{"id":1829402,"date":"2026-03-15T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1829402"},"modified":"2026-03-15T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T06:00:00","slug":"the-wild-ways-artists-have-made-their-livings-renaissance-to-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1829402","title":{"rendered":"The Wild Ways Artists Have Made Their Livings, Renaissance to Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Archives_of_American_Art_-_A_life_class_for_adults_at_the_Brooklyn_Museum_under_the_auspice_of_the_New_York_City_WPA_Art_Project_-_11039.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tThe most sure-fire way to fund a creative career is family money. So says Mason Currey in his new book Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life<\/em>\u2014and only a whiny nepo baby could possibly disagree.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd yet, the history of art is no mere \u201chistory of rich kids.\u201d Only egomaniacs get into art expecting sure-fire success. But more than that, I find it is often the people who most need the world to be different than it is who wind up the most creative, who need to shape what they have into something else. Stories of trials and triumphs punctuate Currey\u2019s book, which is no how-to. Instead, it\u2019s a trove of idiosyncratic, colorful stories\u2014those titular adventures\u2014that exemplify the many resourceful and creative ways artists have made it work.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven in the first section on the fortunate, paths to family money are not always straightforward but rely on twists of fate. Arthur Schopenhauer, for example, would have been resigned to a life as a clerk in the family business, per his father\u2019s orders, had said father not committed sudden suicide and left him an inheritance. As a woman and divorc\u00e9e, Louise Nevelson hardly had access to an inheritance, but her brother proved generous and she made every cent count. When he helped her buy a 4-story brownstone, she filled almost every inch with sculpture, living exclusively off sardines and toast and rotating, for years, between her two gray sweatsuits. She was saving every cent, every square foot, and every ounce of energy for her art.<\/p>\n

\n\tNone of these stories are exactly replicable, hardly moldable into pat, prescriptive advice. Still, some patterns do emerge. Currey\u2019s book is structured according to the tendencies he found, with a focus on stories that span the Renaissance to today.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe second section is \u201cJobs.\u201d There are artists with odd jobs, like Grace Hartigan, who worked as a nude model at the Art Students League, absorbing the instructor\u2019s advice to students and getting a free art education in the process. Despite this and countless other gigs, she lived without heat in her New York apartment, as did Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner and so many others, scrounging and scraping by. Philip Glass worked as a plumber and a taxi driver. Agnes Martin worked dozens<\/em> of jobs: waitress, dishwasher, janitor, cashier, tennis coach, rabbit breeder, and so on. And Kathy Acker had a sex work stint, performing a simulated-sex Santa routine with her then-boyfriend in Times Square. \u201cA straight job would lobotomize me,\u201d Acker explained.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are also moonlighting artists with double lives\u2014who maintain full-on careers that have nothing to do with their art, in an effort conserve their creative energy for themselves and to free their art from commercial pressure. Kafka worked in the family asbestos mine, and William Carlos Williams was a doctor, delivering over 300 babies and even serving as Robert Smithson\u2019s pediatrician.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut of course there are also artists with jobs that make use of their creative skills. Currey\u2019s two examples take place at prestigious institutions: the Museum of Modern Art and Harvard University. At MoMA, Frank O\u2019Hara wrote poems while manning the ticket desk after seeing a Matisse show and deciding he\u2019d like to come back for free. His friends would visit and chat and pass the time until, eventually, he worked his way up to curator. Edward Steichen, Sol LeWitt, and Luis Bu\u00f1el worked there too, and artist Howardena Pindell became the museum\u2019s first Black woman curator while Jeff Koons was working the desk downstairs. Koons was a natural salesman, capable of charming crowds into MoMA memberships.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe book\u2019s section on teaching is surprisingly short for the outsized role it has played in supporting artists, but maybe those stories were simply less interesting: Kurt Vonnegut, after all, said it was \u201cspiritually pooping to care desperately about student work that probably isn\u2019t worth caring about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCurrey\u2019s vivid writing turns mundanities into a page-turner. But his stories are also all pulled from secondary sources\u2014like biographies and published journals\u2014so don\u2019t expect any new big discoveries. Whipping out the most fun facts at dinner parties, I\u2019ve learned to be prepared that my companions may well reply: \u201cI know.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter family money and jobs comes a section on patrons\u2014the book\u2019s most troubling passage, both for the way artists are made to dance for the rich and for Currey\u2019s glaring omissions. We learn that the US poet laureate\u2019s annual stipend of $35,000 has not been adjusted for inflation since 1986, and that Joseph Haydn\u2019s time as the court composer for a Hungarian prince paid him in \u201cmore floggings than food.\u201d Only when the prince died could Haydn even play for other people.<\/p>\n

