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Musings Report 2017:35 9-2-17 Buying Your Freedom via Intentional Poverty (i.e. a low overhead lifestyle)
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Buying Your Freedom via Intentional Poverty (i.e. a low overhead lifestyle)
My longtime friend G.F.B. recently submitted this interview with artist Alex Gross (paintings, mixed media, prints), and called my attention to this question and Gross's response:
Q: What do you feel is the most essential factor an artist must be open to, regarding the evolution of their practice? Having had a lengthy and successful career so far, how have you seen your own work evolve over time?
A: "The most essential factor for most beginning artists is a willingness to be very poor. It’s a brutal existence. Even when you start selling work, there is no regularity to it. You might make a lot of money for a while, then there is a recession, or your work goes out of favor. Galleries are closing all over the place, and it’s much harder to sell work than it was five years ago. So, persistence and a low overhead are both really, really important."
The process of creating requires a minimum of free time and energy, which translates into some measure of freedom from paid work that consumes much of our time and energy.
So in the equation time = money, creators without trust funds must limit their need for money to free up time to create.
I describe this as Buying Your Freedom via Intentional Poverty, i.e. a poverty you choose for the specific purpose of freeing your time and energy for creating stuff that may not have a market, i.e. nobody's rushing to pay you big bucks to create whatever it is you're creating.
There are a number of interesting dynamics in this trade-off.
One is that trust funders--those freed of the need to work via a monthly stipend from their wealthy family--rarely seem to create much despite their abundance of free time/energy. I don't know many trust funders, but the few I do know peripherally are more dilettante than artist: they dabble in the arts, writing, etc., but their output is a fraction of creators who choose intentional poverty with the express intent of using the freed up time/energy to create massive quantities of work.
It seems as if the desire and ability to work hard, productively and consistently is related to the scarcity of money and time. Those with an abundance of both rarely possess the same drive and vigor as those who choose poverty as the means of obtaining the freedom to create their art.
Another is persistence, which Gross listed as an essential. I would describe persistence in this context as a prodigious appetite for work. Among artists, Andy Warhol comes to mind. Before he became famous, Warhol churned out a steady stream of commercial artwork for adverts, marketing, etc. to pay his living expenses, and then devoted the rest of his time/energy to his own projects.
The role of low overhead is visible in many careers. The PBS series American Masters recently featured independent filmmaker/ director Richard Linklater. One of his camera crew described how Linklater made his early films when he had very little money: he would run turn the camera and a Walkman recorder on, run in front of the camera, perform the scene, then run back and turn off the camera and audio recorder. The cameraman noted, "You can't stop someone who can do that."
Linklater specifically credits Austin, Texas in the 1980s as a low-cost, relaxed-atmosphere environment that enabled him and his fellow indie filmmakers to make their movies on extremely low budgets (his first hit, Slacker, was made for $23,000 as I recall).
Like many other once-inexpensive small cities, it seems Austin has been gentrified and is no longer the cheap haven it once was.
The most desirable creative hotspots are insanely expensive: New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. Other than some very creative arrangements (such as living out of a camper on a friend's property, or in a camper parked in Google's lot, if you happen to work for Google), the high cost of housing precludes a low-overhead lifestyle in these metro areas.
There are always nooks and crannies for those with a willingness to make extreme trade-offs (abandoned warehouse districts and boatyards are classic go-to places for creators), but these are becoming scarce as cities tighten up codes and development transforms old cheap hideaways into trendy expensive housing.
There are many cheap places to live in the U.S., but almost by definition they aren't trendy. But for those driven to create, such places may be ideal for low-overhead living arrangements.
Buying your freedom to create isn't cheap--but the sacrifices that are necessary seem to be as essential to creative output as the low-overhead itself. Without the sacrifices intentionally made, creative output seems to dwindle in an abundance of time and money.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
Why We're Doomed: Stagnant Wages 9/1/17
Why Wages Have Lost Ground in the 21st Century 8/31/17
Systemic Uncertainty, Meet Fragility 8/30/17
The 5 Steps to World Domination 8/29/17
Ideology as Addiction 8/28/17
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Friday's blog post garnered 182,000 reads on Zero Hedge. That's not much in the scope of things, but it's a lot to me.
Market Musings: Upscale Malls and Amazon
Simon Property Group (SPG) owns and manages upscale outlet malls. These assemblies of designer brand outlets seem to be doing fairly well still, compared to the typical mall that's being abandoned by anchors, leaving only discount chains.
Just for amusement, let's look at the chart of SPG and a chart of Amazon (AMZN), which is eating retail's lunch in many sectors.
Setting everything else we might know or think about retail and AMZN, the chart of SPG sure looks like a multi-year top has been put in place. The head and shoulders pattern is almost painfully obvious here.
AMZN, despite a few wobbles, just keeps marching higher. Maybe it will weaken and fall back to its 200-day moving average at $575, but there is nothing to suggest such a downdraft is imminent.
Did retail in general top out in 2016? It certainly seems likely.
From Left Field
A Texas Farmer on Harvey, Bad Planning and Runaway Growth (via Joel M.)
Permanent Adolescence: The Epidemic That Will Destroy America -- It's clear that America is suffering from an epidemic of arrested emotional development. -- I've used the phrase permanent adolescence for years...
For years, engineers have warned that Houston was a flood disaster in the making. Why didn't somebody do something?
Stop calling food addictive -- it's the additives that are addictive...
We're Nowhere Near Prepared for the Ecological Disaster That Harvey Is Becoming -- time will tell...
On the ecology of capitalism -- there's no cost to stripmining the seas, for example...
Central Banks as Engines of Income Inequality and Financial Crisis -- stating the obvious...
Why TenX Will Change the Way You PAY for Everything -- maybe this will work as advertised. But why spend bitcoin when the value keeps rising? Why not spend all the other currencies first?
Machine Learning for Humans (series)
Five myths about infrastructure (via Joel M.)
The windscreen phenomenon’ - why your car is no longer covered in dead insects -- bottom of the food chain is dying off--that should worry us...
10 THINGS MOST AMERICANS DON’T KNOW ABOUT AMERICA -- guaranteed to raise some dander...
Beautiful Joshua Tree Supervillain Lair For Sale For First Time -- interesting, even if not one's taste...
"There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." Oscar Wilde
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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