This isn’t really a novel topic—seems like I’ve been hearing some variation of these kinds of questions ever since RISD alumni Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia co-founded Airbnb in 2008—but I wanted to write about it here as part of what inspired me to create this podcast (and yes, after a long summer break, the newsletter is back!). So after all these years is the MFA the new MBA or what? After all, Daniel Pink tried to settle the debate way back in 2008. But I was thinking about these questions again recently after listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Freakonomics (if you haven’t already listened to them, I highly recommend the 3-part series about the art market). Preceding one of their more recent episodes is a call for personal stories about bosses with MBAs. And I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to do a similar episode on the topic of working with people with MFAs in not necessarily creative settings.
What was interesting to me about this shift at the time (circa 2008-2015 or so) was that it contrasted with my own professional experiences up to that point. Working in office administration from the age of 19, even in a creative environment here and there, I often felt like I was living something of a double life, like an art job version of Among Us. When I left my two part-time arts jobs in 2005 to go to grad school, almost everyone I worked with at the time incorrectly assumed I was leaving to pursue a master’s in art history, not art practice. But seemingly overnight, people seemed to be acknowledging that, actually, artists have a lot of skills and experiences that come in handy in office administration and project management, to name just a couple of areas. How artists approach how they make a living, if not primarily from the sale of their art, varies from artist to artist. Some of the artists I’ve interviewed prefer to align their day job with their creative interests, working in art or design higher ed, for example, or in a related field like museum studies. Others prefer to keep their paid and creative work streams totally separate. I’m finding that after years of working in art/creative non-profit or educational settings, I prefer the latter category, but possibly because the latter tends to pay better. I still don’t have a ton of time, but I have more financial resources to put toward my art practice, visiting museums, traveling, etc. (all that said, beware the bullshit job regardless of where you fall on that spectrum).
Ultimately I embrace the recognition that artists are good at many things, even day jobs/careers that are not creative, per se (and that those fields, in turn, benefit from their creativity). Despite this growing recognition, however, I still think we’re a bit stuck with a vision of the struggling or starving artist who would be taken less seriously if they opted for a full-time office job versus cobbling together a portfolio of side hustles, even if the former affords them more time and money at the price of flexibility and art world cred. Artists should be well compensated for their labor in and out of the studio and taken seriously regardless of how they make a living.