Towards An Artistic Middle Class

Manifesto(es)

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing the ‘Manifesto’ of the week. These tend to be a bit utopian - a gesture towards something that I would like to see more of in the world. This week it’s a somewhat knotty topic, but (I think) really important - a conceptual shift towards a more ‘middle class’ view of artistic production as opposed to the gambler mentality about it that we have all had for a very long time.

Best,

Sam

TOWARDS AN ARTISTIC MIDDLE CLASS

There’s a Jaron Lanier line that got to me -  in which he makes the case for an ‘artistic middle class.’ I have no real idea how to make that happen and neither, I’m pretty sure, does Lanier, but something about that, phrased that way, struck me as being a vital goal, at least something to hold in the back of our minds. 

I grew up embedded in the worship of the middle class. The belief was that the existence of a viable hard-working middle class was the critical determinant in the success of societies - and, as far as I could ever tell, that analysis was really correct. A lot of societies divided into rich and poor. The poor seemed to be in unremitting intergenerational misery, and the rich, through a variety of gimmicks, were taught not to care at all about it - their status was understood variously to be an extension of birth or of intrinsic merit or just of the way of things. And a middle class was a miracle, a kind of glitch in the usual human modes for conceptualizing societies - the middle class had to be both endlessly hard-working i.e. aspirational and at the same time endlessly humble, in the sense of viewing itself always as part of the social fabric and never as attempting to stash away wealth or to evade social responsibility. 

In the period in which I was growing up the miracle of the middle class had become completely commonplace - to the extent that virtually everybody insisted that they were middle class, no matter how objectively poor or rich they were. And that ethos affected me in everything. As my life started to drift more towards art, the hope was that I’d find myself coming into contact with something that was middle class, that rewarded hard work but was sustainable across some extensive social class.

Jaron Lanier - and the bliss of the artistic middle class

And that, needless to say, turned out not to be the case at all. There was a very small subset of people who had what looked like middle class careers connected to the arts - ‘working actors,’ people connected to government funding, people whose money came ultimately from universities, people in ‘arts-adjacent’ professions - but, really, even the existence of those jobs was sort of deceptive (that term ‘working actor’ represented such a far-off, unattainable aspiration to all of the actors I knew). 

The reality of the art market was that it was, almost completely, a star system, rags or riches, with the difference between ‘making it’ and not notoriously arbitrary - and with that slender divide serving as the determinant of all worldly happiness. And the real wealth in the market was on the backs of the stars - the agents, managers, publishers, publicists, etc, all of whom could boast of something actually like a middle-class career but entirely by forming a sort of vast entourage to anybody who had broken through. 

There really were infinite problems with that system - the ‘waterfall’ nature of it meant that everybody other than the artist had a guaranteed income while the artist themselves tended to be ripped off; but the only artists anybody ever heard from were the ones who were so phenomenally successful that they could afford to let everybody else take a piece of the cut; while all the other artists were deemed to be ‘failures’ and guilty of sour grapes if they complained about the system, although, generally, they were too scared and worshipful to even think of voicing discontent; and, meanwhile, the apparatus that made its money off stars doubled as a gatekeeper keeping out anybody who wasn’t properly ‘represented’ or didn’t have the whole waterfall in place at the time when they reached any kind of public notice. 

All of that was pretty well known - at least it featured in enough ‘making it’ films that everybody had some idea of the deep inequities of the art economy - but, perversely enough, the inequities served only to make the romance of it even greater. There was nothing new, by the way, about any of these dynamics. Sometime around 1800, Robert Burns met with the Prime Minister to see if he might do anything for literature and was told that, reasonable enough as the request might seem, “literature would take care of itself” - in other words, that art functioned on an entirely different economic model from everything else and that if artists were broke, well, it was to a great extent what they had coming to them for choosing to be artists.

Prime Minister to Art: deal with it yourself

But stripped of the romance associated with art, the dynamics here sounded like something very different - the high/low dichotomy of corrupt economic systems, in which a coterie developed to siphon off wealth from an arbitrarily designated inner circle, while the rest of the population was permanently on the outside. 

