‘The starving artist’ is a myth, author says: Here’s what it takes for creatives to sustain a career

In Stacey D’Erasmo’s new book, “The Long Run,” she interviews artists who are late in their careers.

There’s dancer and performer Valda Setterfield, who performed through her 80s despite serious injuries from a car accident in her 40s. There’s writer Samuel Delany, now 82, who has published more than 40 books although he’s dyslexic.

D’Erasmo also provides anecdotes from artists of the past, including that Monet painted his impressionist water lilies the way he did because his vision was deteriorating from cataracts.

What interested D’Erasmo was not what got these artists going, but what kept them going over decades of life. Romanticized ideas of the starving artist, she says, ignore the reality that art is made “by real people with real needs in real places.” Those include financial realities, which often require balancing one’s art with another job.

“What gets us started — those first few years, or perhaps those early moments of artistic ignition — is brief, fiery, and beautiful, of course,” D’Erasmo said. “It’s a story the culture loves to tell as in, say, ‘A Star is Born.'”

On the other hand, she said, “The story of duration, of a sensibility unfolding over time and the life that evolves to keep art at the center is a story that gets told less often. To me, that is such a heroic story.”

CNBC interviewed D’Erasmo, the author of five novels and two nonfiction books, by email this month. (The conversation has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.)

Annie Nova: Why is it a heroic story when someone sticks to their art over a lifetime?

Stacey D’Erasmo: In this world, it is so hard to do that. As a writer who knows lots of other writers and artists, I’ve experienced firsthand the urgency of this question: How do we keep doing this, on all levels? Which is to say: How do I support a complex and often difficult practice that means everything to me, even though it may not immediately, or ever, produce money, glory or approval? That’s not a three-act drama, roll credits. It’s a life.

AN: The idea of the “starving artist” is a familiar trope in our culture. What does it get wrong? How does financial stability help to create art?

SD: Well, if all the artists were starving, they’d be dead, and we wouldn’t have any art! That trope romanticizes deprivation, and it’s a fantasy of art as some sort of magic that can live on nothing, but art doesn’t get made in some ethereal realm. It’s made by real people with real needs in real places.

Financial stability is a godsend to the artist, primarily because the less you have to think about money, the more you can think about what truly matters to you. In this country, though, even basic financial stability can be very hard to come by, as we know. Among other things, that is never good for the arts. When you starve the artist, you starve artmaking.

AN: What do you see with people balancing a job to pay the bills with their art? Does it matter if the job is related to their art?

SD: I would say that 99% of the artists and writers I know balance a bill-paying job with their own work. Whether it’s related to one’s art or not is a matter of temperament: Some people love to do something totally unrelated, and others want to be immersed in cultural work.

The problem people constantly face is that the day job’s demands are often urgent — things need to happen today, this week, right now, before 5. That’s true whether your job is woodworking or running a gallery. Art-making has its own idiosyncratic clock. The difference between these two clocks is hard to navigate, which is why I and nearly everyone I know pines not so much for money per se as for time. We long endlessly for more time.

AN: The artists profiled in your book work in all different mediums. Do some take more money to sustain than others?

SD: Film, as we all know, just inhales money. Even the lowest-budget film costs way more than what it costs a writer to sit down at their desk and write. Visual art requires all sorts of materials. Dance requires not only costumes and lighting and so on, not to mention dancers who need to eat, but rehearsal space, and space often does not come cheap. Artists, writers and arts organizations all spend a fair amount of time seeking grants and other sources of funding just to keep the lights on. Writing is probably the cheapest medium in terms of art creation, but distributing it in the world — publishing, also requires a fair amount of money that someone has to pay. Sadly, there really is no free lunch.

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AN: How does economic inequality determine who gets to make art?

SD: That’s a book-length question, but the short answer is: A lot.

I would also say that economic inequality is most brutal not only in who gets to make art, but also in who gets to have a career and a life in art. I live in New York City, and I see acts of creation everywhere every day: a person walking down the street who has put together a fantastic look, a person making glorious graffiti, or something like ball culture, which you can now see in the glossy television show “Pose.” All of those people are making art, but the structural inequality of opportunity means that few of them would ever be able to build a life around it. We’re missing out greatly on what those people might be able to do not for a moment or a season, but for decades.

AN: There are some artistic professions that come with an early retirement age. I’m thinking of dancers. How do people reinvent themselves after an early end to a career?

SD: Some dancers become choreographers. Some actors move into directing — think of someone like Ron Howard. But that makes it sound seamless or easy, and often it isn’t. Valda Setterfield, a dancer whom I profile in the book, had a horrific car accident at 40 and she thought her life on stage might be over. Her husband, choreographer David Gordon, helped her learn to move again, and she also began to do more theater and film work, which continued for the rest of her life.

Vera Wang was an aspiring Olympic figure skater, but she didn’t make the Olympic team in 1968. Then she turned to fashion. Later, she began designing costumes for Olympic-level figure skaters such as Nancy Kerrigan and Michelle Kwan. When I look at Wang’s designs, it seems to me that they have a precision and grace not unlike a figure skater’s balletic moves.

Often, people reinvent themselves by opening up a slightly different channel through which their gifts can flow

AN: What advantages do middle and later career artists hold over younger ones?

SD: So much more comfort with the weirdness, unpredictability and challenges of the process. You’re just not as freaked out all the time. I don’t mind my own stumbling. I also don’t feel as brittle or defensive. When I was younger, for instance, I would look at all the incredible writers who had come before me, and who were around me, and feel terribly intimidated by the depth and breadth of the field.

But now, it all looks to me like this extraordinary abundance. If you’re fortunate enough to have a long run, there can be so much freedom in mid- and late career.

AN: How do you see people’s art change as they get older?

SD: Again: a book-length question, and several books have been written about it, such as Edward Said’s “Late Style.” What I noticed about the people I interviewed is that their work changed, and changed again, over time. They weren’t waxwork replicas of their younger selves.

The musician Steve Earle, for instance, who came up as a rollicking solo artist in country music in Nashville in the ’70s and ’80s, has moved increasingly toward musical theater in the latter half of his life — a collaborative, multimedia form. The renowned writer Samuel Delany has traversed myriad genres over the course of his life. Intuitively, it makes sense. As the artist changes over time, so does the art, because we make it out of ourselves.

AN: In the end, what were the biggest things you found that helped people sustain a creative life?

SD: As we get older, the willingness to be open, to be vulnerable, to be a beginner, to be out of one’s comfort zone can get a little stiff. You aren’t always so confident that you won’t break something, literally or figuratively. Shame lurks around. But the people who have sustained what looks to me like a truly alive creative practice are the ones who are willing to take the risk of flopping. I hope that I am able to risk embarrassment for the rest of my life.

AN: What can people do if they hit a period of disillusionment with their art or creativity?

SD: Remember that it happens to everyone — this I know for a fact. Creativity isn’t a machine, it’s an organism. Organisms get tired, bored, distracted, daunted, ornery. Stop. Take a walk — and by this I mean: Go somewhere else, do something different, maybe for an hour, maybe for a year. Or several. Keep walking. Look around. What do you see?