Mason Currey: Mason Currey: Author of Daily Rituals on Making Art and Making a Living

0:01Eli Wolf:The great artists through history are people who know how to listen to their instincts and trust them and people who know how to follow their energy even when it is not at all clear where it might lead or how it might lead to funding or not. And I'm not saying it always works out financially, but I think it does work out in a creative satisfaction way and in an energy-creates-more-energy kind of sense.

0:26Mason Currey:at several points in my life i imagined what it would take to become a full-time artist a photographer or illustrator free from client work what i didn't realize was that i already had an example of a different path right in front of me my dad a practicing physician whose published poetry earned recognition from luminaries like john ashbury mason curry's most recent book explores these alternate paths he's the author of daily rituals the beloved book that cataloged the working habits of nearly 200 artists, writers, and composers. His new book, Making Art and Making a Living, goes deeper into the financial realities, schemes, compromises, and the surprising strategies that creatives have used to keep their work alive across centuries.

1:08Mason Currey:What he found is both humbling and strangely reassuring. Virginia Woolf had inherited investments. Kafka had some insurance. Chantal Ackerman had a cash register that she skimmed from. and John Cage, believe it or not, had Italian game show winnings. And yet running through all of this is the same question that Mason has been asking about his own life since the day he sat down to write a novel and couldn't. How am I going to pay for this? In this conversation, Mason walks us through the four funding models his book explores. Family money, day jobs, patronage, and our personal favorites, schemes.

1:47Mason Currey:and what the lives of creatives from Kafka to Murakami can teach us about building a practice that actually lasts. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad-free. Plus, you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, you'll also get our toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Read AI, and more.

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3:04Mason Currey:We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

3:14And now, back to the show.

3:21Mason Currey:Mason Curry, welcome to Design Better.

3:23Eli Wolf:Hi, thank you for having me and glad to be here.

3:25Mason Currey:We're very excited about your new book, Making Art and Making a Living. And it's something that really resonates with me. I actually studied painting and drawing. And I remember in grad school, me and all of my fellow art student, grad students, were trying to figure out, like, how do we build a career out of this? And a few made it and a few didn't. I've certainly seen a lot that didn't work. Maybe we should start with what brought you to this book. It does seem like a very salient topic right now.

3:54Eli Wolf:Yeah, I mean, it's been the great question of my writing life is how am I going to pay for this? You know, I mean, I started off after college thinking I wanted to write a novel and I got a day job at a library. And then, to be honest, wasn't getting much writing done. I sort of blamed my day job, although I don't think that was the problem, really. But ever since then, I've always thought, how am I going to pay for this? It takes so much time and experimentation and trial and error to do creative work in any field. And so often, it doesn't come with any reliable income attached. And so I think everybody from the get-go is trying to think about how to navigate it.

4:27Eli Wolf:And for me, seeing how writers and artists through history have navigated it is, A, it's just entertaining, but also I think it gives me a sense of being in a lineage of people who have confronted this problem and also seeing the ways that they dealt with it give me some ideas or at least give me some strength as I try to keep doing it myself.

4:46Mason Currey:Yeah. Dan Pink once told us that all research is me-search. I 100 % agree with that.

4:51Eli Wolf:Yeah, my whole writing career in a funny way is trying to understand my failure to write that novel when I was first starting out. I thought, why couldn't I do this thing that I supposedly wanted to do? And can I somehow adopt the habits or the routines that are going to help me find this discipline or this willpower or this ability? So in a funny way, my writing career has been all about understanding that.

5:13Mason Currey:One of the concepts that you talk about in the book is this idea of double lives that some of these very well-known artists had, like poets like Wallace Stevens. He was actually a lawyer for an insurance company, and William Carlos Williams was a physician. And this especially resonates with me because my folks are actually both physicians. They're retired. And my dad had a poetry practice. It was actually pretty successful for what it was. I mean, he got recognition by the poet laureate, John Ashbury, at one point. Sadly, he can no longer really write, but for much of his life was writing poetry.

5:44Mason Currey:But, you know, I had three brothers, had to find a way to support a relatively large family. And both he and my mom worked hard as physicians for most of their lives. So yeah, just reading these stories had a kind of a personal connection for me too. And it was interesting to read them.

