How to survive as an artist in the city that never sleeps ‹ Literary Hub

July 3, 2024

Today’s New York takes me back to the New York of the past. There is no New York, it is too media-driven, historicized and romanticized – a city haunted by images and stories about itself. In New York stories, a theme is retold like a refrain: people don’t work here, they get up to mischief. The hustle and bustle plays a role in everyone’s urban dream, but for artists, the hustle and bustle is celebrated as a sign of a visionary experience, as a rite of passage. In Patti Smith’s memoirs Only Childrenthe hustle and bustle is the poetry.

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Ten years after its original publication, New Yorkers decided to read it together as part of One Book, One New York, a city-sponsored book club. They couldn’t get enough of the New York in which Smith portrays hunger – ambition and lack of food – as a way of life. I’ve heard that Madonna was so broke and hungry in the early ’80s that she lived on popcorn. All you needed to get by in New York was courage and popcorn. Smith needed salad. She describes meeting Saint, her guide and fellow vagabond, near Houston Street. He showed her that it was possible to live on the streets:

We went to the park, sat on a bench and divided his spoils: loaves of bread from the day before and a head of lettuce. He had me remove the top layers of lettuce while he broke the bread in half. Some of the lettuce was still crunchy inside.

“There is water in the lettuce leaves,” he said. “The bread will satisfy your hunger.”

We piled the best leaves on the bread and ate it with relish. “A real prison breakfast,” I said.

“Yes, but we are free.”

And that was it. He slept in the grass for a while and I just sat there quietly, not afraid.

They were just children. They were poor but free. I can hardly imagine what it would be like to be a young woman starving on the streets of New York and feeling liberated. Imagine what it would be like to interact with male artists, writers and performers back then. I’m trying to comprehend the rampant sexism and objectification fifty years before #MeToo.

The misogyny, the barriers to participation in public life, the gender segregation of professions (nurse, stewardess, secretary…), the obligatory roles of wife and mother. In her memoirs, Kim Gordon is reminded of her subordinate place as Girls in a bandEileen Myles said, “Every woman who lived through that era had a lot of problems”; of Smith, Myles said, “She had no problems. Leave me alone, that’s complete eulogy.”

There is no one New York, the city is too strongly influenced by the media, historicized and romanticized – a city that is haunted by images and stories of itself.

Imagine this Instagram post. An unwashed and homeless nineteen-year-old woman and a man she just met in Washington Square Park, also filthy and on the street, pose on a bench covered in pigeon droppings, surrounded by garbage from the garbage strike. In the background, permanently homeless people slump on shards of stinking cardboard. As they eat their lunch, scavenged from a nearby dumpster, they smile knowingly at having found the secret. The post reads: DON’T BE AFRAID. #Freedom #Artists #NYC.

Children only goes down easily. It’s not a manifesto, but more of a love letter to the city, Smith’s ambition, and her best friends, who happened to be great artists and remarkably photogenic (see Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard). I read it when I was in Tokyo, a few months after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown. The locals kept reassuring me that I was safe, that everything was OK. They thanked me for being a tourist. Children only Romance was comforting in the context of post-disaster Tokyo. When you are destabilized and culturally out of place, yesterday– the bad habit of being overly nostalgic, and not necessarily for something you experienced the first time – is particularly cathartic. Everyone talks about yesterbates in private. It’s satisfying to understand lost time and opportunities, the impossibility of the present, through the lens of a mythical past. It’s the Patti Smith effect.

I always come back to what an artist once said to me: “I don’t think you would choose to live here if you no longer wanted to. People come here with ambitions. Like the Midnight Cowboy History, the classic narrative, they come here because their heroes are here. And you can walk into a bar or a gallery and meet someone you adore. There it is. That just doesn’t happen anywhere else.” I’ve had that feeling before and it’s supernatural. It’s like possession, being overcome by some uncanny power and then yearning to be someone else.

After you left art school, you slogged your way through Baltimore. If you didn’t sleep in or take a nap, you slouched around. Solipsistic and crude, you were vulnerable to criticism and terrified of rejection. No one recognized your artistic potential, your ability. You were encouraged that your colleagues at the tapas restaurant seemed to really like you. But they also mocked you and dismissed your ambitions in the art world. As you prepared strawberry and radish garnishes, the dishwashers Tyrone and Manny commented on your unusual sculptures.

It became unbearable to face reality, your own face as a sous-chef with student loans renting a gloomy apartment. But you knew you were a real artist. Your time would come and these idiots had no idea. You lit a cigarette, sighed the smoke, and imagined future scenarios in which the tapas people bragged about how they once knew you, the way someone might talk about working with Warhol or Lichtenstein, proud to be a blip in your infamous biography, a footnote in your archives to be generously donated to a prestigious institution, perhaps Yale.

A few months passed, then a year or two. You measured time by a series of unstable roommates, restaurant dramas, and blackouts that you rationalized as part of your process. You stopped painting because you didn’t have time; you felt drained from a twelve-hour shift. You got off work and got drunk with the kitchen staff. In the midst of a coke rush, you had a brilliant idea for a new painting and were inspired. The next day, not so much. The stretcher bars you’d primed remained untouched, and before you knew it, you were the kitchen staff.

Making art in New York City is a victory. All of your heroes lived in poverty and insignificance at some point – and then they created their greatest works.

You found out that Eddie, your demanding studio colleague at MICA, was accepted by a gallery in the Lower East Side. Eddie, this scribbler, got an article in the Nom York Just. A quick blurb, a critic’s recommendation, or shows to see this weekend, but still. In your objective opinion, Eddie’s work was utter bullshit. Dazed by his success, you began to think about moving to New York. You’d meet real artists, visit real galleries, and live in an artist community that you imagined would be like art school, only much better. Trying and failing in New York beats living in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and every other city that’s supposedly livable or artist-friendly. The New York art world will save you from this loser town, and yourself. You got out of there.

You can’t believe you’re forty. It’s a cliche to even think it, but you still think about it as you work on an art truck and take side jobs as a freelance art dealer. Your left knee keeps swelling. The fluid-filled sac moves when you press on it. As you press on it, you remember that you have no health insurance. You’re not represented in a gallery and you’re subletting a windowless studio in Bushwick with two other artists in their late twenties. Younger versions of you. Multiple paychecks cover almost everything, credit cards maxed out. New year, new rent increase. You can’t find rent-controlled housing, you can’t pay the agent’s commission, art supplies are ridiculously expensive. You only use one particular brand of oil paint—Old Holland. Compromise is unthinkable. You still believe in your work, and you remember that you sold a painting two years ago and it could happen again at any time, possibly tomorrow. Integrity has a lot to offer you because you recognize it as a defining personality trait. You wear your integrity like your favorite T-shirt.

At a gallery opening in some guy’s apartment, a so-called art world professional, an independent curator or art consultant or whatever, said you should update your Instagram and post more often. They are angry at the suggestion. You will never be a brand. And what do they know, they are not artists. They are artist-close.

You have constant nightmares and dreams of failure. If you can keep this up for a few more years, something will happen. What else are you going to do – move back to Baltimore and become a consultant, someone who works with a great team and collects data, analyzes, whatever. Making art in New York City is a victory. All of your heroes lived in poverty and insignificance at some point – that’s when they created their greatest works.

That’s how the art world works. That’s the artist’s path.

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