Recently I met with Bill Ivey, the former chairman for the National Endowment of the Arts. He told me that we sometimes think the alternative to the Starving Artist is what he calls the Subsidized Artist, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. Art needs money. We can deny it all we want and pretend starving makes for better art, but starving often makes for no art at all. Paint costs money. Ink does too. So does food and just about everything else in life. You have to find a way to pay for your art if you want to keep making it.
