How big tech killed artists
Leading critic William Deresiewicz on why the myth of creative freedom was the most profitable lie tech ever told
Interview by Olya Kuryshchuk
In 2020, writer and critic Will Deresiewicz published The Death of the Artist, a book built on interviews with around 140 jobbing artists (rather than a handful of the rich and successful), about how they make a living off their work. As the name suggests, it seeks to understand today’s artists from a place of great concern. Despite pre-dating TikTok, AI and the brutally long tail of the pandemic – three cataclysmic forces that define our current reality – it’s as relevant now as it was then, and offers one of the most clarifying explanations for our cultural malaise.
Centrally, Deresiewicz challenges the myth of creative liberation that Silicon Valley has proliferated – the idea that computer software and social media enables everyone to realise their full artistic potential now. “The Death of the Artist argues that we are in the midst of an epochal transformation,” he writes. “If artists were artisans in the Renaissance, bohemians in the nineteenth century, and professionals in the twentieth, a new paradigm is emerging in the digital age, one that is changing our fundamental ideas about the nature of art and the role of the artist in society.”
It doesn’t talk about fashion explicitly, but, for anyone who works in the industry and feels despondent about its direction, the book will undoubtedly strike a chord. Fashion operates with many of the same central paradoxes, at once thriving but also dead. Generating billions but heavily reliant on unpaid labour. Here, 1 Granary editor-in-chief Olya Kuryshchuk and Deresiewicz discuss what he learned making this landmark book and how he feels about it six years on.
Olya Kuryshchuk: In the book, you say at some point: “I was also a purist, I was also in denial,” thinking about art as needing to be free, done as a labour of love. I went through Central Saint Martins, and without anyone explicitly telling us money was bad, that was the only notion we had, so we all worked for free, excited to work for free, and felt really guilty to ask to be paid. You interviewed around 140 artists for this book. What did you believe going in, and what changed in your thinking?
William Deresiewicz: The book came out of a piece I had written a few years before in The Atlantic, and I think you can tell from that piece that I was still in that old mindset that you encountered in art school, that everybody encounters in art school; that’s still, I think, the predominant mindset in the arts. That even to think about money is corrupting, that art should have nothing to do with money, that if you do work that’s primarily for money, you’re selling out, which is the worst thing you can do.
One of the first interviews I conducted for the book was with an old student of mine who is in the book anonymously. He became a film director. I specifically did not want to talk to people who were successful enough that I had heard of them, because I didn’t want it to be a book about the economics of being a famous artist; I wanted it to be a book about what it’s like for most people. He’s a very frank person, and almost right from the beginning, because he had read my essay, he said: “You know, Will, you’re part of the problem.” I don’t remember the exact words, but basically: you’re peddling the same kind of bullshit that gets young artists in trouble.
He did an MFA at one of the well-known film programmes, so he had experienced this exact same kind of denial, that lofty indifference to money, in film school as well. That interview was really a slap in the face. It made me rethink my whole attitude and recognise that of course you have to think about money. Not thinking about money doesn’t make you any purer. Sometimes it just means that you’re a hypocrite. Sometimes it means that you’ve screwed yourself and you’re unable to make your way in the world, because you think this problem is just going to take care of itself. And there’s an enormous amount of denial about money in the art world, especially regarding how much money people come from and how much family money they have. It’s very true in the film world, apparently.
Olya: It’s very true in fashion.
William: It’s very true in fashion, too. People have talked about it in the theatre world. A young director trying to make their way – it really helps if their parents can finance their first 10 plays. I think I quote somebody as saying that.
Olya: The most fascinating part of your history chapter: if this notion of how we see art right now has existed for only 200 years, it can go just as easily away.
William: Yes, in some ways that was the key insight that led even to the Atlantic article. Digging deeper for the book, I started to see what a deep connection there is between the emergence of capitalism and all of these romantic notions of art and the separation between art and money. And more profoundly, all of this made me rethink my attitude towards the market in general. I was a good sort of unreflecting socialist ever since I was an adolescent, and I’d never thought about the fact that the market is actually really valuable, as it gives us a lot of things we like.
At the same time, my experience in academia, and what people were telling me about the theatre world, made me recognise that the nonprofit world, the world that exists outside the market, is also full of corruption and bullshit. There are all kinds of hidden agendas. You’re favouring your friends, you’re crafting your mission so that it appeals to foundations, you’re not honest about what it is you really value. It’s all an insider game: who you’re kissing up to, who you owe a favour to, who you want to impress.
