Sir, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”
Rather, we expect him to be a wounded, depressed, and lonely fellow with an excellent imagination and a fine way with words, who, like Kafka himself, is more than a little ambivalent about interacting in the marketplace. Our writer likely neither knows nor cares whether this is a good or a bad time to be writing Kafkaesque short stories. He is writing the stories that flow out of his imagination and soul, without calculation. His dreams of fame, recognition, and respect, which he does harbor, do not influence in the smallest measure what he writes or how he writes it.
Throughout college and afterward, Joseph K. spends a lot of time at his desk, in coffeehouses reading and writing, and on his sofa thinking. He works at odd jobs, goes to the movies, has a friendship or two, is shy with and estranged from women, has a stormy relationship with his overbearing father and polite mother, sleeps a good bit, is fonder of marijuana than of other drugs, writes letters, and continues to polish his stories.
When his car breaks down for the final time and his teeth hurt so much that he really must find a dentist, he sets about looking for a steady job. But because he considers himself no better at the game of academia than at the game of publishing, and because there are relatively few teaching jobs anyway, and because, a little arrogant and a little hurt, he despises teachers, he chooses not to pursue an advanced degree in English. Nor does it seem to him wise to seek a job that might violate his principles or get under his skin too much — say, a job in advertising. He decides, instead, to work in a bank.
A year or two later, with three complete and several incomplete stories sitting on his desk, he picks up his first copy of Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market. Reared on the classics and with too many of them still to read, he knows little contemporary fiction and has no ready way of distinguishing one literary magazine from another. With some care but still with only half an eye, he selects several magazines and sends them his stories, which are rejected. A few of the rejections are personal and encouraging. A few are vitriolic. Most are form letters.
He writes more stories but sends none of them out. Several years pass. He now has a book-length collection of stories. A co-worker at the bank, one of the few who know that he’s a writer, tells Joseph K. that her sister is an editor with a medium-sized literary press. He ignores this information since, based on those early rejections, he doubts the ability of editors to recognize the worth of his stories. Although not aware of it, he is also made extremely anxious by her offer.
Our writer’s only good friend, a teacher named Max, provides him with much sound advice about how to market his book-length collection, and Joseph K. finally decides to listen. He tries certain publishers who seem likely, varying his query letters and altering the sequence of his stories. He gets only form-letter rejections.
After the manuscript is rejected ten times, he puts it away and begins to work on a novel, harboring the not-quite-conscious idea that novels, at least, can sell, and when his novel sells, then his short stories will be wanted. When his dark, brooding, and strange novel is finished he sends it out. It is rejected ten times. By now he is thirty-two years old.
Everyone in the trade knows that Joseph K. is to be pitied. Edwin McDowell, writing in the New York Times, commented on the forces working against him: “The odds against an unknown writer getting a manuscript published by simply sending it directly to a publishing house are astronomical.” This sentiment is echoed in a Time magazine article: “It is virtually impossible to get published what is known in the trade as an ‘over the transom’ manuscript.” Bookstore owner Walter Powell wrote: “Few of the major trade publishers will take a chance on a manuscript from someone whose name is not known.”
Does Joseph K., hunkered down in his studio apartment, know this? Does he realize that blindly and hopefully sending out his collection of short stories or his first novel is a nearly futile gesture, the equivalent of buying a lottery ticket? In a way he does, for he has at least his own experience to guide him. But in an important way he doesn’t, for first novels and collections of stories are regularly published. On balance he continues to think that his marketing strategies, as minimal as they are, are essentially sound — and that one day he will be discovered.
He does make one new decision. Some experts contend that with an advocate in the marketplace — a literary agent — the odds of Joseph K. getting published would change from one in a thousand to one in ten. One day Joseph K. realizes this and begins to send out his collection of short stories and his dark novel to literary agents rather than to publishers. He gets many personal and pleasant rejections, all of which boil down to the same message: his work would be hard to sell. Roger Straus, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, explained, “It’s harder for a new writer to get an agent than a publisher,” but Joseph K., unaware of these long odds and of the need to keep trying, chalks up his negative experience to the venality of agents and stops communicating with them.
Over the next few years, two or three of Joseph K.’s stories appear in literary magazines. One is anthologized in a collection of neo-Kafkaesque stories. But his own collection and his novel will not sell. He reads a newspaper poll asserting that Stephen King is considered America’s greatest living author, followed in descending order of greatness by Danielle Steel, James Michener, Louis L’Amour, and Sidney Sheldon. One forty-seven-year-old female fan explains why she adores Danielle Steel’s novels: “It’s pure escapism. Her heroine is always beautiful, the men in the novels are always handsome, the people are rich and everything turns out fine, unlike life.” None of this upsets or educates Joseph K. He simply doesn’t take it in.
