The Wild Ways Artists Have Made Their Livings, Renaissance To Today

(MENAFN- USA Art News) ARTnews Excerpt Reframes the“Starving Artist” Myth, Spotlighting Barter, Survival, and Midcareer Collapse

What does an artist do when the usual financial infrastructure feels out of reach - or simply irrelevant? In a newly published ARTnews excerpt, the answer is not a tidy morality play about mismanagement, but a messier portrait of improvisation: cash stashed in unlikely places, services traded for artworks, and careers jolted off course by forces far beyond the studio.

One of the most vivid details centers on poet Bernadette Mayer, who, according to the excerpt, never opened a bank account and instead kept her money inside a book of Shakespeare's sonnets. Mayer once put the matter plainly in her own words:“i write unbalanced poetry, i cannot balance my checkbooks, nor do i have one.” The line lands as both confession and refusal - a reminder that the systems that organize middle-class stability do not always map onto artistic life.

The excerpt's larger argument is that familiar depictions of artists' financial struggle can be strangely narrow. It suggests that when precarity is framed only as failure, the story misses the ingenuity artists deploy to keep making work - and the alternative economies that often develop around them.

Photographer Nan Goldin is invoked as a key counterexample. Goldin has said that, for her community, survival was an art. The excerpt points to how her pictures hold contradictions in a single frame: grit alongside glamor, poverty alongside principle. In that view, the economics of daily life are not separate from the work; they are part of its material and its stakes.

The text also takes aim at portrayals that reduce artists to caricature. It notes that Currey's depiction (in an unnamed work referenced in the excerpt) casts some figures as“drunks, thieves, and GI-Bill welfare queens,” a set of labels that, in the excerpt's telling, obscures the“revolutionary resourcefulness” that can define artistic survival.

Two artists offered as correctives are Pippa Garner and Beverly Buchanan. Garner, trained in industrial design, is described as spending her life resisting drudgery by operating as an inventor - imagining interventions that capitalism could not easily turn into commodities. She titled her last solo show“Sell Yourself,” a phrase that reads as both performance and critique. Yet the excerpt emphasizes that Garner lived in poverty and relied in part on a government check connected to exposure to Agent Orange.

Buchanan's strategy was different but equally pragmatic: she bartered artworks for ordinary services, including doctors' visits and plumbing. The detail underscores how artists have long negotiated value outside conventional paychecks, using the currency they control - their work - to secure what they need.

Running beneath these examples is another theme the excerpt identifies: the midcareer crisis, when an artist or writer who believes they are on a steady path toward security finds that the ground can shift overnight. The poet John Berryman is cited as a case in point. He held a job at Harvard, but in spring 1943 his students - almost all men - were sent off to World War II, and his class was canceled. The excerpt recounts his response: a classified ad in the New York Times offering to do anything, paired with a stark plea“to continue living and writing if possible.”

Mayer, too, appears in this register of disillusionment.“Maybe I was naïve,” she wrote,“to think if you're pretty famous and you've been influential in the literary scene and in the art world for over five decades, and you're living, you'd be set.” The excerpt closes with a blunt distillation of the anxiety, quoting John O'Hara's repeated request to a New Yorker editor:“I want more money I want more money...”

Taken together, the excerpt insists on a more precise vocabulary for artistic precarity - one that can hold both hardship and agency. It suggests that the most revealing stories are not only about what artists lack, but about the systems they invent when the official ones fail to make room for them.

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