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James McNeill Whistler\u2019s Peacock Room.<\/span>Photo Neil Greentree\/Smithsonian\/Wikimedia<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tNot one to play court jester, James McNeill Whistler\u2014the subject of a retrospective at Tate Britain this summer\u2014liked to turn the tables. Currey describes him as \u201cdemonstrating immense natural charisma and an equally immense antiauthoritarian streak\u201d\u2014a recipe for success? When commissioned to decorate a room in a London townhouse, Whistler went rogue, adorning the walls in leather and gold leaf. Then, despite his patron\u2019s displeasure, he asked for a raise, hoping to be paid in guineas rather than pounds. The former\u2014which equals one pound plus one shilling\u2014typically went to professionals; pounds were for tradesmen. After his request was denied, Whistler made an addendum to the room, painting a peacock hoarding silver coins at its feet\u2014an unflattering portrait of the patron himself emblazoned right there on his own walls. It was a real class act.<\/p>\n

\n\tThese are entertaining stories, but they are hardly the most important: not a single\u00a0Medici or museum commission is mentioned in this \u201cPatron\u201d section. The quirky eccentricity can be charming and fun, but on occasion, elisions disturb. The second \u201cPatron\u201d chapter is titled \u201cGovernment Checks,\u201d and it contains only one example: the New Deal\u2013era Works Progress Administration, which staved off unemployment by commissioning posters and murals from artists deemed \u201cworkers with a brush.\u201d This choice paints the picture that government funding is a rare occurrence, a pipe dream\u2014but this is flatly false. So many other nations, from Germany to Qatar to Canada, fund art past and present much more generously than the United States\u2014never mind that the New Deal itself had several other programs for commissioning art, and that the New Deal was hardly our only attempt. Instead of looking anywhere else\u2014to China or Scandinavia or the Soviet Union\u2014the checks chapter stays put in New York and pivots, improbably, to Peggy Guggenheim. She\u2019s a worthy patron, to be sure, but she is no elected official. Doubly odd, she is the book\u2019s sole art collector besides Theo Van Gogh.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe writer confesses that \u201cthe pressure I felt to create a container for all these stories, and make some kind of sense of them, truly overwhelmed me.\u201d But he did, eventually, create containers; he just failed to fill some of them.<\/p>\n

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Harlem Community Arts Center in 1938<\/span>Photo David Robbins\/Works Progress Administration, Federal Art Project<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tFor instance, the third \u201cPatrons\u201d chapter, \u201cTrue Fans,\u201d advocates crowd funding, even arguing that \u201csome of the most successful instances of patronage in art and literary history have come not from powerful rulers, wealthy industrialists, enterprising heiresses, government programs, or internet strangers, but from other artists who have recognized a need and stepped into meet it.\u201d Intriguing. But the eclectic examples brought in hardly support this claim. We get an early subscription model; Substack; the cadre of literary greats (Hemingway, Eliot, Yeats) who supported Ezra Pound, unbothered by his pro-fascist, antisemitic views; and Augusta Savage, who received crucial encouragement in the form of a state fair prize before establishing and directing the Harlem Community Art Center.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat Center, in turn, launched the careers of Romare Bearden and many others. But it was also a New Deal project, not exactly artists pooling resources. I guess, then, it\u2019s welcome news that Currey\u2019s narrative is a misleading one, for if the most successful models in history were really Substack and some boys club, we\u2019d be even more doomed than we already are.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe final section has the most enticing theme\u2014\u201cSchemes.\u201d In it, we see artists getting creative not only on the canvas or the page, but in the ways they run their lives. Chantal Akerman made Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles\u2014<\/em>which topped Sight and Sound<\/em>\u2019s 2022 poll of the greatest films ever made\u2014as a 24-year-old high school dropout. How? She got a job at a porn theater and pocketed $4,000, making the books look clean by ripping tickets in half and sharing them among customers, distributing one for the price of two and keeping half. It helped\u201430 times as much\u2014that she also got a $120,000 grant from the Belgian government.<\/p>\n

