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Previously in The Work of Art:
Beyond validation or attention, writers seek publication for more time. The true desire is to exchange creative work for the financial freedom to live, read, and think.
Using Marx’s theory of Socially Necessary Labor Time, art’s market value is determined not by how long you spent on it, or how much of your heart you poured into it, but by the average time it takes to produce a similar product.
In 2026, the value of art is dictated by the platform industry. To remain relevant to the algorithm, producing work fast and releasing often is the only way you can survive
Because platforms like Amazon and Netflix spend billions of dollars trying to keep you consuming content, art is now content generation.
Even with a publishing deal, most artists don’t own the means of production.
Even if you sell your novel, you are STILL right where you started: exchanging your labor time for survival.
Today’s essay is brought to you by my dad, a dummer and an artist, brought down by the system and the fear he and I shared: wasting our one precious life. In honor of him, let’s go out and prove to the world that you can be an artist in the world and you can THRIVE.
In his book What Is Art?, Leo Tolstoy describes a world that is so foreign to us it’s hard to believe it was only around 170 years ago. He says:
"For the support of art in Russia, where only one-hundredth part of what is necessary for furnishing instruction to the whole people is expended on public education, the government offers millions as subsidies to academies, conservatories, and theatres. In France, eight millions are set aside for the arts; the same is true of Germany and of England. In every large city, they build enormous structures for museums, academies, conservatories, dramatic schools, for performances and concerts. Hundreds of thousands of workmen — carpenters, masons, painters, joiners, paper-hangers, tailors, wigmakers, jewellers, bronzers, compositors — pass their whole lives at hard work for the satisfaction of the demands of art, so that there is hardly any other human activity, except the military, which absorbs so many forces as this.”
Tolstoy is talking about a massive social investment in the arts. He claims that the arts are second only to the military.
Can you imagine?! He goes on to say,
It would be well if the artists did all their work themselves, but as it is, they need the aid of workmen, not only for the production of the art, but also for their for the most part luxurious existence, and in one way or another they receive it either in the form of pay from rich people, or in the form of subsidies from the government, which are given them by the million for theatres, conservatories, academies. This money is collected from the masses, whose cows are sold for this purpose and who never enjoy these Esthetic pleasures which art gives them.
Tolstoy is being pretty salty here, and his whole argument is that artists are depraved hedonists and must get a little more Christian, but I was stuck on the phrase luxurious existence. Tolstoy is painting a picture of a world where one could be an artist and live a luxurious existence because the world was showing up for art—they were building opera houses, buying books, and adorning their salons with really nice paintings.
Harpers recently published a letter from Richard Wagner to Ludwig II, the king of Bavaria, who had paid off the composer’s debts, in which Wagner basically says that the king saved art itself. He says: My sole reason for living is the wondrous love that descends upon me like drops of dew from the heart of my royal friend—as though from the lap of God—fructifying new seeds of life within me!”
This would be like Trump deciding to fund an independent movie and paying off the filmmaker’s debts. Or like Jeff Bezos deciding he wanted to fund a visual artist for a few years while she completed her Magnum Opus. To be fair, The Atlantic, one of the few places writers can still publish essays and make money, is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But that feels more like a tax write off and not like patronage.
So, since we don’t live in Germany or Russia in the 1860s, how do we solve a problem like money? (Read that last bit in the sing-songy voice of nuns in The Sound of Music.) I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the culture of MFAs is almost exclusively American. Some of the most innovative writers today do not have MFAs. But, more often than not, they’re international. Samantha Schweblin is from Argentina but lives in Berlin. Sheila Heti is Canadian. Roberto Bolano is Chilean. Olga Tokarczuk is Polish. Miriam Toews is Canadian. None of these writers has an MFA.
Canada has a universal, publicly funded healthcare system. Instead of 401ks, they have a pension plan. Is it any wonder that there are so many wonderful artists coming out of Canada right now?
But, in America, where there is no universal healthcare and very limited social services, little to no affordable housing, and a dependence on the stock market if you’re privileged enough to have a 401k, time is not only money; it is the key to health and safety. Where are you going to get the time to write if you must devote your time to safety?
Higher education allows you to get student loans, offering what’s essentially the ability to buy time now and pay later. Because, let’s face it, even at a fully-funded MFA, you’re not going to get enough money to survive so you’re going to either take out loans, which you eventually must pay back (or like my neighbor, who is living under the weight of two PhDs, know you can never pay back and will have thousands of dollars of debt looming over you for the rest of your life, which can be a major boner killer), or work a job in addition to the program, thereby defeating the whole point, which is to garner extra time.