Whereas the one thing you can say about the market, and I feel this as a published author myself, is that it’s honest. A publisher maybe wants to publish your book, but they also have to think about whether they’re going to break even, and there’s no concealing that. There’s no hidden agenda.
Olya: As 1 Granary, we supported a lot of designers pro bono. This is how London operates. Everyone in the industry works for free for emerging designers, and designers expect it. Of course this needs to be given, how dare you not support me. Then they fail, and there’s another wave. You write that no one speaks about the D-Day in creativity, when a wave of artists collapses and dies, there’s always a next wave hitting the beach, so you never notice the constant erasure of talent at the bottom. But you also said that no one deserves support if no one wants what they make. That’s left and right in fashion.
William: Yes, which is the logic of the market. This is another thing that I think is honest about the market: if people want what you’re selling, they will buy it. If they don’t, then you’re not really creating value for people. It’s the reverse of what I say somewhere else, against the argument that artists don’t deserve anything, like: “You don’t deserve money for doing something you love.” And I say: but you do deserve money for doing something that other people love. You’re just turning it the other way around, which is also true: if other people don’t love it, you don’t deserve money for it. I think there’s this sort of unexamined feeling that if people are making art, fashion, music, whatever, it’s somehow doing good for the world. No, not necessarily. Just the fact that you’re doing it doesn’t actually do any good for anyone except maybe yourself, and you shouldn’t expect other people to support that.
Olya: People would never dare to ask for a free can of drink, or for someone to fix their pipes for free, but they ask for creativity.
William: It’s a tremendous problem, as you just talked about, with all these young designers expecting everyone to work for them for free. This ideology of “the market is evil, money is dirty” has put artists in a psychological position where they feel guilty about asking for money, and therefore they don’t push back when people ask them for free work. It’s a gift economy, we’re all doing it for love, what business do you have asking? And that creates a lot of exploitation. Some of it is innocent; you might be exploiting other people without realising it, but you are doing it, and sometimes it can be quite cynical.
There’s an organisation called W.A.G.E. [Working Artists and the Greater Economy] that works within the art world. Artists are constantly being asked to do things for little or no money by museums and colleges. Because of all the attitudes we’ve been talking about, there’s no expectation that they be paid fairly, or sometimes be paid at all, and artists don’t have the feeling of being entitled to get paid. W.A.G.E.’s goal is to introduce this idea – somebody is doing labour for you, you have to compensate them, just like you would compensate your secretary, or pay the plumber, or the paper supplier.
Olya: In fashion it’s even more toxic, because of celebrities. None of them buy anything: they’re either paid to wear it by the big brands, or it’s gifted. From an independent designer, they expect it for free, sometimes shipped too, because of the exposure. Kylie Jenner’s brand Khy would offer designers $20,000 to do a whole capsule, representing two months of work that becomes a mass-produced product. But she has such a huge reach that everyone pays her, so she’s doing you a ‘favour’ by selecting you.
William: Right. We live in this attention economy, and exposure can be valuable. The promise of exposure is of course one of the big things that’s used to extract low- or no-cost labour from creatives. That can be bullshit, but it can also be real and important. I’ve certainly done things just for exposure, because I felt it was legitimate: I really was getting exposure. It’s not like you can just say, “I will never do this just for exposure,” because sometimes it is worth the trade, and you have to decide for yourself whether it’s worth the trade. Now, another part of the problem is that if you don’t do this for Kylie Jenner, somebody else will.
Olya: Was it in your book that the problem with all artists is that when someone pulls the trousers down, someone else will pull them even lower down?
William: I was quoting someone talking about writers, but that’s right. This is part of what W.A.G.E. is trying to do: it’s kind of like a union. The art world is still relatively small, so maybe you can get enough artists to say, “You need to respect this wage scale we’re setting up,” because there aren’t enough other artists the museum can go to instead. But there aren’t a lot of situations like that. There are always a thousand other people who’ll do it instead of you. This is basic labour economics: you have no leverage relative to the employer. How do you gain that power? It’s not such an easy problem to solve. This is why unions exist, but we don’t have unions in the creative industries. I’m not even sure it’s legal in the United States, because artists are not technically workers. That’s part of the problem.
Olya: Designers hate it when we speak about them as workers. There’s a very interesting book, Kapferer On Luxury by Jean-Noël Kapferer, a professor in France who works with executives at LVMH, and the whole luxury industry follows it almost as a religion. For luxury to have that price, it needs to equal art, and for it to equal art, you need an artist at the top. That mythological person can’t be a worker. So the moment the creative director steps in, you need to almost start elevating him as Jesus Christ. Luxury houses are really built like a church, specifically a Christian church. It’s important that he’s never seen as a worker, otherwise then the price of a luxury good can’t be that high.
