The following story, which appeared  in the online edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, points out one aspect of being an artist that is not the norm among most other professions. That is this: Artists often must be deftly opportunistic to keep making art. This (ig)noble tradition includes trading services for a small space to do one’s work, bartering paintings for rent or food, offering one good stroke for another–whatever it takes.

I can’t help but think there’s something poetic and beautiful in the pathos of this part of the artistic reality.

Have Paintbrush, Will Travel

By KAREN BIRCHARD

A picture is worth more than a thousand words to the Canadian artist Katherine Dolgy Ludwig, who trades her watercolors for lodging at the homes of professors on sabbaticals.

Through the rental matchmaking service SabbaticalHomes.com, Ms. Ludwig has house-sat for academics in New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Wales over the past seven years. Instead of paying them money, she gives them one of her vibrant artworks.

“Hosts can choose any of my paintings,” she says, “but often they’ll pick one I’ve done while living in their home. They say, ‘Wow, that’s my rug,’ or ‘That’s my kitchen in the background,’ or ‘There’s my pet,’ so there’s a personal connection with the painting.”

Ms. Ludwig trained as an architect but switched to painting and taught at the Ontario College of Art & Design. In 2006 she decided to paint full time. That has resulted in a series of fellowships in the United States and Europe, during which she cares for professors’ homes and, occasionally, their pets for weeks or months at a time while she paints and exhibits her artworks.

“It’s a very old tradition for artists to trade their work for necessities,” says Ms. Ludwig, who during one memorable house-sit three years ago “paint jammed” with the jazz musician Ornette Coleman, putting him and his band on canvas while they played on Manhattan’s Lower West Side.

As an artist on the rise, Ms. Ludwig has seen her paintings, bartered and otherwise, appreciate in value over the years.

“One of the first I traded was worth about $2,000 then,” she says. “Today it would be valued around $10,000.”

The management team of The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America has been undertaking a bit of soul-searching over the past two-and-a-half months, trying to decide if/how to carry on the work of chronicling all that dooms art to failure in this country (and world) of ours.

Considering that we’ve been at this task, on top of day jobs and other extracurricular writing projects, for seventeen months (i.e., ever since September, 2007), and considering how much worse things have gotten—in the economy and in the arts—since the time that we began this chronicle, we now find ourselves at several crossroads. First, while it’s been fascinating to look at all angles and facets of artistic failure, and while our audience has grown steadily (now averaging 1,500-2,000 visitors a month), we now realize, pretty clearly, that nothing we write, nothing we selflessly point out to artists, curators, critics, or the audience for art, is going to change the conditions that make art such a difficult pursuit in our culture. Second, in the process of dwelling on all the bad cards that’ve been dealt to the creative, the artistic, and the art-sympathetic, we ourselves have been growing increasingly more cynical and glum about the prospects for a more arts-friendly world. And finally, owing mostly to the first two points, we find ourselves simply burning out on failure, and, more importantly, we’re burning out on, and no longer particularly enjoying, art.

That’s not to say we are giving up this endeavor—at least not yet. It’s just that, at this point in history, with so much going wrong and so many artists and regular people anxious, overwhelmed, or cast at sea, we want to take a different tack with failure. We want to ruminate, occasionally at least, on more lofty things. So, having searched our souls, we here at CAFA are shifting our focus away from (except in the most crucial cases) a simple, dry chronicle of failure that dwells, depressingly, on all the things that are going wrong, and we are moving toward (hopefully) more poetic, literary, theoretical ruminations on what it is in the human condition and character that dooms so many of our most well-meaning endeavors to fail. What is in our make-up—spiritual, psychological, genetic—that leads us to (poignantly, doggedly) continue practicing something (like art) even though we know it is futile? And what does the abiding need for art say about the exquisiteness and beauty that lies at the core of humanness? This means instead of continuing to aggregate the latest bad economic news in the arts or to list the policy changes around the country that have a negative bearing on art, we will strive to tell the human story of (the doomed-to-fail endeavor of) art-making.

And so to start, we quote below a poem somewhat about this human predisposition to failure, heard last night in Minneapolis at a reading by Dobby Gibson. It is from his new book of poems, Skirmish, published by the small independent Graywolf Press.

