What Can We Learn From Artists?

I’ve been trying to experiment with how I might graphically demonstrate what I’ve started to learn through the Rethinking the Creative Economy Project. The data is clearly not complete, and to be comprehensive, or as comprehensive as possible, I would need include many more data points and categories, but as an introduction to the concept of what artists do to create the quality of life they seek, this is a kind of theoretical start.

Throughout the interviews I’ve conducted or read so far, everyone expresses some form of creating or managing their own quality of life. This takes the form of access to the natural world, ideal live/work space(s), access to safe housing, food security, the ability to care for family members, and creative expression. All of these categories are complementary in that often one impacts another, however, they are also distinct in their specific benefits and challenges.

Each of the categories of basic needs is crucial to the individual’s wellbeing. Housing, food security, family care, health care, and creative expression require an input to produce the needed effect. For example, U.S. currency paid to a landlord enables the artist or artisan to live in an apartment or rent studio space. This currency is generated through employment at one or more jobs, or is generated through the selling of art or crafts. Alternate exchanges can also be created that generate the same impact, for example, bartering one’s services in exchange for rent or a portion of rent (landscaping, building maintenance, artwork, etc.). But most often, the input of U.S. currency is utilized for paying for these basic needs, and to generate currency most artists turn to traditional wage paying jobs, often from multiple sources.

The challenge with a traditional wage paying job is that one has to balance the time it takes to generate enough income to pay for these basic needs with the time necessary for creative expression. What appears to be different from the general population (we don’t have a control group yet), or at least evident within our pool of interviewees, is that creative expression is prioritized as importantly (and in some cases more importantly) as the other categories of housing, food, family, and health. Whereas some people might find that creative expression is something that can be sacrificed and reduced so that more of their time can be spent on a traditional wage earning job, artists and artisans try to hold certain aspects of creative expression and the time needed to engage in that process as sacred.

What appears to be a trend among our interviewees is that artists and artisans prioritize their day/night/week differently. There is a recognition among artists and artisans that creative expression reaps the greatest impact on their quality of life, and that when creative expression is sacrificed for other things, the quality of life as a whole is impacted negatively.

There are several preliminary ideas that are emerging from this analysis. First, when the time and resources necessary for creative expression are prioritized, compromises are then made in areas that non-artists and artisans typically do not compromise. For example, part-time jobs, or multiple part-time jobs, and self-employment enable greater flexibility in scheduling a week that enables multiple pursuits. Choices in housing are valued differently with a focus on aesthetics and utility (studio/work space). Food security can be a challenge, but it has not emerged as a primary challenge in our interviewee pool, however many of our artists and artisans also farm on small or medium scales to supplement their other food sources. Many of the artists and artisans are involved in parenting, caring for elders, caring for partners, and much of this is enabled by having a flexible schedule rather than a rigid traditional workweek. Healthcare is a major issue for many artists and artisans as many are dealing with long-term medical conditions, chronic pain, in addition to the various health issues that arise in the course of life. However, there is a strong thread of non-traditional healing practices, a reliance on coverage when possible, and a real recognition that without state or employer provided coverage, the healthcare crisis is insurmountable. So here too, artists and artisans make compromises. They forgo dental work, engage in as much self care when possible, and utilize community health clinics. A patchwork of solutions, some quite sufficient, others quite deficient, are utilized to care for themselves and their families.

The reprioritization of value for housing, food security, family care, healthcare, and creative expression is a pendulum that can swing in either direction. When things are going well and are functioning in proportional balance, the pendulum swings towards increased quality of life. And when there is a crisis for family care, health, housing, food, these things then require, most commonly, additional U.S. currency, which necessitates picking up an additional job, working longer hours, or increases in selling art, craft, or personal items. When this occurs, the quality of life drops dramatically, particularly when the category that is diminished is creative expression. When multiple crises occur, an injury predicates the loss of a job, which reduces available healthcare, and subsequently housing stability is threatened, much of the benefits to creative expression are lost as the individual scrambles to try and patch together a safety net.

The goal for many of our artists and artisans is to figure out how to reduce the amount of indirect time it takes to generate stability for housing, healthcare, food, and family care. What I mean by indirect time is that, when an individual is employed at a department store, they are working to sell items and serve customers that are not connected in any direct way to their apartment or the dental work they need. The employment is necessary so that these things can be paid for with currency. However, the work that an individual does for an employer is inherently inefficient in a capitalist system because the employer is seeking to generate profit. That means, the value of any employee’s work is greater (and sometimes far greater) than the hourly wage that employee earns. Imagine if the sales generated at a Walmart were divided equally among all the workers in proportion to the hours worked in the day. The workers would bring home a substantially different looking paycheck. So, in an effort to alter that equation, many artists and artisans are engaged in self-employment, utilizing technology to work at home or provide consulting services, giving community lessons, and doing commissions or work for hire.

Another way to reduce the amount of time necessary to provide stability and security for food, housing, healthcare, and family care, is to utilize cooperative models. In the most basic sense, if one person goes to the grocery store for three people, that is two less trips that need to be made, more time in the day for the other people, and less fuel utilized for the trip. Similarly, when one person rents a one-bedroom apartment, the choices are very limited within a lower price range. When two people rent an apartment, the same contribution of funds from each individual provides for a much broader and possibly more pleasing variety of options. Similarly, when multiple people share responsibility for bills, tasks, chores, there is a division of labor that can enable a greater amount of time that can be dedicated to creative expression, and there are greater resources to be tapped if there is a crisis. There is a potential for cooperative structures to reduce the amount of time required for basic needs stability without reducing the quality (and perhaps even increasing the quality) of that stability.

