Making Creativity Pay

Email scams targeted at artists and creatives pop up pretty regularly in the mailboxes of people I work with.

Here’s an example forwarded to me, exactly as written:

My name is Paul Read, i will like to order for a piece of your Art Works from your gallery as gift for my parent who are celebrating thier 5th wedding annivasarys , so i will be gald to have your reply asap, i  will be glad if you can send me your website address to choose or  send me  four of  your product that is availble for me to choose . payment will be  make by Cheque. Waiting to read from you today.

You can probably guess how this one develops if you engage with it: everything sems to be going fine – you’ll even seem to have been paid – until there becomes an urgent reason they need you to send money for something. This one involves repayment of a supposed ‘overpayment’ for shipping. They’ll ask you to wire transfer the ‘overpayment’.

Here’s another variation, this time to photographers:

I work for XXX magazine and a client of ours who looked at your website has asked specifically for you to do a shoot at their property in (desirable location). Are you available on the (short notice period)?

This one develops the same way; just as all the arrangements are made for what looks like a great opportunity, some problem develops that can only be solved by a quick wire transfer of money from you to them.

They are all variations on well-known 419-style scams but the targeting of artists and creatives is interesting. Do the scamsters see artists and the like as particularly gullible or desperate? And what other ‘opportunities’ directed at artists and creatives are actually little better than scams?

A fine art photographer I know was warned by one of her former lecturers that she shouldn’t be seen doing any commercial work otherwise she would damage her reputation as an artist. According to him, any photographic work she did for money should be hidden or under a different name.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard of such advice given to a recent graduate trying to make their way in life and work. But here’s four good reasons why it should be ignored:

1. Even artists need to eat

Nobody becomes an artist for the money. But to continue making art needs plenty of time to be good. Most of us sell our time to earn money, so a conflict will arise if we spend all of our time making art but none making money.

The choice faced is whether to make that money in unrelated work – stacking shelves, driving a truck – or in doing something that makes use of creative skills but for a clear commercial purpose. I know artists who have chosen each of these options for a good reason, and I regard either as equally legitimate.

2. Commercial success doesn’t seem to have been a problem for many highly successful artists

Lee Miller took society portraits; Toulouse-Lautrec designed posters; Eric Gill developed fonts for commercial use; Picasso painted plates; Brigit Riley worked as an illustrator; need I go on?

3. Nobody else is bothered

A number of successful artists told me their customers, patrons, supporters couldn’t care less what else they are doing. One works occasionally as a consultant, another as a teacher, another doing illustration. Some of them weren’t very complimentary about lecturers, suggesting they might be the only ones who are worried about artists and commercial work.

4. It’s not always that easy to decide what’s art and what isn’t anyway

Some of today’s art was yesterday’s commercial work: Jane Bown took her portraits as an employee of The Observer; the fashion photographer Helmut Newton said of his work:

Some people’s photography is an art. Mine is not. If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that’s fine. But that’s not why I do them. I’m a gun for hire.

This hasn’t stopped his work being widely exhibited, nor a print of his recently being sold at auction for £176,000.  The best commercial creative work is art in itself, and that’s one reason people will pay good money for it.

So why does this sort of advice persist? I guess for those giving it, art should be something above commercial concerns. Actually, all the creatives I know think this too, but it’s a view easiest to hold to, champion and trumpet loudly if your living comes entirely from something else – like lecturing.