Pimps and Snakeoil Salesmen and Art in the Age of Neoliberalism

Ben Zackheim has written a piece recently comparing the plight of the musician in 2015 to the struggle of writers, and contemplates ways that we might have to change – for want of a better term – our “delivery model” in order to replace the kinds of income streams that used to be generated by our writing.  Our very survival might require it.

Zackheim asks, Do writers need to become producers? He suggests turning our fiction into comic books, or podcasts.

My first response had me thinking back to a program for which I once taught, in an art school. For three years, the students in the graphic design department studied all the things you would expect, in order for them to graduate with training in GD. But in the final year, the program threw them a huge curveball with a capstone class that required them to master narrative…..storytelling. Writing. It always seemed insane to me – and more than a little sadistic. No matter how well they did in the program up to that point, these students couldn’t graduate without passing this class. It always seemed to me like training a person for the ballet for several years and then before graduating them, requiring that they learn to play the violin.

I was there, co-teaching that capstone course with a graphic designer; I was the writer advising them, trying to help them survive this giant, flaming curveball.

That’s what I felt like, reading Ben’s question. Writers spend years, decades, developing our craft. It takes a lifetime of work. Isn’t that enough? The time required to make comic books, record podcasts, design lines of clothing inspired by our short stories, or create a cookbook based on the foods in our novel – isn’t this time we could be spending actually….you know….writing?

Can you imagine someone suggesting Victor Hugo turn Les Miserables into a comic book? I try to imagine this. I know Dickens serialized his novels. I know there have always been gimmicks and crafty ways of getting the public’s attention.

Ben’s suggestions smack of desperation. When artists explore other venues or modalities in a natural way, there is something organic about it. Something healthy. But when these sorts of things are done from a basis of fear – when your bills aren’t paid and your refrigerator is bare and you haven’t been paid for any of your writing in the last year, or last five years….well, you get the picture.

I know the world changes. I know sometimes those changes are cataclysmic. But what’s happening now with all professions is a kind of unbundling, a sort of deprofessionalization. Young lawyers, for instance, rarely have secretaries or support staff to help them keep their work running smoothly. Often, they answer their own phones, type their own briefs, make their own travel arrangements, do their own preliminary research. In only one generation, several jobs have been eliminated, with those duties now being piled on top of the job that attorneys were already doing – practicing law. Now they do the paralegal work, the secretarial work – I’ve even heard stories about young attorneys running to the office supply store and replacing the ink cartridge in the copy machine.

It feels as though there’s a point beyond which you are no longer practicing your profession.

Don’t misunderstand. I believe that artists often express their creativity in many ways – that we are often artistically diverse. For instance, I write short stories and novels, non-fiction, scripts (for theatre and film); I’m a singer. I occasionally direct or serve as a dramaturg. Artists often wear many hats.

But each discipline requires a certain amount of focus and energy as we are working. How much can we fracture that concentration without negatively impacting the art itself?

I’m not saying that Ben Zackheim is wrong, necessarily. I just saying that I’m finding it very difficult to envision a way to be all things at once – and that even if I managed to, I fear I would hate myself and what my life had become. It would no longer feel as though I’m living the life of an artist, but that of an arts-marketer. Worse….I’d feel like a pimp. Or some tarted-up madame.

I’m feeling resistant to the idea that what has happened to the lives of artists is simply a result of natural changes. Many of my artist friends – those who might consider themselves purists – become infuriated with the suggestion that they have to be marketers, salespeople – neoliberal capitalists – pimping their work to a marketplace that has no real appreciation for their skills or creative talent. A marketplace that responds to short and shallow appetites, clickbait, 15-word stories…..Doesn’t it make you feel like one of those mothers, dressing up your five year old with makeup and teased up hair, putting her in skimpy clothes and throwing her out there on the stage of a Little Miss Sunshine sort of beauty pageant?

I welcome conversation on this issue. I know that most of us are struggling with the shifting realities impacting art-making…..at least art-making with a life that allows us to earn a living wage. In future blog posts, I’ll be exploring some other options – ways that other societies might offer ideas and solutions which don’t require writers, musicians, artists, to become snake oil salesmen or madams in something that feels like a Bourbon Street whorehouse.