Dear Poets and Artists,
The performance artist Marina Abramovic earns her living by cutting herself in public. Well, she does a little more than that… she once induced herself into a catatonic state by taking pills healthy people should not be taking. There was also that one time she locked lips (not kissed) with a fellow performance artist until they ran out of oxygen and passed out. Did I mention she earns a living doing this? In fact, according to the New York Times, this artist owns a $1.25 million star-shaped country house as well as a $1.5 million loft in SoHo. Renovations at these homes were financed by selling photographs of her performances. Now maybe I just do not have any appreciation for the arts, but I cannot fathom why anybody would pay the equivalent of one years tuition at Mount Holyoke for a photograph of a woman engaging in what to me seems to be masochistic behavior. I might be trivializing her work here, but my point is not to disparage modern art. All I want to share here is my amazement at how some people in this world manage to earn a living, if not make a fortune, without selling their souls. And this soul-selling business is what I really want to talk about in this column.
A visit to the CDC or a convocation address transcript is all that is needed to remind us students of the wonders of a liberal arts education. Armed with critical reading and writing skills, the world is our oyster—or so we are told. But as I watch seniors and recent alums grapple with unemployment and repaying college loans, I at times cannot help but wish that my dream in life was to be an actuary, accountant or anything else that involves crunching numbers and making money. Well, mostly making money—I am still not so interested in the crunching numbers part. As I walk from my video production class to my drawing class, I wonder how different my life could be if I aspired to be a doctor because then I could save lives and have a clean conscience while maintaining a comfortable lifestyle. But then again, some of the highest earning doctors are plastic surgeons, so maybe I should rethink the whole clean conscience part. But the point is that rich artists such as Marina Abramovic, are anomalies and while many view art or English as easy pursuits, there is nothing easy about floundering from one low-paying freelance project to the next. Instead of inspiring me to believe that it is possible to be an artist and afford a comfortable (read wealthy) life, Abramovic reminds me how fickle the art world can be and that you never know whether your etches and doodles could be viewed as pure genius or mere pretension. Should I sell my soul and have a comfortable yet boring life as a banker? Or should I pursue writing and film with no guarantee of whether I would become a sensationalist artist residing in a Manhattan loft or a mediocre artist living in a cardboard box. I increasingly begin to regret pursuing the arts only to snap out of it when I realize how depressed I would be if the next three decades of my life involved balance sheets or financial audits.
And that is where the new Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, Tina Chang, comes in. I know as little about poetry as I know about biology but it was heartening to read about her recent appointment as Poet Laureate. I’m not quite sure what a Poet Laureate does or why a New York borough would need one but I do know that it does not involve making a lot of money or inflicting physical pain upon yourself. The recent article about Chang in the New York Times makes her sound as normal as a travel agent or realtor. And except for the brief mention of how she likes to read T.S Elliot’s Wasteland to her seven month old son, there was none of the pained melancholy or cerebral ruminating one normally associates with artist types. She seems to be doing well with her position as a professor at a couple of colleges and lives in an apartment that is probably the size of Abramovic’s kitchen but still comfortable and artistic. While I have no aspirations to be a poet, Chang reminded me that as long as I do not hold lofty ambitions of wealth and spectacle, maybe, just maybe, I’ll make it alright.
Soullessly yours,
An aspiring artist
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