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Episode LXVI: "Any work of art that can be digitized is now just a form of 'content'"

Published 8/4/20
In this installment, I speak with William Deresiewicz. Topics include the death of the artist, art vs. content, trust-fundism, rethinking schooling, breaking up the tech giants & more.

Today I’m with William Deresiewicz, who has all but brought me back from the grave; I haven’t done an interview for this series, The Art of Commerce, in over three years. But William’s new book The Death of the Artist (July 28, Henry Holt) covers everything this series has been about, and more, asking what exactly it means to be an artist today—whether the term is used to describe a musician, writer, visual artist, or someone in film and TV. (In the book, William also excerpts a handful of interviews I’d done for this series; the ego, of course, loves a scratch.)

I admit that every time I turned a page my eyes always went to the dollar signs within view, usually in reference to an artist’s yearly income; usually this was quite a low figure. When we talk about “the death of the artist”, we can mean a lot of things, but more than anything we mean the fact that artists can (hardly) make a living anymore by being artists, alone. In your book, you stitch a very thorough patchwork of voices that surface all of the complexities behind this fact. But I want to ask you to choose what you believe is the most salient factor: If you could name only one reason that artists are (financially) dying, what would you say?

Hi Andrew! It's a slightly surreal experience for me to be doing this with you, since reading through the complete run of The Art of Commerce three years ago was one of the first and most important ways I educated myself, in the course of researching this book, about the practicalities of being a writer today. So there's a bit of a sense here of stepping through the looking glass.

In any case, you're right that there are a number of important reasons for the dire financial straits of writers and other artists today, but by far the most important one is digital demonetization. In plainer language, the Internet (starting with Napster) has driven the price of content toward zero. Free music, free writing, free still and moving images. Or nearly free, at best. 

Well I first read digital demonetization as digital demonization, with your (occasionally) harsh words for big tech still on my mind. And of course, even as content producers get very little in return (from, say, YouTube or Spotify), those companies’ profits reach new highs every quarter. But I wonder what (or who) exactly is to blame for the (seemingly permanent) expectation that content should be free. On one hand I think of social media content, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about music, books, art, movies and TV—and those are each separate beasts. I think the expectation that music should be free is the one that’s the strongest, and the one that’s been around the longest. And art—no one really thinks owning physical art should be free, no?

I first want to know how you think the expectation that content should be (nearly) free has made its way into publishing. You explored the effect of Wattpad and unlimited e-book services, but the book (hardcover or paperback) still exists much as it did 50 years ago, no?

Second, I want to know how you think of the competition between social media content and “art” content (books, movies, etc.). Is there some crossover effect at work here? Do we think books should be free because the competition—1000 brilliant tweets—is?

Yes, I've thought about that demonetization/demonization pun. First musicians had their stuff demonetized by piracy, then they got demonized, for asking people to stop stealing their stuff.

And that's a clue to where this expectation of free content came from. It came from the reality of free content! Before stuff was free, nobody thought it should be. Once it was, they invented justifications (which I talk about in my chapter on piracy and copyright).

The word "content" is also a clue. A lot of artists hate it (as do I), because it equates highly crafted works that are made with painstaking care by people with years of training and practice (art) with the stuff that we're all just constantly hawking up online (tweets/posts/etc.). It's not so much competition as conflation. Any work of art that can be digitized is now just a form of "content," and content is supposed to be free, or at least, low-cost.

But you're right that physical objects are different. You asked me what the leading problem is. But it's not the only problem or a problem that applies to everything. The unique (and often ridiculously expensive) physical objects that belong to the world of high-end visual art are obviously not affected by demonetization.

Physical books aren't either—except insofar as they must now compete with e-books, which are sometimes pirated and sometimes expected to be free (say, the first installment of a trilogy of self-published genre fiction, an example I give in the book).

And writers don't just make their living selling books. The other big piece, at least before the Internet, was freelance writing. Demonetization has had a huge impact on that, as well, because it has had a huge impact on newspapers and magazines. So freelance fees are way down.

Before we talk more about the difference between “art” and “content”, I do have a question that’s been burning in me for almost a decade: Why are e-books seen as a potential downfall for publishers? I understand there’s inherent competition, with low-cost (and, more often than not, low-quality) options cutting into the profits of major publishers, but e-books also seem to solve a lot of the problems that have plagued publishers for the past century. Amazon takes a serious cut from book sales, but do publishers really not have any other option? Given book discovery is now all over the place (as in, social media), and “shelf-space” (digital or not) is not the biggest driver for sales, do you believe publishers could reclaim e-book sales for themselves (say, selling on their own websites), and turn things around?

That's right, publishers really don't have any option other than Amazon. Obviously, that's not literally true, but it's pretty damn true. One of the reasons that Big Tech is so dominant not only in the arts but across the economy is that the Web is governed by what are known as "network effects." Basically, the bigger something is, the bigger it gets. Everyone's on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook. People buy their books from Amazon because they're already buying everything else from Amazon. Who's going to take the trouble to go to a different site for each e-book when they're already on the one that has them all? Not many people.

