How To Make Money As An Artist

Fine Art, Commercial Art, Popular Art These categorizations of art are blurry at best and often just plain arbitrary. If fine art becomes popular, does it cease to be fine? What about commercial art which has been included in a museum exhibit–is it then fine art? Andy Warhol pretty much invented the idea of popular [...]

Fine Art, Commercial Art, Popular Art

These categorizations of art are blurry at best and often just plain arbitrary. If fine art becomes popular, does it cease to be fine? What about commercial art which has been included in a museum exhibit–is it then fine art? Andy Warhol pretty much invented the idea of popular art (he called it pop art), but in many ways the marketing and mass production of his art was itself a fine art project. Or maybe it was all just a commercial art project

The fact is, artists in this day and age will do well to avoid pigeon-holing themselves into just one category on which they stake their identity. After all, much of the classical art that is now considered to be indisputably in the fine art category was actually created on commission, especially the art sculptures that we all know and love; they were essentially commercial in their time, but were either good enough or popular enough to be treasured over a long period of time.

I think this incubation period is itself what makes fine art. It may well be that there is no way to discover what type of art you are actually making until hundreds of years have passed and you are dead and gone.

So where does that leave the modern artist? In the exact same position you might imagine: making art. You might be making money making art, or you might not make any money at all with your art. The particulars of your motivation for making the art have essentially no bearing on its ultimate status as fine, or as popular, or as classic, or as any other qualitative judgement. Hell, there isn’t even any way to tell whether the art that you’re making is any good! I hate Jackson Pollock, but most people venerate him as a great artist. I wonder what I’ll think about him in another hundred years.

How To Make Money As An Artist

That’s the real question, then. You make what you make. You probably think it’s good or else you wouldn’t make it, but whether you or anybody else thinks it’s good has no bearing whatsoever on whether you as an artist are making any money for doing your art.

There are a number of different paths you can take to make money as an artist, and they depend on your type of art, your geographic location, your networking skills, and your personal ambition to be an artist who makes money. There can never be a complete guide to making money as an artist; the scale is just too broad. However, please keep an eye on this page, because in the upcoming weeks or months I will be discussing some ideas about ideology, lifestyle, and artistic approach, but also primarily about making money as an artist.