But our now not-quite-so-young writer is perplexed that two different universes seem to exist in the same time and space. He has a shelf full of books that inform him that if he puts his manuscript together neatly, researches the market, and sends out a solid query letter to the correct publisher, he has a good chance of being published. At the same time he understands that to operate in such a fashion feels like a pathetic waste of time and looks like lunacy.
He turns forty. His best writing goes into the letters he writes to a woman he has never met, a cousin of a co-worker at the bank, who lives on a dairy farm in eastern Iceland. He begins to tell her that he loves her.
Finally he stops writing stories altogether. He stops reading fiction. Instead he reads books about early Christianity, especially about early Christian martyrs. By the age of sixty he is an expert on the subject, and what began as a modest monograph on an obscure martyr has turned into a thousand-page manuscript. Once or twice he sends the manuscript out. But of course no one wants it.
Something in each of us wants to pity, ridicule, and laugh at Joseph K. — even if, as artists, we may not be so different from him. Something in each of us wants to call him blind, foolish, and weak. And yet, with respect to his writing career, all he has done is carefully and conscientiously write what he felt it important to write and then market his writing following textbook advice. To be sure, he ignored some opportunities and the basic demands of the marketplace and never opted to change his ways or to investigate the shadows in his personality, but nevertheless he operated rationally enough. Didn’t he?
We can call him a failure, as he can’t help calling himself, but we would be wise to understand that he did not fail as a writer of excellent fiction. He failed to negotiate the maze constructed by his own personality and the demands of the marketplace. He failed, that is, to understand how he was fated to travel along a certain path, unless and until he changed himself and rethought his role in the universe.
Our second short story writer, whom we’ll call Robert F., is not that different in personality from Joseph K. He, too, loves the stories of Zamyatin, Joyce, Borges, Paley, Welty, and Kafka. He, too, is essentially a proud, arrogant, antisocial loner. In fact, our two writers look rather alike during their twenties. They work at odd jobs, write stories, frequent cafés, send out their stories, and have their stories rejected. Neither attends marketing workshops nor experiences much internal willingness to meet the marketplace.
But there are major differences between them. We could draw the differences in any number of ways. We could say that Robert F. is the less impaired one — less wounded by his childhood, more able to form relationships, more flexible, or less anxious. We could postulate that Robert F. has been better supported by his parents, has higher self-esteem or a better self-image, or is less romantic and shrewder than Joseph K. Maybe he is less uncompromising, more self-aware, or more willing and able to listen to the advice of others.
However we draw the differences, they are such that Robert F. is able to enter an intimate relationship with a woman, marry, and have children. In this new context Robert F. arrives at a crucial turning point, for it begins to seem like an act of bad faith to stoically identify himself as a short story writer and thereby contribute so little to the household income. At this existential extremity, Robert F. tackles the question of choice. How should he fashion his life? What will appropriately serve his wife and his children as well as himself? What can he do in addition to writing short stories — or even instead of writing short stories? How should he change? What should he do with his life?
The answers do not come overnight, but the questions remain alive within him. He thinks about them, makes plans, makes decisions. He goes out into the world more often, in strategic fashion, to see what’s happening and what’s wanted. He battles his own antisocial tendencies and works to keep his artist’s necessary arrogance in check.
He discovers, over a year or two, that the themes he has been writing about in his stories resemble those being addressed by the burgeoning men’s movement. It dawns on him that he could probably offer a men’s workshop. He thinks about this, works on the idea, and eventually presents his first workshop, which draws only three men. But he does a better job of marketing the second workshop, and the third. His fifth workshop earns him more money that all his previous short story sales put together. Just as important, it strikes him that his new path is not a repudiation of his dreams or a violation of his principles but rather a hitherto unforeseen way to do good work and gain recognition.
Over the course of a year he writes a nonfiction book proposal based on his workshop materials and experiences. This book interests an agent and is quickly sold. It does quite well, and his nonfiction career is launched. By forty, Robert F. no longer considers himself a short story writer. He no longer is primarily a short story writer, although he returns to his first love whenever he can. He finds his identity hard to pin down. If asked, he sometimes calls himself a writer, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a group facilitator.
New business challenges continually arise for him. Some of the compromises he makes are harder for him to swallow than others. Some of his choices turn out to be misguided. But on balance he is pleased to have a career and proud that he has squarely faced the issue of how to acquire and keep an audience. If asked, he would refuse to call himself better than Joseph K. But neither would he accept, even for minute, the purist’s charge that he had sold out by rethinking his career in this particular fashion.
