To spend time thinking about art, cultural critic David Berry writes, is to spend time “wondering what it really feels like to be you.” On the other hand, he posits, “money is a pretty good way to count stuff.”
Berry’s new book, How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists, is so loaded with these kinds of aphorisms about its titular subjects that their incisiveness feels like the point. And yet it is not: The book, the Edmonton writer’s second after a treatise on nostalgia, is also a thorough interrogation of the intersection of creativity and wealth, both historic and contemporary. It simply happens that Berry both carries the thoroughness of a journalist in his work and considers that work to be artistic. He treats his arguments with refreshing grace.
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So, the readers of How Artists Make Money, released by Coach House Books on Oct. 14, are guided through the history of patronage, artistic grants and the role (or absence) of unions in shaping today’s popular music – with endless quotability. “Money didn’t create art, but a lot less art would have been possible if we hadn’t come up with money,” Berry writes. Elsewhere, on purchasing art: “What you are really buying is proof that you are capable of recognizing such talents and sensitivities – you elevate yourself by elevating the artist.” You get the picture.
Berry spoke with the The Globe and Mail by phone on the lunch break from his day job in communications for a non-profit.
Did anything happen in your career, personally, that drove you to examine the relationship between art and money more closely?
I wrote a book that came out in the height of the pandemic. My initial thoughts were, ‘Oh, well, my book didn’t do very well.’ But as I started slightly narcissistically looking into it, I realized that on the scale of Canadian books, my book did fine. That made the question more acute: If I can be considered doing well, how on Earth is this a viable thing for people to do? This wasn’t just a me thing.
Your book draws attention to the fact that, especially with music-streaming services such as Spotify, markets for art are often designed with middlemen that skim away what people pay for art. Is a fair living making art even possible in a market economy?
You could easily apply this to the world writ large: A relatively small number of people will do great, and a whole lot of other people will struggle. What we see with something like Spotify, it’s not that the dynamic has changed much. The people who are doing great are an even smaller number and even less connected to the actual creation of this art.
You delve into a long history here, from patronage to the very concept of “selling out.” You also point out that Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the writers of the song Hound Dog, also wrote Yakety Yak. What was the most striking thing you learned researching the book?
Who gets to be an artist, or be considered an artist? From our understanding of the conception of it, it’s been intimately tied with what people with money and power get out of it – what do they gain from you being able to call yourself that?
You considered, at the outset of writing, including a section on non-fungible tokens – a blockchain-art phenomenon that once seemed explosive, but which has been rendered a punchline. What did the fate of NFTs teach you about how trends in capitalism shape art?
All of these supposed “innovations” that are going to “revolutionize” art are already so polluted, or connected to our existing fairly exploitative framework, that there’s not a lot of hope there. The people who seemed to have first popularized this technology and made the most money were apparently just, for the most part, flipping them. Now looking at AI – should I have talked more about it in the book? Should I have been harsher about it? It gave me a lens of: I don’t know that this is as important as we seem to think it is in at this moment.
There is an illusion among some readers that writing books can be a full-time gig. We both know that’s rarely true. If this book is a work of art, tell me about how its creation fit into your life.
The bluntest way to put this is that I am talking to you on my lunch break on my day job, walking around a light industrial area to go get a sandwich. But this related to a more general question about the degree to which we are funding arts: This is my attempt to figure out the world and describe it in a way that hopefully affects someone else’s understanding of it. At the simplest level, I think I can say I’ve never had a job like that. Maybe, like, a newspaper job. But regardless of what I get in terms of money from it, I’m probably going to keep at it, because there’s still stuff to understand.
There’s a genuine question here: If I can’t support myself through this, what right do I have to keep trying? Obviously, I can dismiss that to a degree, because I’ve finished a book. Maybe this is just the universe’s way of telling me to go try something else – that there’s more good in some other thing that I could do, instead of just sitting on the edge of a cliff and thinking about life. I don’t know. We’ll see if I get there.
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