Question: How do I make a living as an artist?

People are offended by the commerce of the art world. They’re like, “I can’t believe that terrible artist is making so much money, and this other great artist isn’t making any!” It’s like, well yeah, it’s terrible, but it’s also just a reality. I show my graduate students this lecture that completely depresses them where I go through these algorithms that rank artists. I show them the depressing reality which is that .01% of artists make a living at it. Then I start to show them graphs that show income distribution in the United States. Income inequality in the art world is exactly like the income inequality of the country. The art world is in the world. It can’t be better and it can’t be worse than the world. It’s in the actual world. It reflects it perfectly. It seems more extreme because it’s smaller and we actually know some of the people, but it’s really not dissimilar to the world at large.

It’s never been easy for painters, or writers, or poets to make a living. One of the reasons is that we, I mean a big “We,” deny them an income for their work. As a society we do. Yet, these are the same people who supposedly we can’t live without. It’s curious, isn’t it? But people get inventive about how to make a living. We have collectively closed off important sources of income to composers. At the same time, composers have been inventive in finding ways of making money from their music. The survivor is surviving—but not everybody is a survivor.

Making a living on painting graffiti is almost impossible because people are not really educated on who’s really good and who’s put in the work, paid their so called dues and been around. To a lot of people, these things are not important. But if someone’s gonna hire a plumber to run a plumbing system through a building, they’re not gonna hire a guy straight out of school to do it. They’re gonna hire a guy that’s been in the business 15, 20 years. In graffiti, people don’t do that. The first guy they see with a spray can, they go, oh yeah, there he is.

Putting your whole life into something and making that the way that you make a living—as well as the way that you express yourself—can be a disaster. For a long time, I thought that was the dream. I don’t believe that anymore. I love that people support my work, but I would rather find other ways of making money.

My daughter is five years old and she thinks that every daddy sings for a living. My son’s only one so he’s still getting to grips with his limbs. It’s good for them to see what I do and, eventually, to understand where I came from. I think it sets a good example for what you can actually accomplish in life, that you can come from nothing and still make something of yourself.

Most artists are never going to have access to the commercial market that someone like Christopher Wool is in, but that doesn’t mean that they’re less important. The willy-nilly factors that go into market-making are so unrelated to the quality of the art. I don’t know. Earning a living solely through your art is just a false marker.

When you have to play as a thing over and over to make a living, your relationship with it is not so precious…

I come from a background of hardworking immigrants—I immigrated with my parents from Argentina. This is the other side of the story. We moved here in 1995. We came here with $2,000. My parents were doing really badly economically in Argentina. We came here with what we had, and I had the example of my parents busting their asses at trying to make a living for us. That’s what I learned. Working has always been: making money and making ends meet. This has always been instilled in me as the number one thing.

My parents have an attic and I basically took it over and made it into my own little studio space. You think I want to be living at home? No, but I do because the work is so important to me and I believe in it and I believe someday maybe it will get me somewhere. I could live in Manhattan and spend every waking moment trying to make enough money to survive, or I could come here and do my work. Making art is a real sacrifice.