Why I’m Afraid of Heaven

by Dobby Gibson

If you stood on Venus,
where the atmospheric haze
is so thick that it bends light,
it theoretically would be possible
to stare at the back of your own head.
Which would mean you’d never
again have the pleasure
of helping a beautiful woman
fasten the clasp on her necklace.
On Jupiter, a beautiful woman
might weight 400 pounds,
but so would you,
and you’d be far more worried
about suffocating to death
on planetary gas.
We’ve all desired what we can’t find here.
We’ve all left our gum beneath the seat.
In a bright department store,
a plastic egg gives birth to pantyhose.
In a dark dorm room,
a lonely freshman finally gets his wish.
The dog tries, and fails, to run across the ice.
After spending a lifetime
conscious of being alive,
why would anyone
want to spend an eternity
conscious of being dead?
In this bar, one of the world’s last remaining pay phones
hangs heavy in the corner.
Most days it waits in silence.
Once in a while, it just rings and rings.

This just in, from the St. Paul artist Walter Albertson (in response to my query regarding what about art are you thankful for):

Back when I was trying to get a discussion going on the MN artists forum, I posted a reply to an art pundit (not you) with who I was trying to spar with about topics involving being a better art businessman.
I said artists must be true to a feeling, an inner directive I called “verve” and if you depart from this for whatever reasons including practicality or business, you may loose your way. 

Then later, when reading an essay by Curtis White, (who I highly recommend) he expressed a similar concept although with more clarity and directness. I can’t quote directly here now but it was something like:

The value, or one of the values in art is awareness of the difference between feeling alive and feeling dead.

And that is what I’m thankful for in art.  That’s what I respond to in art by others and that is what keeps me going in my own art making.  Not always easy in a world seemingly at the mercy of mechanical thinking.

To follow up on my previous post, about what we are (despite it all) thankful about in art, I’ve posted an homage to Grizzled Art Warriors on the Thousandth Word blog.

Here’s a bit of the crux:

…make no bones, the range of committed and long-suffering arts denizens in this hardscrabble metro area of ours—without whom there’d be scant art worth celebrating today—while not terribly broad, is very deep. Just sit down and make a list, and you will see. My own list of local artistic heroes, whose grizzled tales I have often found myself drawn to, is split in two. It starts with dozens of artists who, while I don’t always love every work they make, are to be admired for surviving through thick and thin and continuing the battle. Then it moves on to those few purveyors and supporters of art—gallerians mostly—who’ve survived the wars from their front-line positions, under constant assault (mostly from needy artists) and with terribly unreliable supply lines to sustain them.

Once again, I invite anyone with thoughts or memories to share–about parts of the art world that you are thankful for, or grizzled arts figures that you appreciate and love–to do so. You can comment here on this blog, email me at admin@artisticfailure.com, or comment on the Thousandth Word blog.

It’s a marshmallow world in the winter,
When the snow comes to cover the ground.
It’s the time for play, it’s a whipped cream day,
I wait for it the whole year round!…

It’s a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts,
Take a walk with your favorite girl.
It’s a sugar date, so what if spring is late,
In winter it’s a marshmallow world!

By now, you art lovers all know the story: the local (MN) visual arts infrastructure (and the national one too, including the museum where I cut my young, art-grad school teeth) is quickly crumbling. As endowments shrink and paying customers stay away, drying up the support money like so much Cobalt drier-spiked oil paint, staffs are being hacked at big arts institutions, longtime professionals are heading for the hills, museums are shutting down, and galleries are going dark.

But fuck it. It’s Christmastime, the most self-delusional time of year, when we turn up the lights against the shorter days, put aside every realistic expectation, and demand that people give us the things we aren’t willing to buy during the rest of the year. Ah, Christmas. So full of false promise, marshmallow wishes, and yum-yummy whipped cream exhortations of love! Now is when we lovingly proclaim how much we appreciate all the people and things in our lives—smugly satisfied that now we’ve done our yearly duty we can forget them until this time next year. In this spirit of Christmas, I thought it might be appropriate now to ruminate on all the things we appreciate about art. In a few days, I’ll post one thing I’m truly thankful about, in that Christmas-sort-of-way, as we approach the hinge of the year (meaning I’ll probably promptly forget about it, as is our way in this culture, soon as January 2 arrives).

If you’re thankful about something that has to do with art, you can post your holiday thankful wishes below (in the comments box). Or else you send them to me at: admin@artisticfailure.com.