William: That’s very interesting, because I think you could say the same thing about architects, ‘starchitects’, or celebrity chefs. You’re making me realise there’s the same logic. And it’s almost like what the artist used to be, because we don’t have the same veneration for artists anymore. It’s like what Picasso once was, but there’s no Picasso anymore. Nobody treats an artist the way Picasso or James Joyce was treated.
So instead we have the chef, the architect, the head of the design house, who has this kind of quasi-sacred role as a priest of creativity. I would say these are not arts in the same way that painting and literature are arts, these are luxury consumer goods, but you’re explaining to me that in order to create enough perceived value to charge those kinds of prices, you need this figure.
It also connects to something I say in the book: the market for art in the narrow sense, specifically for painting, is a very strange market, because it’s completely divorced from any kind of underlying material value. You make a luxury automobile or a fancy Cuban cigar; it may be overpriced, but the price has some relationship to the amount of labour and the quality of the materials. With a painting, there’s no relationship. The painting sells for 10 million dollars because some other painting sold for a million dollars, and that painting sold for a million because a bunch of others sold for a hundred thousand. It’s all relative, it’s all self-enclosed.
So how do you create the perceived value that makes somebody pay $10 million for a painting, $10,000 for a bottle of wine, $1,000 for a restaurant meal? I don’t know how much luxury clothing sells for, but I’m sure it’s also completely unrelated to the underlying costs of production.
Olya: You can get a wedding dress for a million.
William: There you go. And you’re telling me that the perceived value is created to a large extent through the prestige of the brand, which depends on this quasi-divine figure of the creative director.
Olya: And the industry acts against the law here: in France you have the right of attribution by law, but no designer is credited apart from the creative director. They’re not just uncredited; they’re hidden. No one will share the names, or allow designers to speak about their work. I think it’s fear: it’s so hard to succeed that no one will stick their head up. That’s why we introduced our awards last year and released the names of all the teams. It got a lot of people angry, but some brands have now started willingly releasing the names.
William: You don’t ruin your career because you’ve broken the taboo. But to go back to where you started: the woman who founded W.A.G.E., Lise Soskolne, who is in the book, and others interested in these labour issues will always say artists do not want to be thought of as workers. They don’t want to affiliate with other artists as workers, which is a big part of why it’s hard to organise them. This is because of this mythology of the artist, and because of class issues that have always played into the difference between a worker and a creative.
Olya: I genuinely believe artistic work comes from the same place as someone working in finance: it comes from your mind, and crafting the work. I’ve met hundreds of photographers, and if I speak to someone for half an hour before seeing their work, I can tell you in advance whether the work will be good. But somehow, for outsiders, anyone creative is on the same level, whether it’s doodling, fine art, or something made with an app or AI: you’re seen as an artist. I feel it’s a lie that’s really damaging for everyone, and it was really used by tech companies, this message that everyone is creative. In my mind, if everyone’s creative, then no one is.
William: It drives me crazy. I completely agree with you. In the book I traced some of the origins of this idea, because before Apple picked it up as a way to sell their expensive equipment, it was a kind of revolutionary, leftist idea in the 60s. I think it was Joseph Beuys, but there were others. The idea that everyone is an artist, that to segregate certain people off as true artists is somehow anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, classist, bourgeois, capitalist. Whenever you elevate a certain group of people to prestige, as we did with artists in modernity, other people start to get resentful: why are they better than me? And then you create an ideology that gives people the opportunity to say: no, we’re all creative, we’re all artists, in the future communist utopia we will all be artists. And then it gets commercialised in the 90s with Apple. So there’s really a lot of push behind it.
Olya: But everyone can be an artist the same way anyone can become a doctor, if you work for it, right?
William: No. I don’t even believe that. I think doctors have to be intelligent, and not everyone is intelligent. And no, of course, not everyone can be an artist. To me, the most clarifying analogy is with athletes. We all recognise that professional athletes don’t just work incredibly hard, they have physical gifts that they did not earn. The NBA is a great thing to point to, because you have to be freakishly tall even to play in it. Look at LeBron James. Aside from the fact that he’s six foot eight, he was clearly born with this magnificent physical endowment. He worked incredibly hard, he has this great basketball intelligence, but he’s not LeBron James if he doesn’t have this godlike physique. It would be absurd to say that anybody could make it to the NBA if they only worked hard enough. I could never have done it, you could never have done it.