Kulture/Culture: Unfairness in the Arts
Making it as a Writer Making it as a Musician Making it as an Actor Making it as an Artist
I have been working inside the book industry and playing inside the music industry since about 1981. I've also been friends with a lot of artists and actors. There are some things that aspirant musicians, writers, artists and actors should know.
If one walks into a middle-sized bookstore then there will be about 40,000 books on display. As you gaze around the shelves next time remember this : only 20 of those authors you see actually earn a living writing books.
The rest of those writers have day-jobs as Lecturers, Journalists, Chefs and Aromatherapists or have understanding partners who are financing their folly. The reason for this is the economies of scale. A basic print-run is about 3,000 books. At this level a book breaks even. Nobody makes any money except for the people who were paid their day-job salaries along the way bringing the book to the market. These would be the editors, graphic artists, printers, warehouse staff and retail sellers etc. it goes without saying that not many books sell that amount.
In the old days publishers would have been satisfied just to stay in business. They were privately owned and the boss could take risks and work to his personal tastes and gut instincts. Not anymore. Now the boss is an anonymous bureaucrat who answers to shareholders and the shareholders demand a profit. This implies selling big on one book as opposed to breaking even over a whole range of books. But to sell big on a book one has to spend lots of money promoting that book. The more one spends on promotion the larger the print-run has to be in anticipation of demand. Now the publisher's capital is all tied up in "bestsellers" and he has no capital or human resources left to even bite at smaller projects. So he doesn't try to break new authors because this costs money and the returns are uncertain.
As a result we find that the bulk of the authors that are getting published are those that are already famous in other fields like Psychology, Interior Decorating and Cooking. They have their own followings long before they get published so the publisher is taking almost no risk. This means that fiction writing suffers because no-one gives the new fiction writers a contract. All the best-selling fiction writers are people that got their contracts way before the New Age of *Instant Celebrity*.
This, of course, has not stopped aspirant fiction writers from flooding publishing houses with their latest word-processor offerings.
So here is some advice :
Never Ever Write Poetry. Poetry doesn't sell. Nobody will publish you. Ever.
If you write fiction then look for a small publishing house and, if it is at all possible, write Fantasy or Bodice-Ripper Romances. Mills & Boon always need fodder.
If you're really desperate or stupid then pay a publisher to print your latest work. This will mean you will have to personally take your crappy book to a few thousand retail outlets driven by the misguided optimistic belief that they will support a local author and buy a few. This will bring new meaning to the words "Struggling Author".
If you want to make money by writing then change to scandal-mongering. The modern reader has the attention span of a crack-head. Use small words and write about someone famous who is doing something bad. Preferably with, or to, someone else equally famous.
The dynamics are very similar to the book industry. There are a few angles that differ.
In music you could take your band on the road and get a following. This would require that you are wealthy enough to do this or have supportive parents. Record companies don't give a damn if you are Mozart incarnate. They are more interested in whether you are "marketable". In English this means that you have to be good looking and dress in funny clothing. It would be preferable to them if you've already done the groundwork establishing a following. Like the book publishers, they would also like a few thousand guaranteed sales upfront.
The implications of this dynamic is that it is also preferable that you are young. When last have you heard of a pop star coming through at 40 of 50 years of age ? Logically someone that age would be a better composer and performer. What happens is that anyone who hits their head against the idiocies of the music industry soon gives up hope and gives up music for the wonderfully inventive life of a bank teller. It doesn't take long for aspirant musicians to realise that the music is the last part of the equation when trying to land a contract. Yet people do get contracts. Most of those that survive the horrors of life as a musician and rise to the top are often people who are just bloody-minded, or stupid, and hang in there until, eventually, the "luck" comes their way. But this is not reason to be optimistic. I've heard of plenty people who have got contracts because of personal contacts, snorting coke with the right people or sleeping with the right people and I have yet to hear of a band getting a contract because they were "discovered" by an A&R person.
To make matters worse, the fact that you have a contract doesn't mean that you will be earning the big bucks. To sell big you have to well marketed. At this point life becomes awfully complex so we won't go there. The bottom line is that you could sell platinum and still be broke because you owe so much money to the record company.