The hard truth about art is that you must think about it as a business. What is wanted? What is not wanted? Who are the players in the game? How does the marketplace operate? You must spend real time thinking about the business end of art: how it operates, what you need to learn so that you can operate in it more effectively, what move you must make to transform yourself into a smarter businessperson.
On both a practical and a psychological level, you must deal with the high probability that your art will not earn you a living. As a young artist it may be impossible and even undesirable to acknowledge this probability. But the day will come when it begins to dawn on you that the odds are heavily stacked against you. Then you will have to reconsider the rightness of your choices: your choice, for instance, to work any sort of day job no matter how demeaning or debilitating. Might a second career be a better idea? A willingness to do more commercial art? A mutually thrilling relationship with a supportive wage-earning gentleman or lady?
At every stage of your career you must consciously do business, if you want a career. If you are an actor you must do business as a twenty-year-old actor and, thirty years later, as a fifty-year-old actor. If you’re a novelist you must do business as a neophyte and as a mature artist with six novels behind you. At each stage of the game you must understand the marketplace and make decisions based on that understanding. You must handle the hundreds of small and large details that are an integral part of plying your trade — the mechanics of the business.
You’re likewise challenged to examine your career path to see if, metaphysically speaking, there are crucial turnings to take. Above all, you’re challenged to keep your spirits up as you go about your business. Especially if you produce potatoes rather than peaches, you can be certain that your business road will be rocky and that you will get bruised as you journey along it.
How can you better conduct your business and make sense of the business of art? The most important strategies to employ involve the creation and implementation of a personal business plan of action, one that takes into account both the mechanics of doing art business and the metaphysics of your life in art.
Your business action plan won’t look like a recipe or an agenda. What concerns you is too complicated to allow for simple, linear solutions. Your approach is more like the juggler’s, who launches five apples into the air and keeps them all flying. Even as the juggler grabs one apple in order to take a bite out of it, she is aware of all the other apples. Sometimes she needs to take a small, hurried bite because a distant apple is falling. Sometimes she can take a more leisurely bite. The items you are juggling in your business action plan are the following. None should slip entirely from your awareness even as you pay closer attention to one or another of them.
Perform ongoing self-assessment. Your first step is to engage in a general assessment of your present relationship to the business of art. Consider the following questions in conjunction with point 7 of the guided writing program described in chapter 13.
1. Do I intend to create peaches, potatoes, or a mix of the two?
2. How effective am I at doing the business of art?
3. How effective am I at mastering my resistance to doing the business of art?
4. How effective am I at meeting the fears and anxieties that well up in me when I contemplate business situations or attempt to negotiate business situations?
5. What have I learned from my past selling experiences, and how have I built on that knowledge?
6. How much time do I devote to the business of art? Is it enough?
7. How much mind space do I turn over to the business of art? Is it enough?
8. What are my business goals and aspirations?
9. How would I like my career to look? Modest but solid? Immodest and dramatic?
10. What tools will I use in assessing how I do the business of art? Will I read the trade magazines and learn to comprehend the realities of my business environment? Will I engage in quiet conversations with friends and ask them how they see me as a seller of art?
Engage in ongoing assessment of your personality as a seller. Consider the following in an effort to assess and improve your selling and marketing skills:
1. What part of your personality can you enlist to enhance your ability to sell? Your intelligence? Your intellectual playfulness? Your sense of curiosity? Your slyness or sense of whimsy?
2. What part of your personality must you better manage in order to enhance your ability to sell? Your stubborn, nonconforming side? Your aloof, distant side? Your sarcastic side? Your estranged, hurt, defensive side?
3. Learn to empathize with a potential buyer. Get into her shoes. What is she thinking? What demands do others place on her? What does she need? Why should she deal with you instead of someone else?
4. Insofar as your products make this possible, have a polished sales pitch. Present graspable ideas — that you are saving Celtic harp music from extinction, that your collection of stories are linked by their Arizona desert setting.
5. Be able to say why your work should be wanted. Self-advertise. Become the expert. Give workshops on what you do. Create the demand for your work.
6. Set aside time to do business. Schedule time for it.
7. Create a team. Collaborate. Encourage reporters to write about you and interviewers to interview you. Make and maintain significant professional connections.
8. Develop selling awareness. Look for opportunities to sell. Network. Exchange business cards with others. Bring your strengths and not your insecurities to the cocktail hour, the gallery opening, the network party.
