by Daniel Troit

Created on: February 09, 2009

He was as authentic as they came. He'd been struggling for years, building a body of work. What he said and did seemed so principled. As an artist, he served as inspiration and encouragement to his community. But that was before. That was before he did the car commercial and designed the tennis shoes. That was before he cut his hair and started dressing like an adult. That was before he sold out.

To an artist, nothing brings about a quicker loss of credibility than the exchange of principles for recognition and material gain. To artists, the craft is paramount. To compromise character or content for the sake of a payday is a kind of artistic adultery, complete with it's own scarlet letter. A sell out is as good as excommunicated from the artistic community. To many, the art ends where the market begins.

Why, then, do people become artists in the first place? If art is so incompatible with money, why chose it as a career path? For many artists, the answer is simple. The reason they make their art is not because they want to get rich, it's because they have no choice. Artists create because art is the only sufficient outlet for their thoughts and emotions. Some artists claim that art is a calling, far divorced from vocation.

To an artist, "making it" is meant to mean creative success. For some this simply means creating a work that meets their own standards and with which they are able to be satisfied. To others, they need the acceptance of the larger artistic community in order to make it. The majority, however, seem to define success as the ability to support themselves and even prosper solely off of their work. This means either living under the grace of a patron or making a profit from the sale and commission of certain works. The difference between "making it" and "selling out" seems to then be in the moral cost of success. If one is able to prosper from their art without the compromise of their principles, then they make it.

Some persons find it necessary to hedge their bets when pursuing a career as an artist. They may learn a lucrative trade to "fall back on" or pursue a part-time career "on the side". Others remain determined to only produce art as they feel that the quality of their work suffers when their energies are diverted. At some point, every artist has to draw a line between success and failure. For some it is an amount of time or a date by which they must make their first profit from their art. For others, failure only comes once the artist has abandoned their passion.

When Frida Kahlo approached Diego Rivera for a critique of her paintings, she wanted to know if she could succeed as an artist or needed to pursue another vocation. He told her that if she were an artist, she would never stop painting, even after her last penny was gone. The truth of the matter is that most artists are unable to use art as their sole occupation. Many artists are only appreciated posthumously and die in abject poverty. The only way to know when to pursue other avenues of income is to consult your standard of living. If you find that your art is unable to support itself or you to a reasonable standard, then the time has come to support your art with something else. Far from an admission of failure, this decision shows a commitment to art far above vanity. A willingness to do whatever it takes to enable one to continue to produce is the acme of artistic dedication. As long as your principles remain intact, you can never sell out.

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