RIP the Artist, All Hail the Coder
William Deresiewicz on whether arts have a future
The Death of the Artist is a bracing read. Written before Covid and published in early 2020, based on interviews with more than 100 American artists in various disciplines, the book documents in great detail how the new age of tech and platform domination disrupted careers in arts and culture. This is only a partial list: income fell precipitously, cities where artists live became even more unaffordable, physical media were phased out, the self-promotion demands ate up the off time and incubation. In other words, if you feel like you’re working nonstop, online and off, for the princely monthly royalties of $76, it is because you are. I spoke with William Deresiewicz via video earlier this week.
LP: Have you seen that alarming op-ed in the Times about the collapse of the American theatre? Covid has only sped up some of the trends that you talk about in the book.
WD: Yes. I also wrote about the issue in my own piece, “Stages of Grief”, in Harper's in 2021, which was a follow-up to the book. As soon as Covid hit, I realized what the long-term implications were going to be. The obvious stuff was bad enough: all live performances shut down. Live events are crucial for the livelihood of musicians, actors and dancers; anything that can be digitized basically pays very little right now, whether it’s recorded music, or freelance writing. All of those revenue streams have dried up or become significantly narrower. Artists have to turn to things that can't be digitized. You can sell physical objects — musicians sell merch, so T-shirts, posters... visual artists put their images on pens, mugs, calendars and so forth. And then another non-digital thing that you can sell is experiences. And that generally means live events, so for musicians it means performances, but for writers it means speaking, teaching, residencies. And that all got shut down.
Also, recession affected a lot of the kinds of day jobs that artists do, it cut into their incomes that way. One of the things that artists do is to work for art organizations - say, in a theatre office. So they got hit that way too.
LP: What was the situation like in the US? Ontario performing organizations embraced the shutdown completely. In the US, I expect, there was a difference between the red and the blue states?
WD: Yes, the red and the blue states had different approaches here. I think in retrospect the blue states overreacted in some ways, they certainly kept restrictions in place for much longer than they should have, and Canada and Ontario are basically like a very blue US. I was not surprised to read the Times piece on attendance going down post-Covid. It's clear that the pandemic changed people's habits. It went on long enough and it also accelerated trends that were already in progress. As I understand it, restaurant-going is also down from its own baseline.
LP: In your book, you are very specific and detailed on why the arts are not thriving in the age of big tech. Let’s start with the main reason: artists are being paid less. The income has gone down.
WD: The arrival of the internet and of the tech platforms changed the economic logic of the arts completely, because it completely changed the way – let's say content, although I hate that word – is delivered to audiences. Napster is where it started, with music in 1999, because the music file is the easiest thing to share. And it was immediately clear that it was going to be difficult to prevent people from simply replicating and passing around their music files. In the old days you could make a tape from your LP but it was a lot harder, there was a loss of fidelity, and you couldn't do it at scale. But filesharing was devastating. I have the numbers in the book... recording music sales have gone down by about two-thirds in real dollars. People maybe will now pay for a Spotify subscription or they won't pay but they'll have the version that's ad-supported and that generates some revenue, but the money going to labels or more importantly to musicians is much much less than it used to be. Analogous thing happened in other media. For writers basically there's publishing and there's freelance writing. And publishing, of course, that's Amazon. So Amazon has what economists call a monopsony: when you're the only buyer in the market. When Amazon established the monopoly in the book-selling business, it became a monopsony in the book-buying business, as a wholesaler for the publishers. The publishers sell a lot of what they sell through Amazon. And Amazon immediately used that power to negotiate lower prices. This is exactly what Walmart does in consumer products. Bezos specifically copied the Walmart model of, Get a monopoly and then squeeze your suppliers to give your customers the lowest possible price so you will become the only retailer. That's what Amazon has done to the publishers, and the publishers' profit margins are getting smaller and smaller. Which is why there has been consolidation in the publishing industry, why advances have gone smaller, and why, and this is true in every business, there's been an increasing pressure towards the bestsellers. You want the guaranteed things that are going to sell, and in publishing that means books by celebrities. And maybe books about Trump.
For freelance writing, it was Craigslist, Google and Facebook, because newspapers in the US were supported by ads, most importantly classified ads. Craigslist wiped up the classifieds, and then Google and FB have taken up most of the ad revenue. There was an enormous shakeout in the newspaper business industry – hundreds of newspapers closed. Newsrooms cut staff fifty percent over a relatively short period; hundreds of thousands of journalists lost their jobs. Similar things happened with magazines. The freelance fees that the writers could rely on as a pillar of their income, in addition to the books they write, became a fraction of what they used to be. There are a few legacy outlets that figured out how to leverage their brand equity to create a subscription model. There are basically two papers now, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and two magazines, the New Yorker and the Atlantic. And it's not just that those are the only profitable ones, they keep getting bigger and bigger. They all have websites; while there's a limited amount that you can put in print, there is much more that goes online. Basically everything is becoming the Times, everything is becoming the Atlantic and the New Yorker, all the writers are going there, all the content. I should say, in the last couple of years we've now seen something that typically happens when there's so much consolidation, which is that people are experimenting around the edges to see what kinds of models could work for a niche product. So, of course, Substack has made a big difference for writers and various other small publications like Bari Weiss' TFP. She also leveraged a certain amount of brand equity – through her own name, and her own story – to create subscription models.
