After a third email reminder, I retrieved my 850€ stipend from Afro-Asiatische Institute. For some artists whose standard of living or monthly earnings were lower than mine, thed stipend could have been a substitute for a monthly salary. And if the artist traveling to Graz were able to sublet her apartment, this residency could even be a profit-making endeavor. While I was grateful for the stipend and subsidized housing, as many residencies did not pay a stipend, for me this was not a financially-motivated experience. It was an existential endeavor, a trip buttressed by my concern for my continued survival in a world of environmental collapse.
The double-edged sword of living in an expensive city like New York, London, Singapore or Tokyo was that almost everywhere I travel things were cheaper. But if I was receiving pay, I was probably getting paid less than in my hometown. If the travel was temporary, less than a month, there was the shopping spree experience, a sense that everything was on sale. For example, a beer in a bar in Graz was around 2-3€. In New York, unless it was during happy hour, it was double; $8 if the place wasn’t a dive. If I stayed longer, the period can become a serious economic draw. Regardless of the duration of the residency, income, rent, savings and cost of living were always a topic of conversation with artists.
Regularly I heard that it was better for artists to live in a city with a lower cost of living, like Berlin or Leipzig, Cleveland or Baltimore. Those may have been a good advice if the artist didn’t plan to have an income, or even sell their artwork. (With the lower cost of living was a lower pay rate, and usually a lower price tags on artwork for sale.) The problem with this approach was one became economically stranded: if one lived in an inexpensive city, traveling to major cultural capitals would be prohibitively expensive. One was limited to the places where some income, like a stipend, could offset the travel. Those were lotteries. (Cutting corners by sleeping on a friend’s couch was something that was common in the creative world, but most people who live in popular and expensive cities got this solicitation so frequently that it was a burden to host artist friends who were perpetually broke and perceived as dependent on friends who actually worked to pay rent. After graduate school, I had a different friend ask to sleep on my couch every month. It got old, especially for my roommates. When I stopped accepting them, I stopped see them.)
Whether living in an inexpensive city was a good choice depended on one’s age, or stage in life. Living in an inexpensive city while one experimented with what they learned in school as it related to the world could have been fruitful. But a decade out graduate school, I was quite happy that New York was my home, and not LA, Berlin or San Francisco (although San Francisco is expensive, it lacks a large contemporary cultural art scene). Less expensive cities usually had less competition, which may have been rewarding for younger artists to gain experience with exhibitions or grants, but the glass ceiling was defined by the number of mid and late-career opportunities. Most serious, historically relevant artists had a presence in New York, Paris, London, or Tokyo, because that was where the major galleries and institutions were located and that was where historical discourse was produced. It was almost tautological. Inexpensive cities, or even towns, may have been a good choice after one had established a relationship with galleries or institutions in cultural hubs. But going to the woods as an early and permanent solution for creative output paralleled how retirees went to inexpensive cities to lower their cost of living precisely because they were not earning money. However, if one didn’t have the relationship with a cultural hub and planned to mimic the urban flight of retirees, he was overlooking the point that retirees planned to die soon.
The question of whether to try to live in an expensive or inexpensive city was largely influenced on whether an artist was earning money or not. There was a stigma of mid-career artists working day-jobs, as if one was less of an artist if a day-job was required to offset a cost of living that couldn’t be sustained by the artist’s creative output. Strangely, teaching was perceived as an exception to this stigma. The argument I’d heard by teaching artists was that they are still near to what they loved, they talked about art, or thought about their artwork more by teaching it. I didn’t see the distinction. Yes, there were benefits to teaching, but there were also drawbacks, and the demise of tenure-track positions to adjunct teaching, paired with the salary caps one found in higher education, teaching appeared more like an past alternative, at least in New York and other major cultural capitals. The time off during each summer sounded great, but I noticed more and more colleagues used that time teach in other programs rather than focus on personal creative output, which made me wonder about how they are being compensated in the first place. Compared to not working, teaching sounded like a great idea, but I disagreed with teaching being a preferred alternative to other day jobs, especially if the gig outside of academia had a better pay rate. More importantly, I disagreed with the stigma of day-jobs for artists all together.
A rarely discussed reality was the abundance of trustafarians, people who didn’t have to work because of their family’s affluence. The artworld was full of trustafarians. They competed for the same art studios, awards, prizes, residencies, exhibitions and galleries as artists who came from more modest backgrounds, even though the trustees didn’t need the money. The motivation was prestige, exposure, and meeting other artists. Trustafarians could hire craftsman to produce their work, travel to exhibition openings or talks, buy better equipment, and spend more time socializing with gallerists and curators. Living in a more expensive city, with a higher pay rate, was the closest one compete with a trustafarian, if the parents didn’t leave you a nest egg.
Unless you’re a trustafarian, it was best to strike the idea of living off of your art out of your mind because choosing to not earn money was the opposite of creative freedom. Yes, you could make money from your art, but if making art was motivated by economic freedom, as opposed to using creativity as a tool for a job or enjoyment, most artists who lived off their art were replicating a cottage industry without a sense of market saturation: was making paintings that different than making handbags, horseshoes or hummus, in terms of labor, distribution models, time management and daily life?
Even for those who weren’t trustafarians, like adjunct professors or freelancer, having a temporary or part-time gig offered an advantage in competing for resources over those who thought they could survive strictly on art sales. Income and family wealth were not part of the art award, residency, exhibition selection processes, but were mistakenly thought of as disadvantages by younger artists who had some preconceived notion of what art was or what an artist’s background should be. The art world was not a meritocracy; it was an oligarchy.
Thinking that an income was optional, was a meta-trap; not having an income was an even bigger trap than living in an inexpensive city. How did this play out? Initially, living in an expensive city was a net-loss. Some of the initially losses could be reduced by living in unpopular areas, or suburbs that of inexpensive cities. But as one’s skills and age increased after graduate school, the rate of income should have outpaced the increase of the cost of living, making expensive cities more affordable. This was true even for artists. The creative economies were hungry for talent, and if you were an artist, you likely had some skill that could, with practice or training, become valuable. Larger cities tended to have more industries on which artists could rely for income.
Knowing when to stop earning money and focus on creative output was another double-edged sword. I met many artist who, during a residency, were already using the time to apply to the next residency. In a way, that defeated the point of the residency, but it was a function of attempting to live off the meager infrastructure that was an artist residency. Practically speaking, this was a way to convert a potentially creative occupation with a job of paperwork. Instead of a cottage industry, this was a secretarial position.