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Sgt. Romare Bearden in February 1944.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tJean-Luc Godard, Akerman\u2019s biggest inspiration, funded his early films through theft, too. Though born to a wealthy family, he was cut off when he got rejected from film school but clung steadfastly to cinema anyway, opting to teach himself by watching four movies a day. His parents had planned to support his education, but not like this. So he stole rare editions of Paul Val\u00e9ry books from his grandfather, the executor of the poet\u2019s estate, and is even believed to have stolen and sold his grandpa\u2019s Renoir.<\/p>\n

\n\tJohn Cage, a more benevolent schemer, got his big break by winning money on an Italian game show, where he answered questions about mushrooms, one of his great passions, and, at the age of 46, w five million lire\u2014almost $90,000 in today\u2019s money. It was \u201cthe first consequential amount of money I\u2019ve earned,\u201d he explained. Another \u201cscheme,\u201d according to Currey, is just Romare Bearden on the GI bill. But even plenty of anti-welfare fiscal conservatives would agree the GI Bill was hardly scheming. Reading Making Art and Making a Living<\/em>, you\u2019d totally miss that the world of contemporary art is full of, if not epitomized by, blue-chip schemers, those taped-banana vendors and crypto-crazed con men skilled at convincing the ultra-rich to pay big sums for\u2026 what, exactly? The elusiveness is the appeal.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen there are the artists who are simply bad with money, focusing all their energy intensely and with tunnel vision on their craft. Artists like Martin Kippenberger and Bernadette Mayer flatly refused to waste their energy on dismal accounting, with Kippenberger spending (and drinking) recklessly and Mayer never even opening a bank account: she kept her money instead in a book of Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets. She once wrote, \u201ci write unbalanced poetry, i cannot balance my checkbooks, nor do i have one.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThis is no book expressing class rage, and though I\u2019m all for letting stories speak for themselves, the greater narrative they cumulatively tell leaves something to be desired. Painting such a scant picture of government funding makes it seem unimaginable, but it isn\u2019t; and some of the omissions and labels do no justice to the revolutionary resourcefulness that the best artists embody. Think of Nan Goldin, who said that, for her community, survival was an art, and her pictures prove it\u2014grit and glamor, poverty and principle coalescing into snapshots. Goldin and plenty of others remake the economics of daily life, and this is part and parcel with their artwork rather than simple failure or bad management. They didn\u2019t just struggle to find a place in an unjust economy; they refused to.<\/p>\n

\n\tCurrey withholds judgement, to be sure, it\u2019s just that his schemers are drunks, thieves, and GI-Bill welfare queens. What about Pippa Garner, who, trained in industrial design, spent her life staving off drudgery by playing inventor, imagining fantastical interventions that capitalism could never reduce to mere commodities? She performed as a capitalist\u2014titling her last solo show \u201cSell Yourself\u201d\u2014but lived a life of poverty, a gig worker supplemented by a government check for her exposure to Agent Orange. What about Beverly Buchanan, who bartered with artworks for ordinary services like doctors\u2019 visits and plumbing?<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s one more unspoken but persistent theme: artists who think they are on a linear path toward ascendency only to face a midcareer crisis, abetted by economic turmoil or simply changing tastes. The poet John Berryman scored a prestigious job at Harvard only for the spring of 1943 to roll around and send his students, almost all men, off to war, cancelling his class. In desperation, he took out a classified ad in the New York Times <\/em>offering to do anything: \u201cwould like to continue living and writing if possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMaybe I was na\u00efve,\u201d wrote Bernadette Mayer, \u201cto think if you\u2019re pretty famous and you\u2019ve been influential in the literary scene and in the art world for over five decades, and you\u2019re living, you\u2019d be set.\u201d But it is probably John O\u2019Hara who said it best, speaking for most of us when he began a letter to a New Yorker <\/em>editor with a simple request: \u201cI want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/book-mason-currey-artists-living-romare-bearden-franz-kafka-1234776793\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Archives_of_American_Art_-_A_life_class_for_adults_at_the_Brooklyn_Museum_under_the_auspice_of_the_New_York_City_WPA_Art_Project_-_11039.jpg?w=1024″] The most sure-fire way to fund a creative career is family money. So says Mason Currey in his new book Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life\u2014and only a whiny nepo baby could possibly disagree. And yet, the history of art is no mere \u201chistory of rich […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1829402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1829402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829402\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1829402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1829402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1829402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}