A Quote by Damien Hirst
For artists it's a lot easier to make art in bad times than it is in good times. When you've got no money it's easy to just drink your way through it and make great art. But if you're making lots of money it can be very problematic.
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When times were good, we made more money. When times are bad, we make less money.
When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician -- make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor -- make good art. IRS on your trail -- make good art. Cat exploded -- make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before -- make good art.
Hollywood used to be run by artists and people who loved artists... people who wanted to make movies for all the right reasons. For the love. The Art. To tell stories. Yes to make money as well, but it was about both. Now I feel, it's mostly about bottom line and making money.
Obviously, artists need to make money and stuff like that, but if you do something good or if you make good art or make good stuff, the wealth will find you in some way.
Not to say people shouldn't get rich from art. I adore the alchemy wherein artists who cast a complex spell make rich people give them their money. (Just writing it makes me cackle.) But too many artists have been making money without magic.
I think that a lot of artists have succeeded in making what I might call "curator's art." Everybody's being accepted, and I always want to say, "Really? That's what you've come for? To make art that looks a lot like somebody else's art?" If I am thinking of somebody else's art in front of your art, that's a problem.
If you're good at the art and you wanna make money, then it's fine. But if you're just doing it because you know you're gonna make money, then I don't know. Some people do it just because they need the money, but it depends on a lot of things.
My parents didn't want us on the streets or in trouble, so they thought the best thing was to have us work. I saw how we had to, during bad times, stretch the dollar. And during good times, we couldn't spend it, because you never knew when the bad times were going to happen again. It gave me a great respect for how hard it is to make money.
I'm a professional artist, that's how I make my living. So I watch the market. There is, it seems to me, a lot of pure financial speculation, and I don't think that's terribly healthy. Though as long as the money is getting back to the artist, I think that's good. I'm very happy younger artists can make money faster than we could. And we were making it faster than a generation before us.
A lot of artists make art for five years, some artists make art for ten years, a few make art for fifteen: very few do it until they die.
I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it.
Keep it in tune with the times, but don't write with the specific purpose of trying to create a hit. If you're doing it strictly to make money, you're crazy. There are easier ways to make money.
The only way to make a criticism of something is to really participate in it. I'm a completely capitalist person. I participate in commodity culture and the fashion world. High art is a money-making vehicle. We're not making art in a vacuum. We're not shopping in the woods. These are all things that we do within the larger system of capitalism. For me to critique it, I'm also participating in it. That's obvious, I feel. In my work, I participate in the things that I critique. I satirize the things that I love and know well and find problematic.
It'd be nice to make lots of money but it's quite difficult, because every time I make lots of money I make a bigger piece that costs lots of money.
But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?
The reason I do this job is because I started to be a painter. Making money in art was difficult. The easiest way to make money was to use art for some other reason. One of the easiest and most interesting from an economic point of view was fashion. Fashion pays.
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