LP: Another reason the artists are having a miserable time is: no one can afford to rent or own anymore in big arts centres, where the opportunities are. As you say in the book, from about the 1920s to 1980s, artists could easily live and did live in the same major cities, without being priced out. But after the 1980s, that is beginning to change.
WD: Yes, I say from the 1920s but now I think it's from about the 1900s, and Greenwich Village in particular, but certainly true of other bohemian neighbourhoods, for instance in San Francisco. Obviously the bohemia and bohemian neighbourhoods have a longer history in Europe, but Greenwich Village becomes the Greenwich Village of legend around the turn of the twentieth century. And it stays that way through the 1970s. Because NYC kept expanding: there was always room for people, they were always building, building, building. And this is broadly true of other North American cities. And then in the 1950s the deindustrialization starts so the city stays cheap for that reason. Deindustrialization and suburbanization. People are leaving and more importantly industry is leaving. People forget that New York was an industrial city, with the largest industrial workforce in the world. It had a million industrial workers. By the early 1970s it had 450,000. And that's where SoHo came from. SoHo was light industry. All of those companies left and you had those empty factory lofts and that's when the artists moved in.
But in the 1980s it all started to reverse for various reasons. Reaganomics, primarily. In the 1990s, crime started to drop. Cities became expensive. Sam Sheppard died while I was writing the book, and in his obituary I’ve read that when he first moved to NY in '63, he shared an apartment with Dizzy Gillespie's son and they paid $500 a month in today's dollars. So, $250 a month each. And he was putting on plays at an alternative space which cost $37 dollars. Which today might be $250.
The paradox though is that young artists need to live in those places. You need to go to those places, you need to go to New York, or LA, or Chicago, or if you're a musician, depending on what kind of music you do, Nashville or Atlanta. I'm guessing in Canada, you go to Toronto – or maybe also to New York. Music, writing, dance, theatre, comedy: you go to the biggest centres. So what do you do? You suffer, or you're rich to begin with, or you don't last very long, or you do so many day jobs that you never have time to do your art.
LP: You write about the downside of the second and third job – that whether you’re in survival mode, or decently paid, there is often no time and energy left for a long-term view and strategic planning of your artistic career.
WD: That's right. And artists, ideally, would like to pay a second rent, for a studio or a workspace. And my interview subjects have told me that's becoming impossible in New York. Unless you have money. Of course that's the big dark secret in the arts, that a very disproportionate number of people come from money and are supported by their parents or their spouse.
LP: You also tackle the Richard Florida argument in the book: that somehow, magically, the artistic types will rub against the tech and design and fashion and real estate and everyone is going to become richer in the 'creative industries'. It... did not happen.
WD: The funny thing about Richard Florida is that, while of course he is going to include artists in his Creative Class, because how could he not, he's not actually concerned about artists. The role of the artist is to be an amenity for the people that work in the industries that generate a lot of revenue. They don't really care what happens to artists. And the other thing is, especially if you look at a place like Brooklyn, there are always going to be artists there. It looks like a place where the artists can live. But what you don't realize, unless you're in the community, is that it's different artists. It's not the same ones who were here five years ago, but they're still coming and are still creating this... vibe, that the yuppies and the techies want to feel like they have.
LP: I think Florida still teaches at a business school here in Toronto. He was all the rage in the first decade of the 2000s when this argument that arts strengthen the economy was powerful. Arts are generating revenue for other industries, hurrah. And now, the arts are supposed to redress historical injustices. They're all about equity, and representation, While neither should be part of the job! There are any number of other professions created specifically with those goals in mind.
WD: I agree. The arts have for a long time been reluctant to justify their existence on their own terms. First it was this bullshit about economic development, and now it's this bullshit about saving the world.
LP: Another thing that declined, and that made being an artist more difficult, you write in the book, is access to arts education. You have to be upper middle class at least to get a good arts education today. And the media have changed; PBS definitely does not feature the Leonard Bernsteins of today talking about the history of music anymore.
WD: There was a unique and unrepeatable moment in American culture: this post-war middle class, new mass middle class, for whom the arts were important, and at the very least, part of social status. The traditional western arts, the high arts, were an aspiration, because they still carried this social and cultural cache. Then the 1960s came and the political assault on high art, western canon, 'white man' blah blah, but more importantly really it was the growing behemoth of the entertainment industry. People figured out that they would actually rather watch sitcoms on television. Fewer and fewer people cared whether they had opera subscriptions. And it's hard: serious art is hard to digest. So it's become much less of a cultural aspiration and as a result, I think, much less of a media fixation.