In theory you could earn better money by busking on street corners. To give it all in order to become a star you would have to be celibate or completely uninterested in family life. When stars talk of the sacrifices they made in order to get to the top what they are referring to is the fact that no sane person would hang around them while they went on tour and slept during the day so that they could perform at night and had to take uppers to perform and downers to sleep and psychedelics to make the endless series of Holiday Inns seem interesting.
Don't ever be fooled by the stories of guitar heroes who practiced until their fingers bled and now are the top dogs in their discipline. These guys invariably earn a lot of money as session musicians but what they fail to mention is that session musicians run a closed shop. There are a handful of guys in each major city that are the first call pro's. Everyone knows them and knows that they can do the job. Nobody in a position to hire you will take a chance on you, a little upstart, at a thousand dollars an hour. You will first have to become known. This implies gigging and recording until you become known. More Sacrifices. No permanent girlfriend or house or children or pets or gnomes in the garden for you. To survive you will have to turn gay and get your jollies at the local leather-bar in whatever city you find yourself in. Come to think of it, a lot of musicians live exactly like that.
Some more advice
Get a lot of money. Buy a state of the art digital recording studio. Record yourself. Sell your CD to your relatives. For pocket-money you will have to learn a bunch of Abba tunes so that you can play at weddings and bar-mitzvahs.
Don't make laugh. You can't be serious. Acting is even tougher than the above examples. Actors spend most of their time serving drinks in bars or waiting tables.
The positive side of acting is that you can always go and busk as a mime and be hated by everyone. Another positive thing about acting is that you can always go to another audition. Unlike the other arts an actor isn't reliant on technology. You are all you need. You either have the talent or you don't. Getting roles if you have talent is not a big sweat. The real ulcers begin when you've been in the industry for 20 years and you've never landed a big movie role. At this point you will realise that you slept with all the wrong people and that you're no fun as a drinking buddy.
All the actors I know are bone-idle layabouts that think that the world will beat a path to their door. Serious actors never stop learning their craft. If you're going to be serious about acting you will have to work out at the gym, take singing and dancing lessons and still find the money to get your teeth capped. It also helps to be good looking.
Then find an agent. A good agent will get you into TV advertisements as a dancing carrot. This will stop your electricity from being turned off. Bad agents will tell you to wait for the correct role. You have to be suspicious of an agent who is not going to exploit your talents and thereby give up his commission. A true agent would hustle Satan so that you can plead his case on Judgement Day.
Actors are notoriously promiscuous. This is because they spend months shooting in isolated parts of the world where the locals are underpaid extras and the governments give kick-backs to the producers. Be prepared to gain a better understanding of strange third world diseases and the forms of cooking they derive from. Actors are also promiscuous because they are massively insecure people who continually need reassurance. What can be more reassuring than someone willing to share body-fluids with you ? Oh baby !....indeed.
Once again, kiss off all hope of normal relations with the rest of the human race. It would help if you're a little schizoid to begin with. Acting is a wonderful profession where it helps if you are tenuously connected to reality to begin with. The best actors are those without a personality. A fresh blank slate ready to adopt whatever persona the script contains.
Unsolicited advice
Get a life. Your own. Please.
If you're really determined to do this thing you should adjust your goals to a level a bit below George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. You can earn a healthy living as a clown for kiddies parties.
Ok, let's get serious. What artist do you know made it into the gossip columns since Andy Warhol ? And he's been dead for a looooong time.
You've just graduated from Art College. You have a truckload of paintings to sell. You approach the best gallery you know. They tell you to rent the space from them at a few thousand dollars. They tell you that if you want access to their mailing list of wealthy investors it would cost another thousand dollars. Then you want to print up full colour invitations. Bang goes another grand. The catering for the launch will mean you're indebted to the bank for about the resale value of your parent's house.
