Making Art in the Twenty-First Century Quotes

“Would-be geniuses of every species hastened to secure their garrets.”
― William Deresiewicz, Making Art in the Twenty-First Century: How Writers, Musicians, and Others are Earning a Living—or Trying to—in the Digital Age

“It was the great Samuel Johnson, who had passed through Grub Street in his youth, who sketched a portrait of the new type in his Life of Mr Richard Savage, a memorial to his friend and companion in literary poverty. Johnson’s Savage is a brilliant, neglected, drunken, tormented, disreputable vagabond poet, wandering the streets of the metropolis by night.”
― William Deresiewicz, Making Art in the Twenty-First Century: How Writers, Musicians, and Others are Earning a Living—or Trying to—in the Digital Age

“Sammus, the Afro-futurist rapper, changed her mind about charging for her music as she put more and more into it. “The idea of valuing my art—that became real,” she told me: “putting a price on the things that I’ve created,” finding a monetary equivalent for “sleepless nights and anxiety and all of the relationships that working on music for that amount of time had cost me. Now I absolutely feel comfortable putting a dollar amount on my work.”
― William Deresiewicz, Making Art in the Twenty-First Century: How Writers, Musicians, and Others are Earning a Living—or Trying to—in the Digital Age

“The industrial economy laid claim to our bodies. The knowledge economy laid claim to our minds. Now the creative economy is laying claim to our souls. Like the farmer with the proverbial pig, we use everything except the squeal. The squeal is when we realize what’s happening to us.”
― William Deresiewicz, Making Art in the Twenty-First Century: How Writers, Musicians, and Others are Earning a Living—or Trying to—in the Digital Age