And the antidote was pretty straightforward, and difficult to actually accomplish - the rise of an artistic middle class. That hinged, above all, on a certain shift in perspective by the population - and, as with the rise of the economic middle class, the artistic middle class depended to some degree on a collective fiction. The artistic middle class would have to be extraordinarily hard-working - no divaishness, no recourse to ‘genius’ - and, at the same time, it would have to be driven by an abiding humility, no cornering the market with one’s own work, no star system, an understanding that everybody else is entitled to their own expression and that everybody working hard is likely producing something or other that’s interesting.

What I’m describing is part of a trend that’s already quietly occurring. In the last half century or so - and particularly in America - an artistic middle class has, to a surprising extent, developed. It’s in the university MFA programs and the archipelago of artistic teaching jobs, in the emergence of grant and foundational money. An industry like Hollywood is, more than is usually realized, a creator of middle class jobs. And the same can be said, to some degree, of the publishing industry, which, whatever its faults, at least does continue to churn out copy. The shift to the digital economy leads to Patreon, leads to branded content embedded within creatives’ work, leads to new sources of revenue, to some profits for creatives outside of the old star system. 

But there’s a ways to go. A great deal of what makes the idea of the middle class work in economics is that people accept the vision of the middle class - and understand that that’s very different from being ‘mediocre.’ This is a hotly disputed topic. In high/low societies the notion of being ‘middle’ is itself anathema - the only dignity is in being great or, barring that, in attaching oneself to greatness as some sort of flunky. But in societies with a functioning middle class, there’s an understanding that the middle class works ferociously hard, is ferociously ambitious - but that that hard work and ambition don’t necessarily lead to a zero-sum vision of power politics, don’t necessitate taking from everybody else. For an artistic middle class to exist means, above all, something coming loose and freeing up in the minds of artists and artistic consumers - moving away from the gambler mentality that we all are at some level attracted to in art; seeing art instead as a lifelong activity, with the same financial questions attached to it as for everybody else, and artists as a class that can potentially help each other to rise. 

That tectonic shift towards a different conception of art is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Simply put, art as it is is too intertwined with narcissism - and too many people who get into it are in it for the wrong reasons, as a kind of ego bubble to wrap around themselves, which makes them at the same time easy marks of a rapacious industry. 

So, for now, the gains of the past half-century notwithstanding, the artistic middle class is still a surprisingly far-off fantasy. There are a few fairly concrete mental steps that I could imagine the world - the industry, the artistic community - taking in the direction I’m describing (and, basically, everything on this Substack is a gesture towards these mental steps):

• a mode of distribution that’s something other than a clearance sale (instead of books wildly promoted and then pulped weeks later, an understanding that a book was the result of considerable labor and is meant to have a long life in the world);

• a system of reviewing that is closer to genuine appreciation and discussion of the work as opposed to basically advertising for the fresh products put out by the industry;

• an understanding that an artistic career is a lifelong pursuit, that people mature, go through slumps, etc - which is obvious enough but is very different from our current cult of talent in which the industry as a whole lines up behind somebody who is believed to have it and then drops them as soon as they don’t hit;

• an understanding that money is a very poor gauge for evaluating the worth of art or artists (for, if nothing else, the simple reason that money is an effective instrument for evaluating a commodity, which is unhelpful for an artistic object, which is not a commodity);

• an understanding that the intellectual property of a work of art really does belong ultimately to the artist even if the industry can be highly convincing in claiming that the artistic work belongs to whomever buys and distributes it;

• an understanding that there are effective modes of distributing art that do not necessarily pass through the market. 

But any one of these is a tough lift. What they have in common above all is a different way of thinking about artistic production, which is a ‘middle class mentality’ and very different from the current narcissistic high/low paradigm we occupy. And that’s to basically care not at all about status and to care entirely about the quality, the intrinsic worth, of the work one is putting out. In the middle class mentality, one is never bidding for ‘dominance’ of the market, for ‘saturation,’ for some zero-sum elimination of rivals. One simply puts out one’s product, stands by it, and hopes that on a rising tide all boats rise together.