By reducing the amount of time needed to generate stability in the basic needs of housing, food, healthcare, and family care, artists and artisans are better able to utilize their time engaged in creative expression. This is enabled by a focus on sustainability rather than constant growth. It is a prioritization of quality of life as defined by the individual rather than dictated by a government statistic, marketing firms, or the Joneses. It is also an ontological shift, one that artists and artisans make on a subconscious level quite often, but to make these practices overt and intentional is a greater leap that my require assistance, guidance, and planning. When these overt ontological shifts are put into practice in formal ways, we need to learn how to recognize and highlight their successes as much, if not more than the mainstream recognition and appreciation for capitalist processes.

Is This What the End of Capitalism (as we know it) Looks Like?

In J.K. Gibson-Graham’s seminal book, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1996), they concretize what many people were already beginning to understand intuitively. Capitalism had breached what might be thought of as an ethical wall, and leapt into a self-consuming runaway cascade of reactions, the aftereffects we are feeling today. In England, for the last four days there have been riots, which started in Tottenham, peopled mainly by disaffected youth. While the ignition point for the unrest was the unfortunate shooting death of a civilian by police forces, it has evolved into a guttural expression of those who have not, against those they perceive to have too much. Department stores are ransacked by youth, like Louis James, 19, who in the New York Times, said, “No one has ever given me a chance; I am just angry at how the whole system works” (Thomas and Somaiya, 8/9/11). He managed to nab a $195.00 sweater. Neither J.K. Gibson-Graham, nor I promote violent destruction of property, the burning of buildings, and harming of other human beings as a form of economic reform, but it certainly seems like a foreseeable byproduct of the lack of reform.

In the U.S., Verizon is faced with a union strike as it tries to reduce benefits, even as the company enjoys strong profits with a “net income of $6.9 billion in the first six months of this year” (Greenhouse, “Sharp Rift in a Strike at Verizon,” NYT, 8/7/11). In fact, many corporations are enjoying record profits, generating “14 percent of the national income in 2010, the highest proportion ever recorded” (Norris, “As Corporate Profits Rise, Workers’ Income Declines,” NYT, 8/5/11). At Verizon, workers are seeking to stop the management of a company by investor greed and a mantra focused around infinite growth (of profit). In Philadelphia, Mayor Nutter has instituted a curfew to curtail flash mobs with threat of fines and the possible imposition of child neglect charges for parents (“Philadelphia orders curfew after flash-mob attacks,” BBC, 8/9/11). Amidst the record profit taking by corporate America, congress is stymied on how to provide needed social services when so much is owed to other countries and the wealthy do not want to pay.

What this global dissent says to me (even encompassing the spring uprisings in North Africa and South West Asia where people rose up against different, but similar tyrannies) is that the balance is shifting to where there are ever increasing numbers of people who can not afford appropriate medical care, can not repair rotted teeth, struggle to pay for college, for rent, for food, are increasingly characterized as lawless others, and they are becoming aware of the existing inequalities. While some classes of people have full dental benefits with their employment, oftentimes, those very same people are trying to deny the most basic of benefits to their employees or voters. As the imbalance increases, and it does because while the mantra of growth is infinite, the Earth is a planet of finite resources, and more and more people begin to recognize this inequity, we see its impact in increasing and increasingly unpredictable ways, with increased crime, more conflict between workers and employers, and more disaffected youth.

Interestingly, the disaffected youth who are rioting in England, seem to intuitively know who their oppressor is. They are targeting department stores, the material goods of a consumer society produced by corporations who steal from the workers, and sell back to them, the very goods they are producing. A recent rash of burglaries in Western Massachusetts has targeted ATM machines. Even the Tea Party is motivated by this same disaffected anger at inequity. They certainly seem confused and radicalized, but I can understand where that confusion and simmering anger stems from.

What Gibson-Graham did in their book, was deconstruct the obfuscating lens of corporate language and financial media, and validate that what people feel and experience is also a valid truth, one that needs to be listened to and incorporated into a broader concept of what economy could entail. There are many ways in which this can happen, on the individual level through conversation and personal interactions, from teacher to student and vice versa, on the level of factory takeovers by workers in Argentina, by large scale protests, and so on. Politicians are no longer in touch with the American experience and are too beholden to corporate America. If we actually want to fix the system, create change to benefit the people, then we need to discover ways to help the politicians see what their policies engender. Change does not necessarily have to be traumatic, and successes do occur. Look at the recent change of track for automobile and truck companies on the issue of raised fuel economy. Such a concession would have been impossible to imagine a mere five years ago. Yet, the corporations have recognized the value of natural resources, protecting the environment, the dangers of carbon gases, the value of catering to people and the planet. So perhaps there is hope. There may be a day yet, where Americans are no longer seen as plunderers of the planet, to paraphrase the late Ray Anderson, Founder and CEO of Interface, and we become its stewards.