Art, Economics, and Market Share
Although making progress toward receiving a visa that will allow me to work in Portugal, looks like that's more than three months away. I'm a man with time on his hands. Looked over my resumé today and remembered an occupation I omitted.
I once worked as a booking agent for rock and jazz groups. Although it attracts some of the best musicians, jazz is a tough act to sell. The market just isn't that big. On many occasions a struggling jazz musician would come to me and lament over his lot in life and the unfair nature of the world. The question was always the same, "What kind of world is this in which a kid who can barely tune a guitar works seven nights a week while 'real' players starve?"
Truly gifted, well-trained, sensitive musicians often refuse to "sell themselves" to commercial markets and insist on playing what's in their heads and hearts. Unfortunately, the general public usually isn't prepared to drink beer and dance to what comes out.
My response to these fine artists was always the same. The difficult thing about being an "artist" isn't the arting, it's making peace with your market share. If what you have to communicate is so refined, so rarefied, that it leaves the common listener behind, be prepared to starve or play Proud Mary.
Anybody can grab an instrument (or a paintbrush, or a pen, etc.), do (or not do) something with it and declare himself an artist. Who's to argue? On the other hand, who cares? You could just as easily call yourself an orangutan. "Being" an artist makes you neither good nor commercially successful.
There is a market for just about every conceivable form of art or communication. But, some of those markets are very small. If you take two lessons on the tuba and decide to devote your life to playing interpretations of Rick Springfield's greatest hits, I'd wager your market share is exactly one -- you. Sooner or later, though, you'll grow tired of playing in the garage and will feel compelled to share your art with mankind. Mankind, being unprepared to receive genius of this caliber, will turn a deaf ear. Six months later, you'll lament to friends and family that the world is a cold and unfair place.
Sadly, there isn't much difference to a booking agent between a tuba playing novelty act and an extremely talented experimental jazz player. The truly gifted artist committed to his artistic vision will, with perseverance and help from his parents, usually find a somewhat larger market for his art, but often not a market large enough to pay his bills on time.
There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this.
First, there's a vast difference between making art and making "good" art. There are two basic ways the public votes on what is good art. One is by spending dollars for it. Many would disagree with this gauge because it seems to apply more to "commercial" than to "fine" art. The other is by adopting the opinion of those who ought to know good art from bad -- competent, recognized critics. Too bad critics don't send out checks.
Sometimes the two methods come together, as in the case of master artists such as Van Gogh, but unfortunately, from a booking agent's point of view, this tends to happen too late to pay next month's rent.
Second, if you decide that the life of an artist is for you but you want to sleep well at night, make peace with your market share, be it ever so humble. By all means, devote your life to Rick Springfield's corpus, stage performances on your back porch, but be prepared to take your cousins to dinner afterward.
How does this affect my resumé? Learned that most Denny's are open 24-hours-a-day.