The Taboo Against Artists Admitting They Want to be Rich and Famous

In Money Writes! Upton Sinclair acknowledges the desire to "get rich and famous" as a deciding factor in the desire of many persons to become artists. This is not some unheard-of idea, of course, but it is less acknowledged than it ought to be--while when people do acknowledge it they tend to do so with a sneer, not only at the longshot nature of such a hope, but the desire itself, which is seen as somehow unworthy. What makes Sinclair's treatment of the theme different is that, even though it is possible that no one has written more, and more knowingly, about what the sacrifice of art to the pursuit of "success" means for artists and their art and the society they live in, he writes of such persons with sympathy. After all, there is the alternative, the life as a "nobody" that those who hope to become rich and famous as writers, or any other sort of artist, hope to escape.

Why is acknowledgment of something that "everybody knows" so rare? And this the case in a society where the essence of conformity to received values is striving for individual economic advancement--the "American Dream"--such that by that standard endeavoring to get rich as an artist ought to be as respectable a way of pursuing that dream as any other?

I suppose one reason is what Sinclair had what most commentators on the matter do not--appreciation of how cruel society is to nobodies, such that their attempting to become somebodies by a longshot is understandable, and esteem for art as a worthy vocation, both of which they lack. Indeed, it seems that the desire to advance oneself for this particular reason and in this particular way falls afoul of a great many prevailing cultural standards. The conventional preach aspirationalism all the time--but they do not respect those to whom they preach it, the respect for the rich going with a disrespectful and unsympathetic attitude toward the poor and their sufferings and their natural desire to escape them. (Thus does aspirationalist preaching always have the ring of "Perhaps this will have a humanising effect on the dog-stealers" about it.)

Here the attitude of the economic "Calvinist" toward wealth seems relevant--respectful of wealth, disrespectful of the actual enjoyment of wealth. Those aspiring to be somebodies this way--to become "celebrities"--are all too obviously after the perks and pleasures of such advancement, while the conventional overlook how those wearing the business suits may be no less motivated by those perks and pleasures, their desire to get rich quick from work of uncertain value rather than steady, patient, toil at "real" work, and the fantasies of self-indulgence driving it, getting a pass. (The business suit, the perceived tedium of the office, the respect for finance in an era in which old-fashioned producerist suspicion of the usurer and speculator has fallen by the wayside buys the "wolves of Wall Street" the benefit of the doubt as against "frivolous" art, such that only a Balzac or a Marx pays the seamier reality heed.)

By contrast the artist gets the full blast of their moralizing, which in its way gives away something more important--namely, what the aspirationalism is really about. That whole mentality has nothing to do with desiring that the lower orders make the most of their chance to "get ahead," and everything to do with their encouraging those lower orders to make themselves as useful as possible to those who are already ahead. A person discontented with their lot hoping to change it by drawing back from the job market and working on their art does business no good, certainly not as against those who uncomplainingly, diligently toil at an eight-to-six--what the missionaries of aspirationalism really want. Still less can they have those artists making any claims for society's support as they walk that other path. The result is that while, for all his criticism of the compromises of those who become "ruling-class artists" for the sake of living well, Sinclair appreciated that the artist needs support, the conventional wisdom, as John Kenneth Galbraith put it, holds that the "true" artist must resign themselves to being an "unworldly and monkish figure," cutting off that particular avenue of escape from the life of a deprived nobody in the process for anyone even pretending to be a genuine artist rather than just a good-for-nothing looking for "an easy life" in a culture that sees no one as having any right to even hope for that.