How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists

How artists make a living and how money changes art

It may not be the worst time in history to get paid to make art, but it certainly is the strangest. The institutions and markets that have been supporting the arts are undergoing massive changes, some even disappearing. Meanwhile the tools to make art and find audiences have never been more accessible, and there are more people than ever making art.

How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists is an attempt to reckon with the history of money in the arts -- from Titian to Taylor Swift -- and how that complicated relationship is changing. David Berry analyzes past and present financial dynamics in the arts to show the practicalities of how artists make a living and how that, in turn, affects the reception and perception of artists and their work: the impacts art has on wider society, how economic realities affect aesthetic judgements of art, what kind of people are able to work as artists, and how political and cultural ideas about the nature of art affect what kind of resources are made available to it.

David Berry explores how art has become central to our understanding of humanity by tying art to what makes the world go round: money. Along the way, he challenges popular ideas of what constitutes a successful artistic career and considers what our treatment of artists says about us.

David Berry is a writer, editor and critic. He spent the first two decades of his professional career profiling and critiquing the book, film, music and theatre scenes for an Edmonton-based alt-weekly, and then did the same nationally for the National Post. He has contributed essays, criticism and features to the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, CBC, Hazlitt, and many other places, some of which still exist.

His first book, On Nostalgia, was published in summer 2020 by Coach House Books, just in time for everyone to suddenly become incredibly nostalgic for a time when they could actually see people and maybe even buy books in person. He lives in Edmonton with his partner and their two children, one of whom is both old enough to read and quite insistent on being referenced in this biography.