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This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor. It’s best to start at the beginning:
This series isn’t necessarily anti-trying to make money as an artist. It’s about investigating why we want to make money as artists and why we care so much. Obviously, if you wanna make money as an artist, more power to you. I fully support it. Go do it. Well done! But if you’re kind of disturbed by having to make that choice, if there’s something that feels icky to you about it, if you feel confused about relating to money and art and value, this is the podcast for you.
But! If you want an alternative perspective, and if you want the hero to my anti-hero, I would recommend two podcasts or two newsletters:
And, they’re both really good and they actually both came together for a really thought-provoking, episode on February 17th. I think it’s just important to hear people realistically talking about what it means to be a writer in this day and age and what it means to try to make money from it.
If you asked me why I wanted to get published by one of the big publishing houses (and I was being honest), a huge reason is that I want to go on a book tour. I love the idea of going to different places around the country, or perhaps the world, and talking about art. I love the idea of going to dinner with other famous writers and drinking fancy wine and eating fancy food, all paid for by Simon and Schuster. I want to have a fancy book launch in New York where very fancy people are in attendance, and I can wear a really cute pant suit. I’m not as interested in the distribution or the audience and the reach (which, of course, would be great) but rather the cultural experience of being able to call myself “a real writer.” What I am looking for is social capital.
In an interview, Sally Rooney, one of my favorite writers and a Marxist, says,
“There’s a scene in the novel where Connell, one of the protagonists, goes to a literary reading, and he feels incredibly alienated from what he sees. He feels that writers turn up to events full of people from a particular class, from a particular educational background, and essentially the writer sells them the product of cultured existence in the form of a commodity, and the commodity is a book, and people can purchase this book and purchase their way into a seemingly cultured class. And all the money that is exchanged in the book industry is just people paying to belong to a class of people who read books. And that is something that I definitely worry about and feel implicated in. Because I do think a huge amount of the cultural world, first of all, there’s a large extent that it involves sealing off the appointed cultural producers from life by festivals and events, like dinner parties and book launches. That this world, the economic and cultural backing of this world, is a way of taking writers from their background, whatever it might be, and making them part of a special class. And I am very skeptical of that process. And I am very skeptical of the way in which books are marketed as commodities. Almost like accessories that people can fill their homes with, like beautiful items.”
A few years ago, I attended a party at the home of the editor of a prestigious literary magazine. Everyone at the party was either an editor at a publishing house or literary magazine, published by a big publishing house, or employed by a prestigious university. Their home was a rowhouse in Queens (I think? Honestly can’t totally remember if it was Brooklyn or Queens) and it was surprisingly normal. I thought it would look like something out of a Bridgerton set with leather sofas, cognac decanters, and wall-to-wall bookshelves. Instead, it felt like the home a friend of mine might have. I genuinely liked everyone in attendance except the people close to my own age. Nearly everyone I talked to was unassuming, thoughtful, a good listener, interesting! I met another writer who I have kept in touch with who is kind, sweet, genuine, and I hope to be real friends with one day.
At the party, the two people closer to my own age got too drunk and one of them, a young blonde woman from Colorado in grad school, kept trying to tell me how poor she was and how she’d grown up in poverty and she did it all on her own. She was very fashionable, about the age of my younger sister, and in what appeared to be a tumultuous relationship with a man who was kind of having a “literary moment.” The way she brandished stories of her poverty felt like a combination of insecurity and superiority. I wanted to shake her and tell her—who cares how poor you are or where you grew up, look at where you are now! Look at all the smart, creative people who want to get to know you! I am sure she irritated me because she probably reminded me of me, who was also a young blonde woman from Colorado, or I was worried in some subterranean part of myself that I came across the way she did—waving my traumatic childhood like a flag for attention and reverence.
Despite my annoyance, I hypocritically went with the young couple to another party at the editor of a well-known small press. Another male party-goer in his mid-to-early fifties went with us. Before long I was sitting on the couch with this fairly well-known writer telling me how beautiful I was and that I had a beauty that was “of the mountains, of the wild!” It wouldn’t be a party with the literarti if an older man didn’t hit on a younger woman, am I right?
