I'm not a math person, but I've long considered art making to be the product of an equation. It takes time, money and resources to be able to make art.
Time + Money + Resources = Art Career
But the difficulty lies in the fact that it takes time to get the other two parts—money and resources. Likewise, time is money, and it takes money to buy time. In fact, you can take any of the three terms of this equation and see that one necessity is dependent upon having an excess of the other two necessities. If you've got the time and resources, you can make money. But it takes money to buy time and resources. This is why (unless you're a speculator rather than an artist—and some artists are both) people say it takes money to make money.
As an analogy, the equation, then, is what mathematicians and programmers call a recursive function. Each term in the equation adds up to another term. For the sake of mental health, let's call these terms assets.
The key to developing these assets is excess. Art, of the contemporary sort, requires an extraordinary exchange of energy. Energy is the hidden factor throughout this equation. We could go about our days eating, sleeping, and procreating, and doing the work necessary to gather food and protect our young and ourselves. In our down time we could make cave paintings. We would easily have enough energy to make cave paintings. Or we can raise ourselves above the level of caveperson and build extraordinary things, which requires excess energy that can only be obtained by stealing from other people, the earth, or both. Even cooperation may not be enough. If making art doesn't require stealing time, stealing money, and stealing resources, it requires buying them.
Though it should he helping me, one of the main impediments to gathering the assets I need is my day job (actually, for me, a night job). Any career, these days, requires what they call giving 110%. But I'm not giving 110% to my day job, so I will not be financially successful in my day job, committed as I am to art. Therefore I will make minimum wage or a negligible tad above it. As a result, a lot of my time and energy and resources are going to go into making money.
What we see in this algorithm is that having a lot of any two of the assets in this equation increases the third and when you have a lot of the third, everything just builds and increases endlessly. But if you have only a little of any one asset, you are slowing down, stagnant, or moving backwards, draining the other two assets.
Because, each asset not only buys you the other two, it costs you the other two.
I'm going to say it again, as this is key: each asset in the equation not only buys you the other two, it costs you the other two. Time + Money + Resources. Each is an asset and each is also a liability. It just depends on whether the assets are dependent upon each other or have grown into their own and are self-sufficient, bringing in energy or value rather than using it.
Perhaps, I've said all that needs to be said. But, if you can indulge me, I'll elaborate a little in later posts. One final note of hope, though. The economy of the art world is different. It's one of patronage. I'm not in that economy, yet. I'm in the economy that's currently in depression. But, at some point, it must be the case that I can get ahead and move the equation forward. As I figure out how, I'll blog my discoveries and progress.
