Hard Truths and Open Questions About Money for Poor Artists, Part 1

. . . and why this headline has already given you big feelings, whatever your socioeconomic status

Me looking into the sun from our milk barn at age 12

One week ago, I sat down to write this post based on notes I’d been making for months. I started with a generalization:

Money is the great taboo, the thing that dare not speak its name.

I was squinting at this opening sentence, wondering if I should change thing to force when my cell rang. It was my sister calling with the news that my Dad had passed away in his sleep that morning. He was 71.

For the first couple of days, my grief felt like a house that had lost its foundation and roof. Nothing held me up or down. Grief was both a sunken place and outer space. Soon, though, condolences from family and friends brought solace and strength. Mountain walks returned me to the land of the living.

I had to come back, anyway. It was time to write an obituary and eulogy, contact the pastor, and make other arrangements for my Dad’s service. I grabbed my laptop and found this Hard Truths for Poor Artists draft open in my browser. I started to close it, ready to give up on the topic.

Then I remembered one of the first things that came to mind after my Dad died: Even in those early moments of shock, I wondered whether I’d need to help pay for Dad’s funeral, and worried whether I’d still be able to buy my kid Christmas gifts. Since I moved to Colorado in 2011 and lost about 75% of my income, not a day has passed when I haven’t worried about money. Why pretend otherwise in my writing or anywhere else?

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Money is the great taboo, the thing that dare not speak its name. Money’s taboo status is why a writer friend so easily talked me out of writing this piece back in July on the grounds that “anecdotes about money don’t do as much as you think they do.” Part of me was relieved to drop the subject. My greatest success as a writer has come when I’m pretending to be middle class, if not posher. No one wins in an honest discussion of money and class, least of all a poor person in the arts. Reaction to the subject pretty much ranges from nervousness to abject disgust.

Yet I kept thinking about how personal experience is a convincing source for essays on music, literature, family, and food, so why not money and class, too? Besides, anecdotes regarding money and class are grounded in some of the most fundamental hard data around: We either have middle or upper-class money and privilege, or we don’t. Much of our experience depends on that fact.

As the gap between rich and poor widens, and opportunities for middle-class artist incomes narrow, it’s more important than ever that we talk about money and socioeconomic status, however uncomfortable the discussion may be.

A note on terms: “artist” here encompasses writers, painters, dancers, musicians, etc.

Also, I use the word “poor” with intention. By poor, I don’t necessarily mean below the poverty line, but both low-income and without any financial generational wealth. My definition of generational wealth, by the way, is broad enough to include the good fortune of parents paying college costs, for example, so that someone is unburdened by student loan debt. More on generational wealth later.

“Person experiencing poverty” is now the preferred phrase or is at least more au courant than “poor.” Poor is rejected for its suggestion that poverty is somehow immovable. Yet the vast majority of artists with both low incomes and no generational wealth will remain poor over their lifetimes. So I use the word “poor” to suggest, for example, that artists with student loan debt and no generational wealth who want middle-class lives should get serious about improving their economic status while they’re young and remain serious about improving their economic status with every decision they make for the rest of their lives.

Me and Molly McGhee

Last summer, on what was formerly known as Twitter, the online culturati did what it does best: unite around a common enemy. For a couple of days in June, that common enemy was novelist and editor Molly McGhee. Molly had a history of advocating for publishing industry workers’ rights, for which she found broad support. Then Molly tweeted about her student loan debt and her poverty’s resistance to her many markers of success.

The Twitterati didn’t like someone of such enviable accomplishment claiming poverty. Twitter got to work digging up Molly’s past tweets and putting the lie to her claims. Twitter scored big: This extremely lucky woman with a book deal and adjunct position at Columbia was crying poor when she actually had a library in her Brooklyn apartment! See, she wasn’t really poor, they cried. Molly had few public defenders. Twitter’s only seeming area of disagreement, when it came to Molly, was why exactly everyone should hate her most.

Molly deleted the tweets and left Twitter for a couple of days until the furor had died down (I may be tempted to go offline myself after these Substack posts). In October, Molly published a strong essay exploring poverty in the Guardian. The essay was timed with the publication of her debut novel, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, which explores the psychological ramifications of debt.

Last summer’s social media storm around Molly was a fascinating reflection of cultural beliefs and values around success, money, and class in the arts. Particularly revealing was the snarky advice Twitter gave Molly about money. Even the rare piece of well-meaning advice had little bearing on the reality of a debt-ridden writer’s financial life.

