We’ve all heard of the starving artist trope: a young artist living on their friends’ couches or their car who survives off of ramen and hasn’t made their big break yet. They often work a day job totally unrelated to their interests because their art alone doesn’t pay the bills. This trope originated in the late 18th century during the Romantic era. However, this idea becomes problematic when we take a closer look at how society treats artists compared to other people struggling with their professions and what that says about how it values art– or rather, how it doesn’t.

For example, aspiring artists are often discouraged from pursuing art as a career because of the starving artist trope. While this might come from a good place (people don’t want to see you struggling with bills and living off of cheap food), one of the main reasons artists have it so hard is because society undervalues art. When an artist dares put a price on their work that will make them enough money to support themselves, people are affronted. If the rate someone charges for a commissioned piece is even slightly over a few dollars– even if the piece could take hours to make– the artist must be a greedy sellout who charges way too much for something everyone considers to be “worthless.” And if they have a second job and do art on the side, why are they charging money for something they do for fun? This double standard for artists gets even worse when you realize that it’s only artists who are treated this way. If you look at someone like Bill Gates, who worked the night shift at the computer lab and taught himself how to code and then later developed Microsoft, we see that his work is applauded, even though what he went through is incredibly similar to what a “starving artist” might. Really, we could create a term such as “starving entrepreneur” and apply it to all people who are struggling to start up a business (not to mention that startups have a high rate of failure) and in doing so, sacrifice material comforts. But we would never even think of creating such a derogatory term for a group of people so lauded by the American capitalist machine. These people are considered “hard workers,” while the starving artist is living in an “unsustainable way” or “irresponsible.”

This is tied back to how society sees art as something unnecessary. It is seen as something that money shouldn’t be spent in large portions on. And when modern art goes for millions of dollars for rich people to auction on, we laugh at the art and call it stupid. One might believe that now, in an age where we all have access to everything through the internet, art should be more widespread and appreciated by everybody, and in turn, more people would buy art, but that just exacerbates the problem because it creates false expectations about what the art should be worth. For example, when you go to Amazon and see a pack of fifty stickers that costs five dollars, you would also expect that rate when you try to buy from independent artists, when that is not the case. Custom art prices are usually incredibly high because of the amount of work that goes into making them and how expensive the supplies usually are. Furthermore, people will often try to get artists to do free work for them by saying things like “it would look really good in your portfolio” or something of the sort. And often, artists are expected to donate their art for charitable causes even if they barely have enough money to scrape by and the people making that request would never ask the same to anyone else of another profession.

A society that looks down upon artists condescendingly for being poor but then laughs at them and calls them ridiculous for trying to sell their art to make a livable income and then turns around and preaches about how culturally important art is as a celebration of life is hypocritical and sick. Of course, capitalism demands that many people work soul-draining, life-sucking jobs at minimum wage, but I am particularly outraged at the audacity people must have to express anger over artists demanding decent pay for doing work, instead of charging rates for their art that would amount to just a few dollars per hour.