A few weeks ago, a friend’s link to a rant about a rant about the Hype Machine, a music blog aggre­ga­tor, got me think­ing about the issue of whether it’s bet­ter to do art full time or part time. The short answer to that ques­tion, of course, has to do with what bet­ter means to you. But I still think there are mean­ing­ful dis­tinc­tions that can be made between the kinds of art that get made in either situation.

The ques­tion of bet­ter can be addressed to a large extent using eco­nomic sce­nar­ios, though not by rely­ing on clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics. Basic eco­nomic the­ory would say that the more reward you get for your work, the more devoted you will be to it, hence ensur­ing value. Also, we would expect the best artists to receive the most money because their work is in the high­est demand. So full-time artists, by this def­i­n­i­tion, should always be bet­ter artists.

Unfor­tu­nately, great art usu­ally implies an audi­ence learn­ing curve. Beethoven’s early sym­phonies were panned by crit­ics and audi­ences for being too long and com­pli­cated. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, booed and pelted with toma­toes at its pre­mière, is now the most per­formed “mod­ern” orches­tral work. Eco­nom­ics relies on peo­ple know­ing what they want, but any­one who has ever been in a rela­tion­ship with another human being knows this is a bad assump­tion to rely on. Great art is usu­ally ignored, then vil­i­fied, then widely accepted, to para­phrase Schopen­hauer.

Con­se­quently, the moti­va­tions of artists tend to be more inter­nal, or community-based, than directly eco­nomic. This is where the stereo­type of the starv­ing artist comes from: There are enough exam­ples of great artists scrap­ing by—or dying in poverty after achiev­ing con­sid­er­able fame—to make some peo­ple think this is how art should be made. How many times have you heard the argu­ment that a given band’s inde­pen­dent, debut album was their best work? The starv­ing artist model implies the supe­ri­or­ity of part time, because the strug­gling artist must do some­thing other than art in order to sur­vive, until he or she makes it big . . . but at that point the artist is at risk of being cor­rupted by money, and hence sucky follow-up albums ensue.

Inter­net utopi­ans like Clay Shirky and Chris Ander­son also espouse the part-time the­ory. They believe that the inter­net should make it pos­si­ble for any­one to plug into the niche mar­ket of their choice, because there are no bar­ri­ers to pub­li­ca­tion online. But their argu­ments avoid the prob­lem that not every­thing valu­able is sal­able: A lot of the value of art is intan­gi­ble, and as I have argued pre­vi­ously, intan­gi­ble value is auto­mat­i­cally assigned a value of zero, despite our best inten­tions. So I don’t think the inter­net is ever going to make it pos­si­ble for all artists to go part time. Or at least, if we did all go part time, art would suffer.

The pro–full-time argu­ment comes from the mod­ernist camp, which cre­ated the idea of the aca­d­e­mic artist, paid hand­somely by the acad­emy or the gov­ern­ment to cre­ate great art that would even­tu­ally trickle down to the masses. The ratio­nale is that expan­sive, com­plex, sophis­ti­cated art can only be made by peo­ple who devote their entire lives to doing it—specialization is a pre­req­ui­site to great­ness, in other words, as it is for a sur­geon or a lawyer. This argu­ment led us to the extrav­a­gant works of the 1950s and 1960s by com­posers like Stock­hausen (his Heli­copter String Quar­tet is a good exam­ple). Yet while the mod­ernists did cre­ate a lot of influ­en­tial work and many mas­ter­pieces, they also pro­duced their fair share of mediocrity.

Try­ing to deter­mine whether part time or full time is more suc­cess­ful would make for an inter­est­ing study, if this were fea­si­ble. But what is clear is that regard­less of how artists pay the bills, most art is bad, some is good, there are a few mas­ter­pieces, and the def­i­n­i­tion of mas­ter­piece is con­stantly chang­ing. So let’s look at the ben­e­fits and lim­i­ta­tions of both approaches.

Nit­suh Abebe sum­ma­rizes these fairly suc­cinctly. Part-time artists are free to focus on what­ever kind of work they think is valu­able, they aren’t bound to the sal­a­bil­ity of their work (whether sell­ing it to con­sumers or to an aca­d­e­mic audi­ence), they can pur­sue other inter­ests, they have a per­spec­tive other than the myopic art world, and they lead more com­fort­able lives mate­ri­ally. The strengths of part time are also its down­sides, how­ever: Part-time artists often lack direc­tion, they are less account­able, they are more likely to be self-indulgent, and they get dis­tracted by the more quo­tid­ian aspects of life.

Full-time artists have the resources and time to cre­ate more expan­sive, engross­ing work like operas or fea­ture films; they are held respon­si­ble to a com­mu­nity of col­leagues and their audi­ences; and they are gen­er­ally more edu­cated and have spent more time refin­ing their craft. Con­versely, they are less likely to think out­side the box, they can be straight­jack­eted by the need to earn a liv­ing through their work, and they can become rigid in their aes­thetic convictions.

There’s no intrin­si­cally bet­ter way. Girl Talk and Charles Ives both had day jobs that sup­ported their music, at least until they became more suc­cess­ful. Com­posers like Harry Partch and Edgar Varèse never did achieve finan­cial suc­cess, although they were well respected and influ­en­tial. On the other hand, we have Stock­hausen, Xenakis, Schoen­berg, Prince, and the Bea­t­les, artists who were fairly well sup­ported and yet still man­aged to con­tinue one-upping them­selves artistically.

Peo­ple are very dif­fer­ent. Suc­cess­ful artists have taken advan­tage of both the part-time and full-time par­a­digms to give us work that wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble if it were done any other way. And as with any ven­ture, most artists fail. But then again, any­thing worth­while should be hard to do, oth­er­wise it wouldn’t really be that worthwhile.