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“The only sensible way to regard the art life is that it is a privilege you are willing to pay for… You may cite honors and attentions and even money paid, but I would have you note that these were paid a long time after the creator had gone through his struggles.”–Robert Henri.
I learned this week a friend gave up the art life as there is no money to be made in it. He’s now studying to be a psychotherapist. Altho it take eight years I understand he already has clients.
Frankly. the only sensible way to regard the art life and life itself is that it is a privilege we are willing to pay for. I am happy to pay for it.
At 17 I realized that the choice is either to be myself or to be a product. Products can be defined. Our selves can not be.
Asked to play something other than the song he came to sing Bob Dylan at the start of his career walked off the Ed Sullivan Show. His label and his manager were furious.
“You will encounter in your travels folks of your own age who chose the institutional path, who became administrators rather than doers. These folks chose to serve an institutional authority in exchange for a paycheck, and these folks are going to be with you for the rest of your life, and you who come up off the street, who live without certainty day to day and year to year are going to have to bear with being called children by these institutional types; you will, as Shakespeare tells us, endure ‘the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.’ “It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.”– David Mamet, TRUE AND FALSE. (Edited)
Asked why he walked out on the chance to introduce himself to 40 million people Dylan replied, “I would have made myself a product.”
To young artists who think success comes when you are offered a contract, no, it does not.
Sign that thing and you become a product.
“Boy, am I glad I listened to you,” said a young man.
“What did I say to you?”
“You said, “Never sign a contract.”
“What happened?”
“My band was offered a contract. With it came a gold credit card. Everyone signed it but me. I showed the contract to my father’s lawyer. He read it. He said, ‘They built the mortgage on the studio they made silent films into this. If you sign it you won’t make a nickel.”
–Reg Hartt

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