“Art is not a luxury”: a phrase that I once saw on a bumper sticker a long time ago and that I used as part of my “signature” on one of my old email accounts. I’ve been thinking a little lately about the word “luxury” as it’s applied to the things that artists make. In the greater public mind, art is considered a luxury commodity because of how it is portrayed in the media through the lens of commerce and capitalism. Big auction numbers of works by household names like Picasso, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, etc…are often the only connection that many people have to art. When it comes to living artists, only the most ostentatious displays or those generating controversy and public comment made are given any kind of notice, the latest being Hank Willis Thomas’ public work of an abstracted embrace of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife, Coretta Scott King. The work has garnered a lot of attention for how it’s perceived at certain angles; that it resembles an act and anatomical feature of a sexual nature. There are many shades of how art is perceived by the general public. My focus here is mainly on the idea that living a life where creativity is at the center of one's life and livelihood is somehow a “luxury”.
The context in which most artists might hear that they “have the luxury of being an artist” and everything that goes along with that, is usually from people whose daily work feels like anything but creative, and some artists. Most artists have had to work other jobs in order to pay bills, studio rent, have funds for materials and have the basic necessities of life. Many of us, myself included, have considered the life of being a full-time artist as being a luxury. The “luxury” of being able to do something that is self-determined. Contrast that to how most people spend their lives essentially working for someone else or a larger entity (corporation) where most of what you do is determined by someone else. Again, this is a broad stroke, as there is a huge spectrum of experiences and comfort when it comes to working for someone else. However, often in those situations, people look at the perceived life of a full time creative as being one free of the drudgery and repetition of say, certain types of office work or other regimented occupations.
While it is usually true that being an artist can be free of certain regimented time and restrictions inherent in everyday work life, it too, has it’s routines and necessities that require us to pay heed to things that we often find laborious and tedious. The need to write artist statements, statements for grant applications, the ongoing search for opportunities to show one’s work, researching materials, keeping good records of sales and expenses, budgeting, finding supplemental income when art sales are slow, actually making the work and the list goes on. The day-to-day life of artists is very much like other occupations, it’s just perceived through a lens of being different, somehow, which it is, but not for the way that so many like to think it is. Creatively centered lives are seen as luxuries in the U.S. because the perception is that creativity and art are things outside of ordinary life, and it has become like that over time as art has become a specialization and not as much a part of everyday life as it once was. Eventually, there came to be certain people in a village or town who were specialists; the shoe maker, the weaver, the furniture maker. Once machinery and specialized businesses took over many of the tasks of making most household items, including parts for houses themselves, art and craft became further specialized in life and education. Art is now mostly considered outside of the spectrum of everyday necessities because there is no longer a need for everyone to make their own furniture, clothing and countless other things like it used to be done. Art now is largely considered outside the scope of everyday life and experience, even though that’s not true at all.
Art is taught as its own specialty and artists are now deemed specialists when it comes to creativity, in general. Need a poster for the school play? Get Mr. Smith’s art class to make one. Need some graphics for a new merchandising campaign? Let’s get the design department on it. Want a painting of your grandmother in her garden? Let’s talk to Susan down the street, she’s an artist and on and on. This isn’t the worst thing, however, my point is that we as artists should abolish the idea that our time spent making whatever we make is somehow a luxury. I’ve had this same mentality going back years. Almost any time I’ve talked to someone about what I do, I’ve always said that whatever time I’ve had in the studio is a luxury. It really isn’t because what I and countless others do is absolutely necessary, whether the larger society deems it so or not. What I’m arguing for is for artists to abandon the dominant way of thinking about our work time as something that’s on the fringes of existence. No, we aren’t “lucky to have the luxury of making art”, we’re people who are doing the job of creating culture. There’s nothing luxurious about it, It takes a ton of hard work, patience, nerve, grit and more hard work to do what we do and luxury has nothing to do with it.