5:58Eli Wolf:Oh yeah, I'm so glad. That's incredible. I love John Ashbery. So I'm really impressed. Yeah, I think it's one of the big questions starting out. It's like, should I get sort of a crummy day job that's not going to suck up too much of my brain power and do my creative thing on the side and work as a bartender or at a cafe or on a construction site? Or should you try to secure a comfortable middle-class lifestyle as a professional in some field? That's what William Carlos Williams did as a family physician or Wallace Stevens working in insurance. Or do you try to like mix the two and do something that is creative or close to what you're trying to do creatively?

6:35Eli Wolf:And I tried to sort of make a chapter for each of those strategies to see the ways that it played out for different people.

6:41Mason Currey:Let's jump into those four models in the book. I thought it was an interesting way to organize the research of these are business models that people have approached their work with. Could you walk us through the four and maybe share a little bit of what you learned from each one of those?

6:58Eli Wolf:Yeah, well, the book is in four sections. The first section is family money because I kind of thought, well, the absolute best case scenario for an aspiring artist would be to have access to some sort of family money, either an inheritance or some kind of parental allowance or sort of mooching off your family, borrowing money. So I gave a chapter to each of those possibilities and just tried to explore the ways in which it enabled different careers. I mean, Virginia Woolf is an example of someone who never would have been able to have a serious creative practice without that family money that she inherited.

7:27Eli Wolf:And she had to work incredibly hard to build a successful writing practice and a publishing enterprise. But she also always had this steady income, the interest off of her inherited investments, which allowed her to get started on all that. so you know it's like a little depressing maybe if you don't have that money but it's also in a way sort of a relief to know that yeah some people did have a leg up and it's definitely an underlying factor in a lot of famous artists lives is access to some kind of money that we don't all have the second section of the book is jobs because that is the obvious thing that so many of us have to do if you don't have family money you know you need to get a job and so that's where i looked at well, there's the kind of odd jobs approach.

8:09Eli Wolf:Like, don't give your brain power or your creativity to the job. Just do something to make the rent and then save as much of yourself as you can for your creative practice. So you have people temping. You have just like a great variety of jobs, a lot of which don't work out that well for people. And then you have, like we were talking about, the more sort of parallel careers idea. My favorite in that section is Kafka, Franz Kafka, the writer, who also went into insurance and was deeply unhappy working at this insurance office and his letters and diaries chart his overdramatic, over-the-top misery, even though he was actually getting writing done and actually had a pretty forgiving schedule by today's standards.

8:47Eli Wolf:It was just fun for me to unpack that. After the job section, I have a patron section because that, of course, is the other big way that artists have funded their work through the ages, either through individual patrons or through government patronage. I kind of lump those together. And then the last section is my favorite, which is schemes. And that's kind of a grab bag for all the other ways that people cobble together income through shoplifting, working as a stripper, trying to implement some sort of get rich quick scheme, going on a television game show in one case. That's stuff I love to read and write about.

9:20Eli Wolf:Can you share like one or two stories from that? Because that's fascinating that people would go to those lengths. The first chapter of that section is about people who stole as part of their early way that they funded their work. We have the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman, whose work I love. One of her early jobs living in New York in the 70s was working at like a seedy Times Square porno theater. And every ticket she sold, she would pocket half the money. And she saved up enough money to make some of her early short films. And she also stole film, like 35 millimeter film from a photo lab that she worked at and hid it under her bed and later also used it in her filmmaking.

9:55Eli Wolf:And then her great inspiration was Jean-Luc Godard, the French filmmaker, the French new wave filmmaker. And he also stole in his early filmmaking days. I think it was his grandfather had a collection of valuable first edition books and Godard would steal them from his grandfather's apartment and resell them at Paris bookstalls. And he used that money. And then another French, it's interesting, the French connection, another French writer in this case, Jean Genet, his whole entry point to writing was as a thief. He was this sort of prolific shoplifter and he He even had a trick briefcase he would use to steal, again, books from right out from under the nose of booksellers.

10:34Eli Wolf:He would keep the briefcase under his arm and stick books in there as he would be distracting the bookseller. And he got caught over and over again and was sent to prison for short stints. And it was actually in prison that he discovered his calling as a writer. I love the story about John Cage, the American avant-garde composer. He was always broke. He never made much money from his composition work or his musical work, but he did have this hobby of mushroom collecting. He was like an amateur mycologist and over the years became quite serious about it and had this huge collection of books. And he ended up on a tour in Europe in the late 50s, ended up getting on this television game show in Italy where they would have normal people appear and test their knowledge of a particular subject.