But let’s say you’re fully funded. You can spend three years in a program like the one at Syracuse and earn $24,000 a year (which is a lot, actually, for an MFA). For context, according to the MIT minimum living wage calculator (using conservative estimates), a single person in Onondaga County needs $47,150 before taxes. Where I live in Olympia, Washington, the living wage is $51,720. In my hometown of Denver, Colorado, the living wage is $54,490. Even the highest-paying MFAs offer only a fraction of the cost of living. And while the plight of the starving artist sounds really romantic on paper, it’s a lot less glamorous in real life.
I was humbled by Alice Notley’s interview in The Paris Review. She’s what I’d describe as a voice of a generation, a true genius, a gift to our world. But she and her husband, Ted Barrigan, spent much of their life in abject poverty, and he died an agonizing death from hepatitis C in their apartment. Notley says:
He was, in a way, always sick during [his last] years. The illness went untreated, because there was no treatment really; we couldn’t afford doctors anyway, he didn’t want to change his lifestyle that much, and he didn’t want his illness named and charted by doctors.
Patti Smith’s Just Kids is an empowering story that makes you feel like if only you were braver, stronger, and more creative, you too could have suffered the way she did and become a world-famous musician and writer. But, in reality, you’re reading a memoir that says much more about luck than it does about talent (although I am not disregarding her talent).
These stories of the starving artist who made it present us with a pretty terrible and aggressive dichotomy: art and physical death and suffering, or selling out and existential death and suffering. I think this is a false choice.
I once ran into someone who’d just gotten a 9–5 job that she’d spent months training for. I asked her how the job was, and she said, Oh, that? I quit. I’m just not built for a desk job. I’d rather make art.
I found myself getting angry. I don’t think any human being was built for a desk job. I think desk jobs are anti-human. I just think there are those of us who are better at squashing our desires for freedom and autonomy in exchange for the security of healthcare and a steady paycheck. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this friend is someone who, while she is self-sufficient, comes from a stable family that contributed to her housing. I also probably took this extra personally because I am one of those people who has a desk job. I make my money sitting at my desk all day Monday-Friday working for a tech company even though I, too, would rather make art. So I am sure I heard her comment with a chip on my shoulder and reacted defensively as a result.
But, even if your parents didn’t help you with the down payment for your house like this friend, it is undeniable that not having someone to call on to bail you out in America will change your relationship to work. If you’re someone who can’t call your dad if your car is towed and you only have $5 in your checking account, you can feel like a failure. But if you’re someone who can’t call your aunt to help you with rent, so you decide to get a job with good healthcare and high pay, you can feel like a traitor to art. It’s a lose-lose situation. Either way, you can get to feeling like all your other artist friends are somehow better than you, that somehow there’s a big game being played, and you’re losing.
(Careful, my dear, that savors strongly of bitterness)
A piece in New York Magazine speaks to this feeling of failure. “How Many New Yorkers Are Secretly Subsidized By Their Parents?” discusses the flood of baby-boomer money that’s changing the social fabric of New York:
When the job is nonprofit and the trips European, when the work is too freelance and their kids’ school too private, when they close on a co-op before they finish their dissertation, sure, it could be crypto. It could be sex work. Maybe you missed that time they were hit by a city bus. But if you know someone under 50 who’s living like it’s the ’90s — who owns their apartment, who’s out every night, or who sends their kid to private nursery school and still has money left for vacation — it’s safe to assume there’s a baby-boomer behind them.
One of my dad’s favorite lines was from the film It’s a Wonderful Life. After George Bailey jumps into the water to save his guardian angel, Clarence, he asks him if he has eight thousand bucks. Clarence responds, We don’t use money in heaven. To which George Bailey responds, It comes in pretty handy down here, bub.
That’s how I feel about money; it comes in pretty handy down here, bub. And if you’re not one of the lucky ones in the article above, or even one of the regular privileged people whose parents can help subsidize a trip back home for Thanksgiving or give you an extra hundred dollars here and there when you’re behind on your phone bill, you must make that money somehow because the world is not a friendly place for the poor; in fact, it’s more expensive. So having a 9-5 job when you’d rather be making art shouldn’t make you feel like a traitor to art, it shouldn’t carry any sort of extra emotional weight. It’s literally just doing what you have to do to be safe.
My father, who was unhoused for twenty years, died with only what he had in his pockets. Throughout his life, I saw firsthand how awful it is to get sick and die if you don’t have any money. It’s not glamorous. It’s painful and dehumanizing. And if you get sick without health insurance, there are some options for postponing the debt with things like payment plans or predatory credit cards with 0% APR that you must pay within a select timeframe. In 2024, 36% of U.S. households had medical debt, 21% had a past-due medical bill, and 23% were paying a medical bill over time to a provider. I myself had a surgery in 2021 that would have cost over $60,000 if I didn’t have health insurance.
If you live in America and you don’t have a safety net, this should scare the shit out of you. So, if you’re like me, and not willing to make like Alice Notley and literally almost die for your art, how is an artist to get this money then? How are you going to generate, at a minimum, the $54,000 in Denver, Colorado, or the $51k in Olympia, Washington?