I am painting a funny picture of it, but it truly wasn’t something from the beatnik era or even the 70s. It was pretty tame and lovely, and I would like to tell you that I embraced this experience with grace and kindness. But in reality, this whole night made me feel incredibly insecure. The way I handled this experience is still a source of shame. What I did after meeting the literati was tear them down and build myself up with my rhetoric. When I described the night to friends, I said things like, “I realized that everyone is just insecure and unhappy, no matter their credentials,” and “I realized I really like my life! I am so glad I didn’t get an MFA, I think it would have ruined me.”
I was envious of the writers and professors. I wanted their lives, or the fantasy I had of their lives. I wanted their New York brownstones, their days spent thinking and reading and discussing. It felt so much richer and more powerful than my life. The one where I spend at least 40 hours a week, sometimes more, in front of a computer trying to understand complex technical concepts that hurt my brain, trying to ingest and then translate that information into something legible for an engineer, and then writing it all in a (very basic) programming language and publishing it on the internet. At times, my life feels joyless. It feels rote.
And so, I left this party not only feeling dissatisfied with my own life, but also feeling less than. So I tried to stem the pain of this feeling by belittling the choices and lives of others. By making myself superior.
I’m not trying to defend such behavior, and I’d like to think that now I have a stronger sense of self and confidence in my life direction, but I want to make it clear that it’s not just me who tries to bolster my identity by tearing down others. It’s common to want to improve our status by trying to be better than.
But better than who?
Better than somebody! Anybody!
Many of us have a small, bitter, rotten gremlin in the corner of our hearts that is crying out, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront: ‘I could have been a contender! I could have been somebody!’
In an interview, Andrew Hartman, author of Karl Marx in America, discusses. W.E.B. Du Bois’s assessment of capitalism and race in America. He says,
“So when W.E.B Du Bois, who’s one of my favorite thinkers in the 20th century, wrote this book, Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, to my mind, still one of the greatest books about U.S. history ever written, he analyzes the Civil War and reconstruction through a very Marxist lens, but sort of extends the Marxism to include the experience of racism in the American South at the time, and why it was that white workers came to be more concerned with staying above black workers than challenging the ruling class in the South.
And that’s when he uses the term the psychological wages of whiteness. It felt better to them to at least be above somebody than to think about them as aligned with the working class as a whole against this ruling class.”
Obviously, W.E.B. Du Bois is talking about whiteness in particular. Still, I think he’s touching on something distinctly American—the desire to be above somebody rather than accept you’re a member of the working class. I believe this is what’s happening with the war against immigrants in the United States. A white member of the working class doesn’t want to feel the pain and despair of her exploitation, so instead she targets another group. At least she’s not a lazy, criminal immigrant, she tells herself. She has a right to be here; she has a right to seek the status and value that was promised to her! This way of thinking and living is an attempt to gain social value and capital by aligning oneself with the ruling (billionaire) class. Not only is this thinking anti-community and prevents collective change, but this othering to protect our own fears and vulnerability is also bad for our souls.
The same principle can be applied to artists. Like my friend who quit a job she’d trained for months to get and said to me, Oh, that? I quit. I’m just not built for a desk job. I’d rather make art. As if some of us were born for the soul-sucking exchange of our time for value, and there are those of us, in her words, artists, who are somehow above this drudgery. Implicit in this statement is a kind of superiority.
There’s the working-class, those fools who sit around at a desk all day, and the capitalist class, the assholes and the man who keep us all down, and then there’s the artists who somehow get to escape this whole shitshow and just make art.
