Writing Samples
It's no longer chic nor gothic to dedicate your life to a craft when your craft is fueled by short-term success.
Nobody's unique, differences are only “trends”, and hobbies are simply performative. In the present day, everyone has the means and privilege to create. When I first realized this, I was unable to align myself with such an idea of the ‘The Privileged Artist’. I always saw being an artist as a struggler's job— not to say it is a disgraceful job, as I too want(ed) to be an artist. I've just always viewed art as a win/lose profession. Where there is freedom, there is struggle, the one percent make it big, and the rest just have fun trying.
Women's History author Virginia Nicholson wrote in In Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900 - 1939, “Fifty years on we may judge that Dylan Thomas's poverty was noble, while Nina Hamnett's was senseless. But a minor artist with no money goes as hungry as a genius.”
What does the so-called “Starving Artist" mean today? Perhaps it's only the modernization of an aestheticized achievement. The starving artist is purely the accomplishment of looking the part rather than truly being one: rather than a physical state of being, it is a societal status, a trope, an archetype, a characterization of the artist who decades before held that title because they'd dedicated their entire life to their work, to the point of self neglect. The “Starving Artist" used to be completely embodying the title rather than just claiming its name.
Society sees sickness as beautiful, mixed emotioned beginnings as sexy, and mental illness as strength, suffering, deteriorating. This culture stems from the Romantic era, where artists strived to deliberately detach themselves from the many societal and capitalistic responsibilities laid out for an individual, so that the artist/ creator can solely focus on pure creation. Figures like Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova argued that artists should abandon "bourgeois." The artist must abolish any need or want for the ownership of items besides the artist's own work. All disposable incomes feed not themselves but the creators' creations.
Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Amedeo Modigliani, are cultural pioneers of challenged creatives, and worshipped because of it. All found fame, however, not instantly. Their inevitable praise from the public came long after their deaths. In a world where the starving artist now only exists to chase fame, I ask myself if the world will ever find success like this again?
In the present day instantaneous success is needed, fought for, and prayed for. Clicks and likes make a person feel whole. If one does not ever come to be recognized in their lifetime for their creation and achievements what was it all for? Fame used to be limited, it's now almost more fleeting -moving away from the physical art world for a moment into the temporary entertainment side of things. I think of it as ‘temportainment’. Fredric March, one of the most celebrated stars of Hollywood once said, “Stardom is just an uneasy seat on top of a tricky toboggan... A competent featured player can last a lifetime. A star, a year or two. There's all that agony of finding suitable stories, keeping in character, maintaining illusion.” When March said this in the late 30s, he had no intention of relating this to current successors in social media, however, I find its parallels strikingly clear. Clips cycle, their quotes reused over and over again, until its original creator is forgotten, and the short phrase no longer hits the same. The digital life cycle dies and the meme is deemed as cringed.
Recently, I came across a video of a Tiktoker begging for money. They'd uprooted their life, quitting their job after finding themselves in almost overnight success from a viral 15 second clip. In the digital age people raise and fall in fame within days, after one run in with success. Especially online when the algorithm's job is to stay up to date, the whiplash into irrelevance hits quickly. It's strange how common these occurrences are, how as you read that sentence several names of whom it might be come to mind.
Ultimately, today's starving artists are funny enough TikTokers who find themselves in virality and quit their job to move to LA to find themselves to have already gone outdated due to the trend cycle. Ending up as a starving artist detaching themselves from everything else to pursue a lifestyle that can be considered as the ultimate creator.
While the last thing I want to do is spend my time discussing influencers and would much rather discuss ‘real’ art, I feel as though it is important to highlight the harmful and over-glamorized culture of the modern day starving artist. People are feening for shortcuts. Everyone is an opportunist for fame, though I can admire Basquiat—a quick ode to earlier struggling artists– for bumping into Andy Warhol at a restaurant, then taking upon himself to take the unsolicited opportunity to run home, quickly paint a piece to give to Warhol, before he had the chance to leave. Basquiat coined his speedy way of making art. The same can be said about Warhol. He was so efficient with his screen prints and screen tests that he could produce them in a day. However, it is safe to say their art has stood the test of time.
What of today’s “artists’” work will be relevant decades from now? Will they be hung in museums? Will they be inspiration for tomorrow’s artist? Or, will it simply be disposable “tempo-tainment”. It was Andy Warhol who once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” It turns out he was one hundred percent right. But, what I would suggest as today’s artists chase virality and race to hit the next trend cycle is, “Everyone’s art will last only 15 minutes.”