There has never been a society where artists can make money
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2026 9:13 pm
Here's an experiment. I'm going to give you a Substack note in this forum, and see what happens, compared to what would probably happen if I screencapped it and posted it to The Other Site.
From:
https://substack.com/@dawsoneliasen/note/c-208393435
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Dawson Eliasen
3d
Orbis Tertius
There has never been a society where artists can make money. Artists who make enough from their art alone to support themselves (while they were alive) are the 1% of artists. As the article points out, most famous pre-20th century artists were just generationally wealthy aristocrats who didn’t have to work. The innovation of the 20/21st century was institutionalizing artists as professors, a relatively leisurely job with built-in gaps to allow time for artistic work. Now with tech-oriented jobs and remote work, as a. natasha joukovsky has pointed out, you can live a very comfortable life while also having the time, flexibility, stability, and emotional availability required for the creation of art by doing something like strategic consulting or freelance programming. I make a livable wage billing ~15hrs/week as a data scientist and I work from home with a lot of flexibility. I can’t imagine a better setup for supporting writing.
It’s just a fact that art exists in tension with commercialization. There’s a reason it’s hard to make a living, say, writing deeply aesthetic and philosophical novels: nobody wants to read them. At the end of the day, why would you really want to make your art your career, anyway? It puts you in a position where you have to create things that will sell if you want to eat. How does this help the art?
From:
https://substack.com/@dawsoneliasen/note/c-208393435
-----
Dawson Eliasen
3d
Orbis Tertius
There has never been a society where artists can make money. Artists who make enough from their art alone to support themselves (while they were alive) are the 1% of artists. As the article points out, most famous pre-20th century artists were just generationally wealthy aristocrats who didn’t have to work. The innovation of the 20/21st century was institutionalizing artists as professors, a relatively leisurely job with built-in gaps to allow time for artistic work. Now with tech-oriented jobs and remote work, as a. natasha joukovsky has pointed out, you can live a very comfortable life while also having the time, flexibility, stability, and emotional availability required for the creation of art by doing something like strategic consulting or freelance programming. I make a livable wage billing ~15hrs/week as a data scientist and I work from home with a lot of flexibility. I can’t imagine a better setup for supporting writing.
It’s just a fact that art exists in tension with commercialization. There’s a reason it’s hard to make a living, say, writing deeply aesthetic and philosophical novels: nobody wants to read them. At the end of the day, why would you really want to make your art your career, anyway? It puts you in a position where you have to create things that will sell if you want to eat. How does this help the art?