That's why the nightmare scenario for every publishing-industry person I talked to is the disappearance of Barnes & Noble, the last major alternative to the Amazonian anaconda. And by the way, discovery is much more restricted on an online seller than it is in a physical store. How much social media has changed that I'm not sure. Among other things, your friends can't recommend a book if they haven't discovered it themselves in the first place.    

Have you heard of Bookshop? What are your thoughts?

I just heard of it recently. Maybe it will help. The person who told me about it is a publishing-industry analyst who pointed out that Borders was the first place to enter into this kind of e-book partnership (with the Sony e-reader). It was one of the things that helped kill Borders. But maybe this will work out better. 

Ok, now back to the difference between “art” and “content”. Am I right to summarize your perspective that the true difference is the amount of time put in to the project (school, training, just years of production, etc.)?

I found one of the most fascinating parts of the book to be when you discussed education. No matter the industry—whether it’s publishing and MFAs, art and MFAs, or film and film school (music seems to be the outlier), having proper schooling really, really matters. This is because of training, but also (and in many cases, more so) because of the connections you can make. There’s not just a few problems with this ecosystem, but the one I found most salient was that getting into these schools—and being able to afford them—leads to what you call “a high level of trust-fundism”. Besides the fact this effect might make the sort of art that comes out of these schools not very interesting (or at least repetitive), it also adds to the financial predicament of artists. What is to be done? And should we be knocking down the preconceived notion that artists need to attend school?

Yes, for purposes of this discussion, the essential difference between art and most other forms of content is time and effort put in. So (again, only for the purposes of this discussion), I would group journalism with art. Journalism has also been turned into "content" and demonetized.

As for the question of school, it's complicated. Making art requires a high degree of skill. School is one of the best ways to develop that skill, and sometimes it's hard to do it without school. School (colleges and MFA programs) gives you access to the intensive guidance of experienced practitioners and the company of fellow talented and serious young artists. So it's not just connections and credentials.

At the same time, you're making me think about why music is different. Not all music is: classical music isn't. But other forms of music are. Why? Is it because they do not require a high degree of skill? In some cases, you could make that case. But in others (say, jazz, though I know that you can also go to school for jazz), you can't. So how is it that those musicians are able to develop that skill without going to school? Thinking out loud, it seems to be because there are communities where that kind of intensive mentorship and lateral learning are possible outside of school.

Could such communities be created for visual art, writing, film? Maybe in principle, though while people have tried, it doesn't seem to have proved that easy. Perhaps there is something intrinsic to those arts, as opposed to most forms of music, that makes it more difficult.

But I don't think so. What does classical music have in common with visual art, writing, and film that it doesn't have in common with other forms of music? It is heavily institutionalized. In other forms of music, you don't need to appeal to institutions (nonprofit or for-profit); you don't need connections or credentials to reach an audience. In those other arts, by and large, you do—still, even in the age of the Internet, whether we like to believe it or not.

Which means that getting rid of the need for school (and the inequalities you rightly note that need creates) is not just a matter of knocking down preconceived notions. The institution of the art school (broadly speaking—college counts in this respect, as well) exists as part of an interlocking set of institutions in the arts. It exists as the pipeline to those other institutions (publishers, orchestras, galleries, etc.). I'm afraid you would have to get rid of the whole institutional structure. Which may be worth doing, but certainly wouldn't be as easy as changing a notion.

This talk of interlocking sets of institutions makes me think of capitalism. (I appreciated that you pointed out in the book that “markets are not evil,” even though markets are required for, well, the most evil parts of the art industries.) For all of the grants and foundations this country has—many of which keep many artists, specifically visual artists, in practice—it pales in comparison to the support given by other countries (i.e. Canada, much of Western Europe). But in many respects, and many art industries, the US still leads the world. I wonder if you think a more “socialist” system of grants and scholarships would lead to a more vibrant, successful artistic community, or one awash in mediocrity and all of its trappings.

Before I started working on the book, I did think that markets were evil, that art and money shouldn't touch, and that the answer, or part of the answer, was a radical increase in public funding.

But markets and capitalism are not synonymous (and capitalism is not synonymous with the extreme and unconstrained form of capitalism we now find ourselves living with). Markets have existed for millennia, and they are one of the ways that people communicate their desires.

Which is why the answer is not simply tons of public funding. More public funding would be good. Absolutely. Public funding for the arts in the United States, at all levels of government, comes to less than $1.4 billion, a ridiculous sum (it's about $4.20 per person). As a percentage of GDP, Europe funds the arts at 60 times that level.

But as you suggest, lavish public funding does not necessarily lead to good art, as the European example abundantly demonstrates. Art that is publicly funded is not necessarily art that people want (in fact, it's often pretty clearly art that people don't want). It's art that the funders want: that the committees and bureaucrats and insiders want. And when you cut art off from the feedback loop of popular taste, from people's desires, you end up with art that is unbearably stale and safe (not to mention rarefied and obscure).

The answer, for me, is not to separate art from the market, but to make the market function better. We need both to find a way to get people to pay for art again (directly or indirectly) and to enable them to do so more readily. The first means, above all, breaking up the tech giants, so that the tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue that now flows to them from "demonetized content" goes to artists instead. The second means creating an equitable economy for everyone, so that the audience is in a better position to be generous.