I had no trouble understanding where Molly was coming from, which put me in a distinct minority, at least in the Twitter crowd. I decided then to write about success, money, and class in the arts. This post is no screed against the rich but is designed to offer poor young artists some hard truths about money and class. Along the way, maybe we’ll raise some vital questions for everyone.

Knowing Where We Stand

Before I moved to New York and became a writer, I was in a Cultural Studies PhD program. Like Molly, I was a first-generation student who was winning graduate fellowships, firmly on what academia regarded as a path to success while also accruing massive student loan debt.

Cultural Studies academia in the mid-to-late 90s was a hotbed of critical theory and identity politics, though with a different spin on those topics than we’ve seen in mainstream culture recently. Back then, I told anyone who’d listen that one of critical theory’s best ideas was standpoint epistemology. This many-syllabled term simply meant that you know what you know based on where you stand in the world. We took this to mean that in any power structure, the privileged often can’t see how power works as well as the underclass. People of color, for example, see and understand white privilege in a way that white people don’t. This concept relates to W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness, in which Black Americans exist in both a Black world and the dominant white one.

Standpoint theory now means something more essentialist and reductive than the working definition we used in the mid-90s. The useful idea that any power structure’s underclass has a uniquely valuable perspective somehow slipped into the dubious notion that the underclass has the only valid perspective and that the privileged in a power structure are always and forever destined to oppress the underclass.

The older, flexible standpoint epistemology is the perspective from which I write about class. I believe my standpoint as a poor writer allows me to see and understand economic privilege that is sometimes invisible to middle and upper-class writers. This is not to say that a wealthy artist’s perspective is irrelevant. This is not to say that anyone from a more comfortable class than mine is somehow tainted by privilege, as if by original sin, or forever consigned to some irremediable oppressor status. I believe in the fluidity of perspective and power of empathy. I believe we can all understand class better.

Hard Truth #1

Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, who seems to be making money from creative work is secretly earning it on OnlyFans. But I kid. Start with a joke, we always say—especially when we’re writing about something as fraught as class.

Every artist is self-made. Being a financially self-made artist comes with specific concerns.

Fueling much resistance to class discussion in the arts are concerns around self-sufficiency. The mere mention of the term self-made can rouse special anxiety and animosity in artists. Whatever one’s economic background or status, working in the arts involves the perseverance to sit alone in a room overcoming fear and inertia to create something. Does a person not deserve agency for creating a book of poems, musical recording, or gallery show if they have family money, passive income, a high-earning spouse, or even the simple advantage of someone having covered their college expenses? Of course it would be offensive to suggest as much. Everyone who creates something deserves credit for making the work.

To meaningfully discuss money and class in artistic fields, we have to hold in our minds the mutual facts that people can work hard for success while also enjoying the advantages of privilege. Having the money to self-fund a book tour is one thing; having the tenacity to work with bookstores and other venues to garner press and sell books is something else. Someone can get a choice opportunity based on their uncle’s status in an artistic field, then through aptitude and effort distinguish themselves in the opportunity that their uncle’s status afforded them. Merit and privilege aren’t mutually exclusive categories in the arts.

We need to complicate the idea of the self-made person, anyway. I grew up objectively poor, e.g. sharing a small bedroom with three younger siblings until I left home and qualifying for government programs. My education wasn’t always the highest priority. In fact, my Dad thought I read too much. “Get your nose out of that damn book,” he often told me. Though as I discussed in a previous post here, Dad was a great oral storyteller who encouraged me to tell stories. Whatever writing ability I may have isn’t entirely self-made, because my father helped to make me this way.

So it’s complicated. Still, an artist who breaks into a field with zero financial support has some special concerns. That’s Molly, me, and many others. Being economically self-made doesn’t make us more authentic. It does make us different.

Coming next week in Hard Truths and Open Questions about Money for Poor Artists, Parts 2 & 3 . . .

Money for nothing: generational wealth is bigger than we think

Why poor artists can’t afford to take political stands

How a lower socioeconomic status can help with success in the arts—yes, help

Why many people don’t believe a writer as successful as Molly McGhee could be poor

Why many poor artists maybe shouldn’t get a MFA in their field (it’s not just about money)

How the common advice to move to a more affordable non-coastal city can backfire for poor artists

Poor artists’ misunderstandings of certain unspoken codes in the arts, or why people prefer to give money to people with money

On the not-universal but widespread belief that poor people don’t deserve to be artists

Why poor artists would do well to proceed in their careers as if there’s no merit

And more . . . .

Now for those open questions

If you have any questions about money and class in the arts, please leave them in the comments below. I’ll try to address them in part 2 and 3 of this feature. Coming next week.