Art and the Sinking Ship

 

My friend gave up his career as a bureaucrat and became a painter. But he’s struggling financially, surviving on a budget that is well below the poverty level. And I think, at times, it’s killing him. It hurts when I see how he and many others among both my real-world circle of friends and my social media contacts are struggling to make ends meet. Some are fortunate to have full-time teaching jobs, but many are relying on income from box office, bookstore, and art gallery sales. 

It was with this dual sense of foreboding and admiration for them that I read in The New Republic a book review written by economic journalist Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, who was critiquing Shannan Clark’s art history The Making of the American Creative Class. 

I’ve copy/pasted and summarized what I see as the most surprising, frightening, and intriguing elements of Kaiser-Schatzlein’s piece. There’s a link at the bottom so you can read the original essay entitled “The Artist Isn’t Dead” at The New Republic website. You really ought to read Kaiser-Schatzlein’s full essay.

Here’s what I see as the most important takeaway, with most of this quoted directly from the review:

The creative class as we know it emerged as a by-product of industrialization and the introduction of a consumer economy. White-collar work exploded into existence between 1880 and 1949, far surpassing the growth in blue-collar work. In the growing mass consumer economy, manufacturers had to find a way to make their goods desirable to the public, and so mass advertising was born and white-collar work became creative. Advertising dollars funded the growth of newspapers as advances in printing technologies enabled mass employment for writers, photographers, printers, graphic designers, editors, and artists.

The Great Depression tore a jagged hole in the heart of this culture industry, driving creative across all spectrum to join together in unions and guilds. Unionized cultural workers were able to achieve a middle-class salary that, for a while, kept up with the rising wages of unionized industrial workers. Meanwhile, the New Deal programs that hauled the United States out of the Great Depression and launched it into the prosperity of the postwar boom directly supported cultural workers as well. 

This dynamic combination of organized cultural worker groups and government support encouraged a flourishing of the culture industry that did quite well until the ugliness of McCarthyism struck against them. The anti-liberal phobia effectively neutered many cultural industry labor groups by forcing a culling of their more radical members. The larger labor movement, which at the top was thoroughly white, male, industrial, and conservative, was happy to watch the creative and perhaps more diverse left flank die. 

But then in the late 1960s the U.S. economy began to deindustrialize, which slowly eroded the bargaining power of the labor movement as a whole. By the 1970s, a number of newspapers and magazines began shutting their doors. During the Reagan and Clinton ears the hydrochloric acid of Neoliberalism flooded over the New Deal levees of socioeconomic security and started corroding not only the financial systems, but social and cultural structures as well. Public support for social welfare programs declined, income inequality skyrocketed, and prices exploded to feed the needs of the financial sector. In an age of toxic individualism, creative workers were largely left to fend for themselves. They are not doing so well.

The culture economy is brittle. Art organizations, from museums to concert venues, require a massive structure of employees to function properly. The creative classes also need an audience: people with enough income to buy a range of books and paintings, and enough free time to go to concerts and museums. Sadly, our current economic system leaves the majority of people, including creative workers, vulnerable and powerless.

Artists and other creatives are but a slice of the art world, which itself is a portion of the wider culture industry that is verging on collapse. Many creative people today are swimming barely above the poverty line. The walls are caving in everywhere: book publishing is contracting and consolidating; the music and film industries are taking huge blows as they transition to streaming; and journalism continues to shed workers.

Across the entire economic system we are seeing the need to empower workers through organized labor movements while ensuring these working people have affordable-yet-excellent healthcare, childcare, education, food, and housing. But unionism is not nearly enough. The creative class en masse will need to get behind political movements that aim to provide low-cost housing, curtail the financial sector, and reinvest in public schools and municipal infrastructure. We falsely see culture through the keyhole of individualism, which makes it almost impossible to connect the conditions of the working people in general with the bleak economic prospects facing artists, writers, performers, dancers, and other cultural creatives.

We are all in this together.

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Source:

“The Artist Isn’t Dead” by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein.
Published online for the January 4, 2021 issue of The New Republic Magaazine.
Read Kaiser-Schatzlein’s essay at:
https://newrepublic.com/article/160695/making-american-creative-class-book-review-artist-dead

Graphic:
Echo of a Scream
Art by David Siqueiros, Mexico