Not to mention that the perceived status of making it as a writer often goes hand-in-hand with a check signed by Knopf or Simon and Schuster, and publishing has been, and remains, a white space. The financial and social legitimacy granted by a fancy publication is the same as acceptance into a historic club. But it’s important to remember that the club has maintained its elite status, its exclusivity, by excluding writers of color, and, for a long time, women, not to mention queer folk. The word covet comes to mind. We covet what feels exclusive, the special and the rare. It’s why Nike only sells a certain amount of their special shoes—by preventing everyone from having the shiny thing, makes the thing more shiny. The word covet came to be in the mid-13th century. It meant, “to desire or wish for inordinately or without regard for the rights of others,” and it has its roots in the Latin word cupiditas “passionate desire, eagerness, ambition.” When I say I want a book deal, or when I walk in a room and want everyone to say—look, there she goes, a real writer! I am displaying an ambition, a passion, to possess something specifically at the cost of others. It’s the exclusivity of making it as a writer that creates its value.
In her book, Salvage, Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand discusses the fact that the literary canon, a group of “great” books written by writers who have made it over the long haul, is damaging on two levels: writers of color were not published, and they were only ever represented from a colonial and violent perspective. Brand says of books like Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, “Mine is not an argument about being ‘absent’ from literary texts; we were not absent. We were in the texts. Potent as life. But we (and others) were trained to remove or skirt our presence, or to observe that presence as something like background, immutable, not subject to the action of the text…” She continues, “I propose that the colonial event is the aesthetic—that its pleasures, tastes, manners, consist of this juxtaposition. What is pleasing, what is beautiful is the violence.”
I want literary recognition because it makes me feel special and eases my social paranoia, but that feeling of specialness stems from the genuine and real violence against other voices. And that truth certainly erodes the joy of attaining recognition.
Beyond the social capital granted by a byline in The New Yorker, what makes you a “real” musician, or a “real” writer, is not the act of making music or writing, but the exchange of cultural value, which is money, for your labor.
Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses this in her book Thick. While pursuing her PhD, she got pushback from another academic for the attention she was getting from writing. Other academics were upset that she was getting so much notoriety because that’s not what you’re supposed to do in grad school. You’re not a person she says, you’re a unit of labor. You’re there to serve your mentors and the institution and not your own ends. Since then, Cottom says:
“I have come very far. I had come so far that I could be considered a problem. It is an honor of sorts. I was writing, and I was doing so without express permission from gatekeepers… I am now an academic, an official one. I have the title and the letters after my name that black people are fond of calling our educational credentials.”
The point McMillan Cottom is making is that only an anointed few are allowed to speak in society. You are considered an intellectual only if you have paid for the title through either tuition or your labor for an institution. You are considered a real writer only if you’ve been anointed by the capitalist institution that owns the means of production. If Penguin wants your book, you are real.
This is because what has value, or what is made real, must be funneled through the system that grants legitimacy.
As James Baldwin states, “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” Writers help make the interior lives of readers real, but society hasn’t deemed that labor as worthy of reward. It’s taken for granted.
If Penguin wants your book, you are real.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that more and more people are choosing to get MFAs and that it’s in those programs that you’re more likely to get an agent or a book deal. It’s a pay-to-play type of system. Programs like The Iowa Writers’ Workshop grant your work legitimacy not only because money has been exchanged, but because a system of exclusivity bolsters its perceived status, so you become legitimate in the eyes of the system if you are permitted to partake. And, as we become lonelier and more disembodied as a culture, MFA programs become some of the only places where we can gain connection and intimacy with other writers.
So, even though I am intensely critical of the MFA industrial complex, I just applied to a program because I am so fucking lonely. I am starving for artist conversation and connection, and I will do anything, even go $40000 into debt, to get it.
Don’t get me wrong, I truly believe that leading a creative life is one of the things that makes us most human and most real. I don’t think there is anything wrong with calling yourself an artist. I believe life is art, and therefore every human is an artist. But I also think there are those of us drawn to creative expression with a particular fervor, and we have a deep desire to be seen as creative.
But clinging to the title artist or intellectual as some sort of performative identity is kind of classist and snobby.
It bolsters the systems that make it so hard to be an artist in the first place.
The person you’re harming the most with anointing a special distinction to the identity of an artist is you.