LP: The American system is unique in that it largely depends on donors and ticket sales. Most of the major donors are probably in their silver years... Is there a new cohort coming up, do you think, after they're gone? Will the donor class renew themselves?
WD: The main reason we're so donor dependent, of course, is the lack of government support. What is the number I quote in the book, 1.4 billion dollars at all levels of government, in the entire country. It's about $4 a person. That does not compare with European levels of funding.
There was an article in the Times while I was writing the book, that reported on the fact that American orchestras have crossed the line from majority ticket sales funding to majority donor funding. And there has been huge tumult and contraction in symphony orchestras since, as well as in opera companies and ballet companies. Some people in the sector are not worried and believe that there are always going to be new old people. But I don't know about that. The future old people are not being taught to value the symphony the way people who are now 80 years old were when they were kids and teens. I mean, it's possible – one of the ways people get into the elite colleges is by learning to play piano and violin and it's possible that they will form some part of the audience. But I think it's going to be pretty rough going.
LP: You write about how the job of the artist has become the job of the selling of the self. Not only are you expected to talk about your projects on social and legacy media, but you are also expected to share images and information from between the projects, from your studio, your process, your life. How is this not gonna lead straight to burnout?
WD: I know. I mention in the book a couple of artists, one is a young woman a cartoonist, who said, well, this is getting to be too much, I feel like I'm giving away my soul on social media, and then the older one who really did reach a point of burnout and had to pull back, but was able to sustain what became a six-figure salary. She was unusually successful so she managed to make that transition where she figured out the way to continue to make the same amount of money without posting quite so much.
A number of people have told me that you kind of have to be “young, childless and healthy” if you want a career in the arts. At least one of those things is not going to continue to be true, likely two. And increasingly, there isn’t a point within reach where you sort of establish yourself—where you get a faculty position, or you have a regular gallery that's gonna stick by you, or whatever it is.
LP: No, it's continuous. And the publishers don't really nurture writers any more. You know – you stick with a writer because you see them as an investment over time, even if the latest book doesn't recoup the advance. I think that’s gone now.
WD: I had three commercial contracts and might have the fourth one next year, and each one of them is with a different company. No company has given me a second contract. And it's not because the books haven't done well.
LP: William Deresiewicz. Why is our culture so boring?
WD: It’s the constant churn of content. I think it's most obvious to people in television now. We had 200 scripted shows in 2009, now we have almost 600 in the United States because streaming came in and everyone wanted to get on the bandwagon so streaming services multiplied. But it's not just that there are more places making the shows; the model is, you have to keep your customer hooked, you have to constantly supply new content to your customer. If Netflix is producing ten-episode seasons of different shows, it wants people to watch them every night, so it has to produce more and more and more. There just isn't sufficient time and often no sufficient personnel for quality. We had this great age of television, starting with The Sopranos in 1999, that went to maybe the end of the following decade, and that became what is now derided as “prestige TV” (high production values, famous stars, but gimmicky shows and endless superhero teen protagonists or detectives) that lacked the depth of those great shows. And that's true across the board. There's such a churn of opinion journalism, it's rare to find something that's insightful let alone well-written. People just don't have time to think, and don't have the time to write carefully, and newspapers don't have the time to edit well.
LP: Plus, the self-censorship.
DW: Plus, self-censorship doesn't help. It's the political environment that we live in, but it's also the voice that the audience now has. The audience will punish you, and punish you instantly, and you're so dependent on your audience because you have this immediate relationship to it. It actually occurred to me recently that it may not be the case that the Woke ideology broke out of the English departments. I started a PhD in English in 1989 so I was already exposed to the earlier version of this ideology today, but for decades it was confined to the university humanities departments and it broke out, the theory goes, into the larger culture in 2015. And I think the normal way to see it is, the ideology has the power that it has because of the dynamics of social media: the ability of social media to engage in surveillance and to enforce conformity. But it occurred to me recently that we may think of the causality in the opposite direction. Social media were full-blown by 2010, 2012. The very structure of the social media is the structure that inevitably gives rise to a culture of surveillance and conformity. It's basically a global fish bowl. It just needed some ideology to enforce. And Wokeness happened to be around. It's the platforms, in a sense, that created an ideology, rather than the other way around.
LP: Add to that the economic conditions in which hundreds of people are vying for the same poorly paid gig.
WD: Yes, you can't afford to take chances. Your economic situation is so precarious anyway. Who's gonna risk running afoul of their audience? Only someone like Chappelle who doesn't have to care.
LP: Last question. Who do you love to read?
WD: I love Patricia Lockwood. Ben Lerner. There are some great critics around now, Becca Rothfeld for instance. I think there are good people out there but we're making it unnecessarily hard for them.