9. Make yourself accessible and visible. Go out. Nurture your extroverted side. Be present. Make small talk. Watch to see if you self-sabotage. Are you drinking too much? Hiding in a corner? Can you manage your boredom, your arrogance, your shyness?
10. Acquire business savvy. Learn about contracts. Honor deadlines. Spot the trends early. Learn to read between the lines. What is really being said when people comment on your work? “Your paintings are very large” may mean “My gallery makes most of its money from graphics.” “You lost me when your character went to Finland” may mean “You violated the genre formula.” “This doesn’t seem very focused” may mean “This is too painful to read.” Try to intuit the real message and respond to it, or ask clarifying questions.
11. Practice your new skills. Practice exercising your personality in the selling arena. Practice pricing your art. Practice asking for what you want. Videotape yourself asking and answering questions. Interview yourself. Practice being a businessperson and a professional. Rehearse business situations. Role-play them with friends. Arrive at ideas about what you want and what the other person might want before you set off for a meeting with a curator, a collector, or an art dealer. Step into the other person’s shoes. Walk around the block in them. Be prepared for his agenda and his savoriness or unsavoriness.
Practice ongoing anxiety management. Doing business raises the anxiety level of most artists. You may feel anxious contemplating the business you have to do, anxious because you doubt yourself as a salesperson, anxious because you have no clear idea how to proceed with your business. To handle your anxiety you will need to assess it and to learn general anxiety-management techniques, as well as some specific techniques that apply to you as an artist. Answer the following questions, and others you’ll need to frame for yourself, to help yourself really learn how anxiety operates in your business life:
• How do I presently manage anxiety? By using drugs and alcohol? By avoiding situations that make me anxious? By acting agreeable, self-deprecating, or nice? By acting out aggressively and sabotaging myself?
• Which business situations make me most anxious? Discussing my product? Negotiating contracts? Making decisions about whom to hire for my band or my play? Choosing between the options in front of me? Studying trade magazines to learn about trends? Talking on the phone with agents or curators? Meeting in person with directors, gallery owners, publishers? Auditioning?
When you have assessed how anxiety affects you, consider using the following general anxiety-management techniques:
1. Meditation and breathing techniques
2. Getting enough exercise and rest and eating a balanced diet
3. Biofeedback and autogenic training
4. Stress-reduction practices incorporating guided visualizations and affirmations
5. Behavioral and cognitive approaches: learning new thoughts, inoculating yourself against old thoughts, and systematically desensitizing to anxiety-producing situations
6. Rehearsal and role-playing in preparation for anxiety-producing situations
For more information on these and other anxiety-management techniques, please consult Performance Anxiety, in which I describe these techniques in detail.
Some specific anxiety-reduction techniques for artists include the following:
1. Have a marketable product. If you do highly personal art that has a questionable chance of reaching an audience, also diversify.
2. Don’t identify with your product. You are not your painting, novel, or performance. When your agent asserts that your novel is not working for her, she is really talking about your novel — she is not calling you incompetent or a failure. Be able to step aside and hear what an agent, director, or curator is saying.
3. Demystify the process. Ask questions of friends. Read books. Learn what to expect and what not to expect. Listen to the players in the game. How are things done? When do you turn to your agent, and when do you consult your entertainment lawyer? How much must you socialize? How important are personal contacts and personal relationships? What does a good contract look like, and what does a bad one look like? Take a dose of reality.
4. Acquire advocates. A room is less intimidating with a friendly face in it. People who have already bought one of your paintings are on your side. An agent who has sold a book of yours is on your side. A playwright whose play you lit up with your performance is on your side. You can approach these people with confidence.
5. Prepare for business events. Rehearse. Ask yourself potential questions and answer them. Meet potential objections. Role-play with an art buddy, your intimate other, or your creativity coach.
Engage in ongoing market analysis. This strategy applies to both the practical and the metaphysical side of your art. Analyze what sells in your field. For example, is it regional art but only from a certain region? Mysteries but only British-style atmospheric mysteries, police procedurals, stories featuring an old-fashioned, hard-boiled private eye, or cozy narratives featuring a female amateur detective? New Age music but only on one or two labels? Students of a certain teacher? Clients of a certain agent? Artists represented in certain galleries?
If someone is selling in your field, what exactly is that artist doing? Is he adhering to a certain formula? How does he market himself? How does he keep himself in the public eye? Who represents him? With whom does he network? If his product is essentially uncommercial, how has he managed to obtain an audience? How has he managed to get his symphony performed or his quirky film financed, produced, and distributed?
