“If we made a calculation about how much money we earn per hour for each commission we do, it would be less than a Euro,” Fredrik Hellberg, one half of Swedish/Spanish artist duo Space Popular, says. We meet over schnitzel in Vienna and I find myself oddly comforted by his sincerity, as much of my own creative work brings in similar numbers, but I don’t dare talk about it. Hellberg and his partner, Lara Lesmes, just unveiled their latest work at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Art; an installation that showcases hundreds of portals throughout history and culminates in a 20 minute VR video experience. The duo, who are in their late thirties, have established themselves as a fixture in the global architecture and design circuit world, with solo shows in renowned institutions like Rome’s MAXXI Museum or Stockholm’s ArkDes. They also regularly get teaching assignments from institutions like UCLA in Los Angeles and INDA in Bangkok. “We were lucky to get into teaching early on, to sustain our artistic practice,” Lara says, “but there were times when we searched the sofa for coins and ended up walking 10 KM to university because we couldn’t afford the train ticket.”
Since the late-18th century, when the figure of the “starving artist” first became popular, we’ve romanticized artists for their dedication to their craft. The German word “Lebenskünstler”—which roughly means “artist of life”—feeds off the same notion, describing people who live life at ease, despite all the hardship they face. The artist, so we think, must be happy to create, as long as they find a way to get by. A more accurate equivalent in today’s market conditions would be the “hustling artist”. Many of today’s artists face extremely high degrees of uncertainty, an incredibly competitive and speculative market and constantly changing parameters—from rising rents and costs of living, to artificial intelligence, which threatens to make all creative practice obsolete. There is no clear path to having a sustainable income other than going from one gig to another. The opportunities seem endless, but the competition is fierce. More content than ever is created today, but there is less attention available to have it seen and discovered.
“The internet has democratized access, but it also demonetised creativity,” Anton Teichmann tells me at his office in Berlin’s Neukoelln district. The Berlin native has been running his independent music label Mansion & Millions together with his partner for a decade, releasing alternative pop music at a time when it became next to impossible to make a living from selling music. “The pool model of Spotify erased the middle. If you want to earn any money from streaming, you must be in the top 2 percent, otherwise you won’t have any significant earnings,” he says.
The resulting gap is mirrored not just in music, but everywhere in culture, where similar algorithmic data models decide what you see and who gets paid. What we have today is global artists like Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen or Beyoncé playing sold-out stadiums, while middle-tier artists like Animal Collective or Santigold are having to cancel tours because they can’t make the numbers work. The margins are getting smaller on all sides, and the only ones benefiting are the major platforms, the chart-dominating artists and the conglomerates behind them. The result, Teichmann explains, is that “taking risks has become a luxury”. In other words; you must come from privilege, which is either wealth, connection or—ideally—both, to be able to afford becoming a musician in the first place. Otherwise you won’t be able to rent a studio, pay a band or afford a tour that provides the basis for building an audience, signing a label and releasing music, at least in the established sense of the industry. Everyone else has to find other ways to put themselves out there.