You have to go about it the way everyone else does. You must exchange your time for money.
So, let’s say you’re an artist, and even if you can’t write and read all day, every day, you still want to work for something you believe in.
It’s very taboo to talk about money and art but I think it’s important because we live in a real world that costs real money. And I’ve spent so much of my life feeling like a failure working in tech and not finding a way to make my art pay the bills. I used to google famous writers and try to figure out if they were a) married and b) what their spouses did for a living. So many writers, if you dig into their lives enough, have lawyer/doctor partners, inheritance, or parents who invested in property and let them live for cheap. I definitely had a secret fantasy that I would have a sugar mama who would let me write in the attic into the wee hours of the morning. Because I wanted to figure out how everyone was making their lives work, I did a ton of research, and realized that the system is so rigged we should all just be proud of ourselves for getting by and no one is a failure. That probably seems obvious to y’all but this was a hard won reality check for me!
Also, on a personal note, while I have been interested in the economy and capitalism for a few years and have been conducting research for fun and as an intellectual thought exercise, I didn’t begin to think about the real world implications in earnest until two years ago when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. She spent a few years as a school librarian and then, due to budget cuts in Denver Public Schools, lost her position as a librarian and became a 3rd grade teacher. had to retire early and even though she’s lucky enough to have a pension, her economic reality is sobering. Watching my mom retire was like being thrown into an alpine lake. I woke the fuck up. I didn’t have a pension. And I hadn’t really saved for retirement because of a combination of delusion and a belief that I might die before then anyway. I realized that no one is going to take care of me but me. And the likelihood of selling a book that becomes a bestseller is very unlikely at this point (and, as you will see in part 8, really doesn’t guarantee financial stability anyway, and as you will see in the conclusion, defies the whole point of art, but I digress) so I need to make money to live a dignified life as an older person in some way! Because, money comes in handy down here, bub.
So, on to the real heart of the essay: if you are alive in America, you need money. And let’s say you’re an artist, and even if you can’t write and read all day, every day, you still want to work for something you believe in. So let’s explore some options for how you’re gonna get that money.
You could be a teacher, educating the next generation and reading literature with high school students, and living out the fantasy of Dead Poets Society. In Colorado, the average teacher’s salary is mid-to-low $60,000s. So you’re barely scraping by the minimum living wage. But, at least you’ll have a pension, which is not truly enough to retire on, but at least you won’t have absolutely nothing when you’re 65.
Let’s say you want to work for a lit mag and get exposed to new voices and help shepherd the new generation? You could be a full-time managing editor at N+1 and make 59-64,000 dollars! And in case you’re wondering, the minimum living wage for Brooklyn is $60,833. So sure, it’s doable, like you won’t die. But you won’t thrive. And you certainly won’t be able to save for a healthy future as an older adult in the United States.
You could be a professor, but to do so, you must obtain a PhD, which can lead to significant debt, and higher education is under immense pressure right now due to declining population and shifting demographics, resulting in enrollment drops and closures. In other words, there’s a lot of risk with little reward. And humanities professors don’t make very much until they get tenure, which is a very cutthroat process. A humanities professor at DU, my local school growing up, probably only makes $60,000 dollars a year.
To be clear, these aren’t unlivable wages. But do they provide a life of dignity? I don’t think so. You could be one of those naysayers who is thinking to themselves, “These Millennials and Gen Z think they can have it all! Who do they think they are?”
Yes, it’s true that back in the day, my grandma owned three dresses that she wore to the law office where she worked, which meant she wore the same dress twice a week. The concept that one day her granddaughter would own enough clothes to fill two closets and go out to buy coffee multiple times a week would have astounded her. Family vacations were taken once or twice during my mom’s entire childhood, and they traveled to places like Nebraska, where the rest of my family lived. And my grandma was one of the privileged ones who had a college education.
In the age of Instagram, we see so many of our friends on trips to Europe (I myself have contributed to this with my recent trips to Greece), with really lovely nails, in new cars or houses with gorgeous decorations. It can be easy to want those things. It can be easy to feel like you deserve those things. Why should you be denied the beautiful life of your dreams when everyone else seems to have it all? Especially when, for women, especially Black women, beauty can be the only means for gaining respectability, promotions, and wealth. And who are we kidding? Even in the publishing industry, it pays off big to be white, blonde, and “hot.” I spend a lot of money to dye my hair blonde so I can reap the benefits in the workplace and among my peers.
I think the reality is that people are either getting support from invisible places, are in a lot of debt, or are among the few who make $54,000 a year and live lives that accurately reflect that income. Which, to be clear, doesn’t make you one of the 38 million Americans living below the poverty line, but it does mean that you will be one of the many Americans who will retire in poverty (studies say that you must make at least $150,000 a year if you’re under 50 to not retire in abject poverty).
