The Idler

Letter from the Editor: 9

MONEY, ART AND BRIAN EPSTEIN

Do you bite the hand that feeds you? As I trip further through life, I become more convinced that the world of work is made up of two groups: the people who don’t want a job and the people who do want a job.

There are other ways of describing these two groups. Artists and bureaucrats, would be one. Truth-seekers and time-servers would be another. And people without money and people with money would be another.

The way it works is as follows: the people without money need the people with money to give them money. The people with money need the people without money to give them ideas and creative work.

The two groups hate one another but also need one another. Today, for example, big business has realised that it needs to use the language of the outsider, the rebel, the warrior-poet, the anarchist – in order to get people to buy their products. And of course the artists need the time-servers to get cash to live.

It’s the tension between these two groups that informs today’s cultural dynamic.

Journalists hate newspapers, authors hate publishers, artists hate the art world and musicians hate record companies.

Ad agencies hate their clients. The makers of TV programmes hate commissioners. Film directors and writers hate the studios.

The creative people resent the fact that they are funded by bodies of whom they disapprove. They bite the hand that feeds them by complaining to friends of the client’s lack of vision. They may also express their rage and resentment by storming out of meetings.
The commissioners, for their part, resent the perceived freedom of the creatives. The creatives do not have to sit through tedious meetings. They do not have to expend valuable energy dealing with office politics. They don’t have to humour boards.

When I toiled for a living as a freelance journalist, I was well aware that my job was being made more difficult than was strictly necessary by the commissioning editors. I always felt that, in the mind of the office-bound commissioning editor, the freelancer sat at his or her desk for about five minutes a day, and the spent the rest of the day picking blackberries in the garden and listening to the Archers.

The commissioning editor, meanwhile, worked in a sick building and had to deal with tyrannical bosses and grumpy staff, over-long meetings, tightening budgets, lunch hours, water coolers, fag breaks, overpriced gunky sandwiches and drinks after work.

And so it is that the commissioning editor – and his or her associates – is always trying to take revenge on the freelancer. This revenge can take many forms. One is to demand three or four rewrites, hell for the writer. Another is to lose the freelancer’s invoices, so the freelancer does not receive the measly ��175 fee for three months after writing the article (I wrote an article for Loaded – published by IPC Magazines – in December 1998 and was paid in April 2001, a gap of two and a half years).

Another form of torture is to call the writer regularly up to the deadline, making sure that the article will be submitted on time, and then, once the article has been filed, to disappear. No calls to say the piece has been received. No pleasant chat

William Blake, besides being a visionary poet, worked also as a commercial artist. His “real” work was too out there and underground to make any real money, so he was forced to undertake commissions from rich people in order to pay the rent.

Perhaps it is because he was one of us in this sense that he so keenly felt the “mind-forg’d manacles” that each of us work under.

The great mission for the Idler, therefore, is to carry out the near-impossible feat of becoming one’s own self-commissioner. If you could sell your own work, and run your own business, then you could be creatively free. The problem is, of course, that creativity and business acumen rarely meet, and the worlds of music and art are littered with stories of innovators who failed to profit from their work.

Among our contributors, I would say that only Billy Childish has pulled this one off.

The other option is to escape entirely from the world of money. To discover how to live on very little. If you don’t need money, then you don’t need the business people, and that means you are creatively free. Again, another hard one. But perhaps Mark Manning has achieved it.

There is a third way, which is to find a Beatles/Epstein-style relationship. There are some artists who have an ally from the world of money who helps them. Healthy relationships of this sort are rare but when they work it is magic.

The rest of us, however, probably should accept that we will never find the answer to the money-art problem. But then, it’s fun to try.

MONEY, ART AND BRIAN EPSTEIN

Do you bite the hand that feeds you? As I trip further through life, I become more convinced that the world of work is made up of two groups: the people who don’t want a job and the people who do want a job.

There are other ways of describing these two groups. Artists and bureaucrats, would be one. Truth-seekers and time-servers would be another. And people without money and people with money would be another.

The way it works is as follows: the people without money need the people with money to give them money. The people with money need the people without money to give them ideas and creative work.

The two groups hate one another but also need one another. Today, for example, big business has realised that it needs to use the language of the outsider, the rebel, the warrior-poet, the anarchist – in order to get people to buy their products. And of course the artists need the time-servers to get cash to live.

It’s the tension between these two groups that informs today’s cultural dynamic.

Journalists hate newspapers, authors hate publishers, artists hate the art world and musicians hate record companies.

Ad agencies hate their clients. The makers of TV programmes hate commissioners. Film directors and writers hate the studios.

The creative people resent the fact that they are funded by bodies of whom they disapprove. They bite the hand that feeds them by complaining to friends of the client’s lack of vision. They may also express their rage and resentment by storming out of meetings.
The commissioners, for their part, resent the perceived freedom of the creatives. The creatives do not have to sit through tedious meetings. They do not have to expend valuable energy dealing with office politics. They don’t have to humour boards.

When I toiled for a living as a freelance journalist, I was well aware that my job was being made more difficult than was strictly necessary by the commissioning editors. I always felt that, in the mind of the office-bound commissioning editor, the freelancer sat at his or her desk for about five minutes a day, and the spent the rest of the day picking blackberries in the garden and listening to the Archers.

The commissioning editor, meanwhile, worked in a sick building and had to deal with tyrannical bosses and grumpy staff, over-long meetings, tightening budgets, lunch hours, water coolers, fag breaks, overpriced gunky sandwiches and drinks after work.

And so it is that the commissioning editor – and his or her associates – is always trying to take revenge on the freelancer. This revenge can take many forms. One is to demand three or four rewrites, hell for the writer. Another is to lose the freelancer’s invoices, so the freelancer does not receive the measly ��175 fee for three months after writing the article (I wrote an article for Loaded – published by IPC Magazines – in December 1998 and was paid in April 2001, a gap of two and a half years).

Another form of torture is to call the writer regularly up to the deadline, making sure that the article will be submitted on time, and then, once the article has been filed, to disappear. No calls to say the piece has been received. No pleasant chat

William Blake, besides being a visionary poet, worked also as a commercial artist. His “real” work was too out there and underground to make any real money, so he was forced to undertake commissions from rich people in order to pay the rent.

Perhaps it is because he was one of us in this sense that he so keenly felt the “mind-forg’d manacles” that each of us work under.

The great mission for the Idler, therefore, is to carry out the near-impossible feat of becoming one’s own self-commissioner. If you could sell your own work, and run your own business, then you could be creatively free. The problem is, of course, that creativity and business acumen rarely meet, and the worlds of music and art are littered with stories of innovators who failed to profit from their work.

Among our contributors, I would say that only Billy Childish has pulled this one off.

The other option is to escape entirely from the world of money. To discover how to live on very little. If you don’t need money, then you don’t need the business people, and that means you are creatively free. Again, another hard one. But perhaps Mark Manning has achieved it.

There is a third way, which is to find a Beatles/Epstein-style relationship. There are some artists who have an ally from the world of money who helps them. Healthy relationships of this sort are rare but when they work it is magic.

The rest of us, however, probably should accept that we will never find the answer to the money-art problem. But then, it’s fun to try.