It costs money to exhibit. After you've bitten that bullet and you see your potential clients walk through the door of the gallery you will need some serious drugs to get through the evening. The kind of people with a disposable income for art tend to be blue-rinse ladies with toy-boys and bankers who need paintings to match the drapes in the boardroom. These are not the people who want to invest in your angst-ridden self-portraits done at 4am after your all-night nitrous-oxide binges. Your paintings will be too big or too small and definitely the wrong colour. And is it possible for you to do a picture of my grand-daughter surrounded by all her fluffy toys ?
It is at this point that you will succeed or fail as an artist. Selling artworks is about hustling. Doing whatever it takes. The most successful artists are those with great interpersonal skills. They will give the client whatever he or she needs. You might have to become the toyboy/bimbo of the geriatric set to make a sale. Or you will, at least, allude to the possibilities of this occurring so that they keep buying. The least you can get away with is to listen to the endless hours of drivel that investors will spend criticising/applauding your pathetic drug-induced scribblings.
The real money is in advertising. But no-one will hire you until they "know" you. Ok, be prepared to hang out at yuppie bars drinking and snorting with the right people.
Last piece of advice
Give the people what they want. Portraits of children. Dolphins and whales. Flowers done in pastels colours. Large-eyed puppy dogs.
Or buy a camera. No-one really gives a damn about your contribution to the visual arts. The myth of the artist having any meaning at all stopped when kids could, and did, produce better images on their home computers.
More grist to the mill
You still reading ? There are no pearls of wisdom. Trust me, I wrote this. The world is not a nice place. Especially if you live in in some god-forsaken shithole where somebody has you pegged for candidacy in a genocidal "ethnic cleansing" program. The bulk of the world lives in utter despair. You just don't hear about it. Seeing as how you have a computer and all, I doubt that you have much more to worry about than whether or not someone's drinking directly from the milk-bottle in the fridge.
I have learnt some things in my 200 years alive on this planet. Truly evil people do get away with it. Check out Pol Pot and Pinochet. They both lived to ripe old ages in the lap of luxury. They are recent examples. Historically, all the kingdoms and wealthy families have made their fortunes by spilling blood and being outside the law. The history of the world has, to date, been the history of the bad guys. Churchill bombed Dresden, the yanks nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mother Teresa didn't pass on all her donations to the poor, and John Lennon said that the Beatles stood on a lot of people in order to make their way up the charts. Nothing secular is untainted by degeneracy.
If you are a creative artist there are some fundamental questions that have to be resolved first before you can continue your journey. Your first job is to communicate. This implies a mastery of technique that allows you to successfully get your idea across. It is no good complaining about being misunderstood. There are no new ideas. There are only new ways to present old ideas so that people are reminded. It is your job to put these ideas in a language that is understood by the people you are attempting to communicating with.
What ideas are you trying to communicate ? You can try and and mirror the baseness of humanity but I don't think that people are going to bite. There is enough of that on the news. Give people something to aspire to or something that is uplifting or that allows them to escape their mundane existence and they will shower you with gold.
You must never forget that "critics" are profoundly damaged and jaded people. They get off on Ugliness and Depravity in the arts because it gives them something to write about. One can go to town describing ugliness but how many way can you describe a sunset ? They also love ugliness because they are mostly small-minded envious people. They are frustrated artists. Never read the critics if you're trying to earn a living in the arts. Your time will be better spent finding out what people are buying. Then ask yourself why.
If the way of the world is filled with pitfalls that detract from your ability to create that which needs to be created you also have to ask why you're doing it at all ? Why not just get a day job and be with a partner that will shower you with affection ? Are you not vain in thinking that you are special ? How can you be so arrogant ? You're nothing but a blip in the grand cosmic scheme of things.
The answers to this are as plentiful as there are creative people. (most of whom are just vain, self-centered, arrogant, fuckwits that aren't worth the spermicide that was meant to stop them). The best answer is that a real job with real adult responsibilities aren't half as much fun as struggling against enormous odds so that one day one can stand at the top of the dunghill and say "look at me mommy !!"
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This page was last updated : Tuesday, November 04, 2008
A rant on unfairness in the music,recording industry,hollywood,publishing industry,tin pan alley,corruption,writing,painting,art world,guitar playing,singing,acting,publishing industry