It also means we won’t have access to the many luxuries Instagram peddles, encouraging us to indulge in self-care. And if you can’t afford that massage when your neck is killing you from a double shift at the restaurant where you work, that Instagram is telling you that you need to feel grounded and embodied and deal with the trauma stored in your body; or if you can’t afford the out-of-pocket cost for a therapist that will help you navigate the turmoil that is American life, you can start to feel resentful.
Michael Green, who is for sure one of those capitalist folks (Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager), wrote a viral piece suggesting that the minimum living wage an American with a family of 4 needs to just participate in the system is $140,000 a year. As economist Kathryn Edwards says, our lives aren’t becoming unmanageable because we’re in a recession; it’s because social policies over the last fifty years have left us without the foundation to live dignified lives.
Dear reader, you might be thinking, “Why do you need a job that provides you with meaning and satisfaction? Life is pain; anyone who says otherwise is selling something! Nobody was guaranteed a happy life or even a safe one; we were just given the right to pursue it. You get weekends and holidays! You only must work 40 hours a week, so buckle up crybaby! Pull up your bootstraps! Make like Octavia Butler and wake up at 2 am before your shitty day job! Or like Toni Morrison before your work at a publishing house.”
Or you could be saying, “Yes, it is hell to work a job I don’t enjoy. Yes, it feels like death to trade my precious time to sit at a desk for 40 hours a week. No way do I want to do this for the rest of my life, let alone until the end of the week!”
In an interview, Andrew Hartman, the author of Karl Marx in America, describes the anxiety of exchanging our time for money well when he says, of the switch from a feudal system to a capitalist one:
“[I] was trying to convey… how radically foreign it was to have to go into a factory every day and work in very regimented conditions, not only foreign but miserable, right? And so it’s, again, to repeat myself, it’s not as if like being a peasant in Sicily in the 19th century was like some utopian existence but when these people were sort of pushed off the land and immigrated to the United States and were thrown into factories, it seemed much worse to them. Same for example, with like these people who had moved out west in search of, you know, whether they were immigrants or not, in search of just independence of the ability, they would hope to sort of have a little chunk of land and grow their own food and maybe make a little profit on the side when that was increasingly foreclosed upon in the late 19th century as increasingly corporations and the rich monopolized the land and people were, again, in order to survive, they had to sell their labor, which often meant going into some sort of factory-like conditions that was an extremely foreign existence for them, an unpleasant existence for them…”
We’re taught that with the advent of capitalism and industrialism, we acquired more freedom and autonomy, and everyone was happy about it. Still, the truth is, this transition was met with intense resistance. It is a very unnatural and inhuman way to spend our days, being “yoked to the time clock,” and it’s perfectly reasonable to want to fight back or at least be unhappy about it. Our modern understanding of time is very new. Like 200 years new.
As Oliver Burkeman describes in his book Four Thousand Weeks:
“On balance, you should definitely be grateful you weren’t born a peasant in early medieval England. For one thing, you’d have been much less likely to make it to adulthood; but even if you had, the life that stretched ahead of you would have been one definition by servitude. You’d have spent your backbreaking days farming the land on which the local lord permitted you to live, in exchange for giving him a crippling proportion of what you produced for the income you could generate from it…. But there’s one set of problems you most certainly wouldn’t have experienced: problems of time. Even on your most exhausting days, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to you that you had “too much to do,” that you needed to hurry, or that your life was moving too fast, let alone that you’d gotten your work-life balance wrong. By the same token, on quieter days, you would never have felt bored. And though death was a constant presence, with lives cut short more frequently than they are today, time wouldn’t have felt in limited supply. You wouldn’t have felt any pressure to find ways to ‘save’ it. Nor would you have felt guilty for wasting it: if you took an afternoon break from threshing grain to watch a cockfight on the village green, it wouldn’t have felt like you were shirking during ‘work time.’”
So yes, it’s very true, it is possible to write even when you’re working multiple jobs to support yourself, or freelance enough to cobble together an income, but does it help facilitate a safe and prosperous future? For many who don’t achieve commercial success, it doesn’t.
Finally, what if you’re someone like me, someone who doesn’t want to live in Brooklyn on $64,000 a year, because you’re either not brave enough (I really don’t have the grit to be broke anymore, it really stresses me out and it terrifies me to relinquish security) or, also like me, you could have a mixture of bougie tastes (I love an expensive candle and a good facial, blame it on my Virgo sun sign) combined with a childhood history of economic insecurity? If you’re this type of artist, you could just abandon values and passion and get a job you hate that at least pays you the money you need without requiring too much time.
Does this make you/me a sellout? Does this mean I have relinquished the true soul of art for security?
But since when have security and art become mutually exclusive?
Continued next week….
