Tracing the Myth of the Starving Artist (c) 2008 Paige Buffington
There is a belief strongly held by both artists and the artists' audience; society, that one must suffer in order to produce great works of art. Tracing this belief is a complicated process. Have you every pulled weeds from your garden? As you dig more deeply to uncover the weed's root, one discover's more offshoots, growing horizontally, and vertically. And so on and so forth.
The roots of the starving artist myth is shaped by cultural ideaology movements, economics, psychological positions, theology, and simple human nature. In Tom Wolfe's, The Painted Word, he says, "By 1900, the artist's arena-the place where he seeks honor, glory, ease, success-had shifted twice. In seventeenth-centurey Europe, the artist was literaly, also psychologically, the house guest of the nobility and the royal court (except in Holland); fine art and court art were one in the same. In the eighteenth centurey the scene shifted to the 'salons', in the homes of the wealthy bourgeoisie as well as those of aristocrats, where cultureminded members ofthe upper classes held regular meetings with selected artists and writers"
In the courts and the salons, artists had "jobs," econmomic security. These "jobs" aren't jobs in the modern sense of the word placed within the context of the Industrial Age. Picturing an artist keeping track of his or her time in any age is difficult to conjure because the myth of the "artist" requires that we assume an artististic disregard for the mechanical documentation of one's time invested in producing art. to be continued.................
ADDITIONAL RESEARCH BY OTHER AUTHORS ON THE TOPIC OF ART AND MONEY:
http://members.shaw.ca/competitivenessofnations/Anno%20Hughes%20Art%20&%20Money.htm
The roots of the starving artist myth is shaped by cultural ideaology movements, economics, psychological positions, theology, and simple human nature. In Tom Wolfe's, The Painted Word, he says, "By 1900, the artist's arena-the place where he seeks honor, glory, ease, success-had shifted twice. In seventeenth-centurey Europe, the artist was literaly, also psychologically, the house guest of the nobility and the royal court (except in Holland); fine art and court art were one in the same. In the eighteenth centurey the scene shifted to the 'salons', in the homes of the wealthy bourgeoisie as well as those of aristocrats, where cultureminded members ofthe upper classes held regular meetings with selected artists and writers"
In the courts and the salons, artists had "jobs," econmomic security. These "jobs" aren't jobs in the modern sense of the word placed within the context of the Industrial Age. Picturing an artist keeping track of his or her time in any age is difficult to conjure because the myth of the "artist" requires that we assume an artististic disregard for the mechanical documentation of one's time invested in producing art. to be continued.................
ADDITIONAL RESEARCH BY OTHER AUTHORS ON THE TOPIC OF ART AND MONEY:
http://members.shaw.ca/competitivenessofnations/Anno%20Hughes%20Art%20&%20Money.htm