Link Love + Should we pay artists before they do the work?
What does it take to make good art?
There’s a whole passel of good links to good and beautiful work down at the bottom of this piece below the paywall, so don’t miss that!
I was recently a part of a conversation about how we cobble together a living wage as makers, writers, artists, and creative people. There was no one specific narrative brought to the table, but there were two distinct positions taken:
The first was that asking for payment for our creative work cheapens the work and makes us into dancing monkeys.
The second was that without bread, butter, and an ability to bring home even a slice of bacon, none of us would be able to do creative work period.
It occurred to me later that I’m not sure this would be quite the conversation it is if we weren’t all people of faith, people for whom the line between sacred and secular is non-existent—or as Wendell Berry writes, “no unsacred places, only sacred and desecrated.” And as I reflected more on the conversation, it made me realize I’d like to talk a bit about this here on Sayable.1
Many of us were raised in religious environments and have spent much of our [recent?] lives disentangling from the ways religion, legalism, and moralism twisted our God-given brains and hearts, creative pursuits and intuitive natures into something we learned to distrust and become suspect of. Most of us are constantly aware of the ways our art, words—regular descents into the depths and rising into resurrections—have become fodder for religiosity and, in many cases, the religious right in particular. Art for art’s sake is rare among us, instead we feel it all has to be undergird with some sort of message or point or directive cue toward redemption or right thinking/doing. In the vernacular, tie a pretty bow on it or it doesn’t count.
I don’t know. Maybe that’s not you. But it’s me, and I suspect it’s probably many of you, whether you wield a pen or paintbrush or pot of potatoes. We ache to spiritualize our work or believe it doesn’t have meaning—or worth, more specifically.
One of my favorite poems is by Richard Wilbur, a poem ostensibly about laundry in which he refers to “the punctual rape of every blessed day.” I have always loved that line and I’ve always loved the title, “Love Calls us to the Things of This World.” There is no illusion here, he is saying to love the things of this world—the “secular” things we so try to make sacred without acknowledging they already are—is to submit ourselves to the agonizing theft of our hours and minutes and days, sometimes against our will, to see the work as work but also in its most unadorned way, as “angels,” as Wilbur calls the sheets on the lines. It is spiritual work, whether we do it well or do it grumbling or do it for the plot or do it at all, because we are humans and to be human is to love. But it’s also work.
Because we’re so tangled up in laundry, pots of potatoes, pens, paintbrushes, etc. etc., we get tangled up in spiritualizing the work to a degree beyond love, which is, ironically, not loving. Spiritualizing is not loving. It is bypassing love for meaning or learning or defending or reasoning. It is valuing the logical left brain over the intuitive right. And yet, the intuitive right is where our best work as artists is done. It is in the self-forgetfulness of intuition that we make something of nothing without trying to make nothing have meaning. The meaning, if it comes, comes almost without our awareness, a surprise to us as much as a surprise to the one viewing or reading or hearing.
This is difficult for any artist, religious or not, but adding in matters of faith or spirituality or some innate need to thread all work with “the gospel,” the webs we weave end up looking empty or trite or too soft to say anything serious. It’s why there’s such bad art in Christian environments. It’s why I stood in a bookstore owned by Christians recently, aghast at the rows of Amish romances they stocked and the piles of towels and blankets adorned with Bible verses in papyrus font. It’s because our idea of what can be holy and sold for a living wage is limited to projecting forward the most pious among us or our elementary attempts at ancient typefaces. If it’s art at all, though, it’s fearful art. We trivialize with tropes because we’re afraid of looking in the gaping mouth of the unknown and writing our way through it. Trusting there is something of goodness in the dark, even if all that is good is still dark.
I heard someone read a dark piece recently. It was dark, dark, dark. And yet it was light too. It was light because it was brave, because it refused to look away from darkness, because it took courage to write and then publish, because they read in front of other writers (notoriously snobbish, writers are), because it said what we’re all thinking and too afraid to say. So it was dark and it was light at the same time.
I’m reminded of Chiam Potok’s words in My Name is Asher Lev,
I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.
And I think this is why we Christians are so bad at asking to be paid for our work as writers, and sometimes too afraid to do the work that must be done as a writer who also has faith: because we know we’re darkness and light at the same time. We know we’re right and wrong. We know all the goodness of our work is tinged with badness. We know that to moralize our work, to lead always toward just good is disingenuous at best and straight up lying at worst. And we’re wildly uncomfortable with that.
Returning to the conversation I had earlier, I think it’s not so much that asking to be paid cheapens our work (I don’t think it has to, unless we decide to cheapen ourselves for the ones who pay us—a thing I’ve been asked to do more than a time or two) or that we must have payment in order to justify the work we do.
I think we’re afraid that being paid for our work means we must do the real work or else we’re just grifters, trying to make a quick buck on the backs of readers who are looking for the true, good, and beautiful and settling for semi-squishy spiritualizing because at least it makes them feel like they can do better or more or different. Moralism. Legalism. Papyrus font.
We should be paid for our work because we’re willing to go first into the dark, and we want others to come with us and it’s uncomfortable and hard and we need to not worry about the cost while we’re doing it. We need to, as Annie Dillard writes and someone important to me reminded me recently, “fling ourselves at what we’re doing. Point ourselves. Forget ourselves. Aim. Dive.”
And the truth is, that’s easier to do when we’re not worrying so much about our mortgages getting paid. Love does call us to the things of this world, but someone still has to pay for it.