When I was in grad school one of my professors said their job wasn’t to make us good designers, it was to make us employable ones.
I wish my undergrad had been of the same opinion. Much respect to you and your program for doing it right.
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Unless you happen to become the rock star fantasy of an artist, your chances of making a modest living off art will lie in a bunch of extremely boring, down-to-earth factors: marketability, visibility, prolificity, adaptability… It is essentially being an entrepreneur and demands the same amount of work, luck and discipline than running a business demands. An art degree/program that doesn’t prepare people for this is pretty much useless to earn a living in the real world, especially if it saddles you with huge debt from the start.
People ought to drop the romantic stereotype of what an artist’s life is and realize that the vast majority of artists who actually earn an income off their work are largely trades people. Most of their time is spent networking, packing equipment and wares for shows, producing urgent custom work until 3am, dealing with postal damages/delays, keeping track of invoices and bills, hunching over their computer to update their product pictures and branding, etc, etc. They can’t afford to ‘not feel inspired’. They have to kick themselves in the butt to produce art on top of all the non-creative work. And those are the lucky ones who managed to stay inspired and afloat long enough to encounter the right momentum or circumstances to even see a modest profit from their art.
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Fallback to Plan B?
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Sure, worked for this guy (but he uses 4 sticks - maybe that’s the trick, eh?)…
Thanks, Steampunk. We’re mostly artists and writers ourselves, so we understand the need to make a living while keeping the arts central to your life.
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Oh, I agree, but then don’t complain that you can’t “earn” a living (what a capitalist construct, “a living” = something to be earned, instead of something merely done!) , just accept your fate as the starving artist, throw your passion into it, cut off your ear, and for heaven’s sake, don’t go to art school - so bourgeois!
Education does cost an arm and a leg. Losing body parts is the one true path to artistic greatness. You think van Gogh was good with only one ear? Imagine how much better he could have been if he had cut off both!
I believe it is more how you promote yourself, your name and your art rather than having a fancy degree with an enormous debt behind you. At the end of the day, the artist with the enormous university debt ends up being pigeon holed in to a creative day job and they may not be doing what they “really” wanted to do with their lives. And in the end they suffer. I believe you are better off not getting into debt at all and then do a day job you enjoy while creating your masterpieces on weeknights and weekends until you build your “art business.” There are so many ways artists can make a good living because of the Internet and the connected world today. For example graphical assets for game developers, even custom perfumes, poetry on birthday cards.
Sorry but artists are really bad business people and in today’s times, artists need to use both sides of the brain, creative and intellectual.
The question we should all really be asking is what do I want to get out of my life before I die? Yes. It’s that deep. What is the artistic legacy I want to leave behind? How am I going to promote my works and how am I going to make a living from my works and the art in which I love to do?
Every art medium has away. You just have to find it!
.( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Go to another country and get experience there. That way you get both international experience and general experience. When you go back to your own country you all of a sudden look exotic to employers. Plus you get to live in a different country and traveling will make you richer as a person.
An art degree doesn’t make you an artist.
I always thought that artists made a life, regardless of their making a living.
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I had a degree in toxicology 20 years ago.
So I did 2 years in AmeriCorps with a science program, then after that I got certified as a hazardous waste laborer. Then 3 years of digging out basement oil spills and wearing tyvek suits for 10 hours a day later… someone was willing to talk to me about how I knew how to run bench grade analysis equipment and write high end reports.
Pay the dues. Eat the crap.
If you simply break the rules, you get shunned. We’re monkeys, after all.
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