Author Kyle Chayka starts this way: In our current start up-obsessed moment, aspiring to have a job that already exists seems almost unfashionable. The true goal of meaningful employment, or so the aspirational entrepreneurial culture would have it, is to create your own job, distilling your utmost passions into a career that is enriching in both the soul and the wallet. Fulfillment! Salary! Material consumption! These are the inherent promises of doing what you love, or DWYL, a slogan-turned-ideology that recently received a smart takedown by Miya Tokumitsu in the leftist Jacobin magazine<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n And as the Brooklyn-based Chayka concedes, for all the self-determining energy that artists and people who work with them receive, the life ain\u2019t easy, especially these days:<\/p>\n Conflating creative passion and capital, however, can be hazardous, as the economic situation of the arts in the United States in particular suggests\u2026 A 2012 survey found that those who studied visual and performing arts in college averaged a starting salary of just $33,800<\/a> (compared to $41,900 for history majors, and more than $70,000 for those in finance). \u201cThe arts industry, at all levels, is subsidized not just by the labor of artists, but by their quality of life,\u201d wrote Paddy Johnson, a well-known art blogger, in a New York Times op-ed<\/a>. The fact that art-making is a passion doesn\u2019t necessarily make it profitable and it doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s a job.<\/i><\/p>\n Chayka was once a staff art critic, and realized, eventually that this was, for him, better a hobby than a job. He goes into some detail about the issue and I don\u2019t want to steal the dude\u2019s thunder. (I also recommend the sharper-edged Jacobin article.) Here\u2019s a key line, though:<\/p>\n Art and creativity don\u2019t need to be monetized\u2014in fact, presuming the need to do so degrades their potential to be a source of joy for the creator, as any artist who has to follow the demands of an external market rather than their own sensibilities knows. I\u2019ll point out what may be an obvious tension here: Many of us who work in culture at some level have struggled, over the last few years, with the new world that announced itself in 2008 but had been building for years, maybe decades previous. Income polarization, a casino economy, cuts to arts education and funding for culture, declining newspaper readership, the closing of bookstores and record stores, on and on.<\/p>\n But to those of us still do this \u2013 who hand-sell books or play saxophone or write about art for a living \u2013 does this stuff provide any less sustenance and meaning than it ever did? Ask me in 10 years, I guess. But just because most of the world assesses things based on income or Big Data doesn\u2019t mean that we have to.<\/p>\n This may come as a shock in a technocratic, neoliberal world, but not everything can be quantified.<\/p>\n Folks? How does it look to you out there?<\/p>\n![\"Namuth_-_Pollock\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Namuth_-_Pollock.jpg\")
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