Perform ongoing audience analysis. Who is your audience, in general and specifically? What are some of the characteristics of audience members you know personally? Do they come to all modern dance performances or only to see certain companies? Do they like all live theater or only feminist theater, drawing-room comedies, or plays by playwrights with name recognition?
What do they claim to like in general? Are surveys available? Questionnaire responses? Can you take your audience’s pulse? What do they say they like about your work? Do they have favorites among your paintings, books, songs, collages, or repertoire pieces? Do they say that your fiction is difficult but that your nonfiction is useful? Do they say that your watercolors are charming but that your oil paintings are scary? Do they say they could listen to you playing Mozart sonatas all day but can’t really tolerate any modern music? Do they like your ballads, angry message songs, or upbeat tunes the best?
Work to acquire a small respectful and knowledgeable audience, in addition to your larger audience, by searching out one or a few art buddies. Is there someone who really understands and appreciates your work? The person who holds Greek drama and Russian literature in the same high regard that you do may be your most valuable reader.
Accept that, insofar as you have an audience, you are a public figure. Have a public face. Realize that there will be misunderstandings — that your fans will not really know you, that they may not understand your message, that sometimes you and they will get caught up in the unreality of your status as a known artist.
Work to retain your audience. To the degree that it’s in your heart to do so, play your hits, produce your trademark work, repeat yourself, be recognizably you. When you want to stretch or change, plan strategies to minimize the risks involved in offering your audience what they are not expecting. Help them understand.
Do ongoing product and portfolio analysis. Be able to talk about your products in detail. Prepare a written statement, for example: “I paint large-scale abstract Expressionist paintings in primary colors, with a recent emphasis on cobalt blue and cadmium red. I paint in two scales: roughly five feet by eight feet and three feet by five feet. In feeling, my paintings are like those of Hans Hofmann and Nicolas de Stael, but my inspiration is drawn from the look of contemporary Los Angeles.”
If you are the product, learn to talk about yourself as a dancer, actor, or musician. Practice by preparing a written statement, for example: “I’ve worked in the theater for the past dozen years. During my time with the One Act Repertory Theater I performed in more than twenty contemporary plays and a dozen revivals. My performance in Simon Gray’s Butley and Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and Others were singled out for praise, as was my performance in the revival of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. My strengths are my voice (both speaking and singing), the conviction I bring to roles, my discipline, and my look, which reviewers have called ‘exotic’ and ‘extraordinary.’”
Think about which of your products have been commercially successful. Why were they successful? How can you repeat those successes or make use of what you have learned from them? How might your present products be altered — without sacrificing or compromising too much — to better meet the demands of the marketplace? Might you paint in a smaller scale? Add more plot to your fiction? Tailor your songs to a certain market? Can you do private, idiosyncratic work and commercial work?
What other products might you attempt that would allow you to diversify? Nonfiction along with your fiction? Mysteries along with your poetry? Multiples along with your one-of-a-kinds? Solo performance pieces that you write and perform? Music of your own composition? Might you audition for unaccustomed roles? Would you do commissioned pieces? Send your band in a new direction? Create products in another medium?
Prepare answers to the following hard-to-answer questions:
• In what tradition do I work?
• Which work by a famous or popular artist does my work most resemble?
• What makes my work unique?
• Of what technique or style am I the master?
• Why do I paint or play the way I do?
• Why is my work important?
• Who has loved my work and will vouch for it?
• Who collects me? Who reads me?
Dream up other difficult questions and answer them, too.
Do ongoing financial-support analysis. There are essentially eight sources of income available to you as an artist. You may want to treat them as if they comprise a buffet meal from which you select items according to what’s available and most palatable. These eight sources are:
1. Art products and performances
2. Commercial products (including commissions, genre work, commercials)
3. Grants, residencies, gallery stipends
4. Related careers (including tutoring, teaching, producing, agenting, editing, doing art therapy)
5. Unrelated careers (as lawyer, doctor, psychologist, etc.)
6. Unrelated day jobs
7. Income from a mate or spouse
8. Income from family and friends
Although you might prefer to live on income from the first category only, that’s not generally the most plentiful source. Accept that perfect solutions are rare and that any financial-survival program you put together comes with its psychological fallout.
It is easy to picture a culture in which art and commerce are not connected and equally easy to picture a culture in which everyone has permission to create, does in fact create, and is supported in their creative efforts. Ours is not that culture. You can live an artful life and an art-filled life without worrying about the connection between art and commerce, but if you intend to live an art-committed life, then the challenges that we’ve discussed in this chapter are yours to face.