I find that really exciting and want to talk about that: making people pay for art again. In theory I can understand that breaking up the tech giants would prevent them from getting money that should go to content creators. But in practice, I don’t see how the toothpaste goes back in the tube. We already expect online “content” to be free. And we’ve already established the different between “content” and “art”—so how would, say, breaking up Google or Facebook really put money back in artist’s pockets?

Right. Getting people to pay for art would not be easy (though it would probably be easier if people felt less strapped) and is never going to be more than a relatively small piece of the solution.

But here's why breaking up the tech giants could be a big piece. Free content, as I said, generates tens of billions of dollars for them. They are counting the clicks, aggregating the data, and selling advertising (and other services) off of that data. As of now, they share very little of that money with the artists who enable them to make it. They don't because they don't have to; they don't have to because they're incredibly powerful; they're incredibly powerful because they are enormous monopolies.

To take the most obvious example, about half of all music streaming takes place over YouTube, which is owned by Google. Because it's owned by Google, we don't know how much revenue it generates, but estimates are that it's about $30 billion a year. (Total global revenue for the music industry, from all sources, is about $20 billion a year.) YouTube is estimated to pay musicians about ¢0.07 per stream (we don't know the exact number, because Google doesn't have to tell us). That's seven hundredths of one cent per stream. Which means that 1,000,000 streams will earn you $700.

Google can get away with this obscenity for a lot of reasons I won't enumerate, but all of them flow from its size and power. One way or another, we need to force it to pay musicians more—a lot more. And comparable things can be said about the other arts and the other tech giants.    

Thanks, that’s all fair. And it makes me think of this quote from the book: “Labels and artists, however contentious their relationship may sometimes be, are necessarily symbiotic. The tech industry is parasitic. It doesn’t care if one musician gets a million streams or a million get a single one apiece. It doesn’t care how many young musicians come and go, because it knows there will always be more, and it isn’t putting money into any of them.”

It seems (to me at least) that most of the book is focused on the demand side of the equation. But I am curious about the supply. I wonder if you encountered any research dealing with the pure number of artists in the world today versus 10 years ago, 20, 50. It now seems that everyone is an artist, and, if that’s taken for granted, it should follow that no one will make much from the endeavor.

Well, that's the other thing, isn't it? It is extremely and painfully clear that the Internet has multiplied the number of artists virtually without limit. For example, the number of books that are self-published each year is now over a million and continuing to rise.

The ease of self-production and self-distribution in the Internet age has indeed enabled everyone (with abundant encouragement from Silicon Valley itself) to believe that they're an artist. Most of them are wrong. Meanwhile, actual artists (that is, serious ones), are contending with the avalanche of amateur garbage that threatens to bury their work.

Still, I don't think that necessarily means that all artists are fated to penury. The truth is that the vast majority of work produced by that legion of amateur dabblers gets zero attention and generates zero income. The reason that the "middle" is starving—the much smaller group of dedicated, talented, professional artists who produce work of value and who, before the Internet, had a reasonable expectation of a decent standard of living—is that too much money is going to the few at the top, not the many at the bottom. It's the so-called blockbuster effect, itself enabled by the Web. In the 80s, 80% of revenue in the music business went to the top 20% of content; today, 80% goes to the top 1%.

Yes, and I think the truth is that in this new world the people who can find and evaluate the gems in the “middle,”—that is, critics—are losing out to the effect of virality (not to mention just losing their jobs). Do you see the virality model of exposure to be an inherently problematic system?

Absolutely. It's precisely the virality model that creates the blockbuster effect, which is just another instance of a network effect: the big get bigger. Small waves turn into tsunamis. Best-selling books sell more than ever; books on the mid-list sell less than they used to. The world of newspapers is contracting down to a few big winners, like the New York Times; same thing with the world of magazine journalism (the New Yorker, the Atlantic). And so forth in music, movies, etc.

And now, to close us out, you finish the book by theorizing (and naming) the fourth paradigm of artist (following, 1. the original mold of the artist, 2. the bohemian, and 3. the professional): The producer. This producer encapsulates everything we think of when we think of being an artist in the digital age: branded content, direct engagement with fans, identity niches, the fall of the critic, the (over-)reliance on metrics, the destruction of barriers to entry. I’m curious what you think are both the most positive and the most negative aspects of this fourth paradigm, the producer.

To clarify, the first paradigm is the artisan. Artisan (until the 18th century), bohemian (until the early-mid 20th century), professional (after World War II), and now this new thing that I call the producer (as an alternative to the loathsome buzz phrase "creative entrepreneur"). 

I would say that the most positive aspect of the new paradigm is the freedom it provides: freedom from the gatekeepers and the institutions. It's a difficult freedom (gatekeepers help, if they let you through; so do institutions, if they accept you), but a genuine freedom nonetheless. There are more opportunities than ever, more ways of making it work.

The most negative aspect is precarity. As I say in the book, producers are "free particles in the marketplace, finding what work we can for what money we can, and exposed without protection to the market's whims."