11:21Eli Wolf:and for John Cage it was mushrooms and so he appeared on this show in five episodes and they asked him increasingly difficult questions about mushrooms and he kept getting them right and at the end walked away with the equivalent of like 90 grand in today's dollars and he said that was the first significant money he ever made. He was 46 or 47. I don't know if that provides a model for the contemporary person but it does give you a sense of the nerve and tenacity and creative thinking that you can bring to the problem. One of the other sections

11:50Mason Currey:and sorry to jump around a bit, but there's interesting stories all over the place. This idea of the bridge that you have, I think in the job section of your book, which is this idea that, okay, if I can't directly make a living from my art, maybe I do something that's kind of adjacent or related to it. So you talk about the story of Remar Bearden, who tried to kind of make a living as a cartoonist. And he eventually kind of gave up because he felt he was maybe not succeeding in either. The quote from him was, there's unfortunately no bridge between the fine arts and the arts of commerce. and I kind of felt this in another personal connection myself because there was a period of time where I got really into photography and I thought, oh, this is great.

12:25Mason Currey:I want to make this into a career. And I did some commercial photography. I was working on a cookbook for a pretty well-known chef. And it got to the point where that work was like killing all interest I had in photography because I was doing it to essentially survive and try to raise a family. And those pressures and stresses, I wasn't doing any shooting outside of that. So it feels like there is a danger. I think some people are able to do it successfully, but there's a danger that it might kill the passion that you originally had for your art form.

12:53Eli Wolf:Yeah, I feel that dilemma quite powerfully, too. I mean, I really loved reading about Bearden. He was a Harlem-based painter in the 1950s and 60s and going forward. And like you say, he got his start in cartooning as a college student. And he had the opportunity to have a professional career as a cartoonist publishing in magazines. But then he fell in love with painting. And he thought, oh, can I do both? Or can I somehow meld the two? And he decided, no, there is no bridge between fine art and commercial art. You know, I feel like sometimes I'm trying to stand on that bridge in the writing world.

13:27Eli Wolf:And it's not always there. You know, like I'm trying to write about things that are interesting to me, that fascinate me, and also produce relatively commercial books that are going to appeal to a wide audience. And I think that's really the fundamental dilemma for a lot of people. How do you do the work that you want to do and not compromise it, but also find some way to get income? And he decided there was no bridge. I'm hoping there can be, and I think a lot of people are.

13:54Mason Currey:I wonder if people like Romare Bearden, Robert Mapplethorpe, who famously was a prostitute in New York to make ends meet. if artists of their time, if they live now and had access to like Patreon, Substack, YouTube, in the case of Robert Mapplethorpe, maybe OnlyFans. I don't know, like different ways that you can make money. Find a patronage, build a patronage on your own instead of the Medici model where you have to go find these wealthy people, get in access and you're the Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, whoever. It gets the connection to these wealthy people. How do you think that these sorts of platforms change the possibilities for creative work today?

14:41Eli Wolf:I think it's still the fundamental same mission for the creative person. I mean, I write in the book about Alexander Pope, the English poet who lived in the 1700s. And he wasn't the first person to do a subscription scheme for his writing, but he was one of the early pioneers. And he basically did a lot of what we're doing on Substack today. He attracted a subscription base for this big work that he wanted to put out there over the course of a few years and managed to fund the work and actually make a lot of money by the end of the day. And the way he went about it was he was just a very gifted person at making friends, powerful friends, influential friends, moneyed friends.

15:20Eli Wolf:He has sort of a gift for cozying up to those circles and making himself seem indispensable, making them want to be in his good graces. It's the sort of gift that you see throughout this book. People who seem to be able to ingratiate themselves or charm people with power and influence and money. So that's one method. I think Substack is interesting because it democratizes patronage, but also it's so democratized that it can feel like it's just people seeking income and not enough people providing that income. I feel like this is the great dilemma for our creative economy at the moment is it's like if everyone wants to write a newsletter or fund a creative project through Patreon or Substack, who is left to be the funder?

16:08Eli Wolf:The patron is a disappearing person. It feels like everyone's an artist and no one's a patron anymore sometimes. I don't know if you share that feeling.

16:16Mason Currey:I do think that there's something going on where people feel oversubscribed. There are people with great intentions. And I really like what Patreon is doing. Their founder, who's also a musician, Pomplamoose, Scary Pockets, he has these bands. And they have YouTube channels that are very successful. And they're always collaborating with different people. and he wants to make sure that creative people have an income, that the arts are supported. I think that's amazing. But platforms like Substack, we're on Substack, of course. We love Substack. It helps us reach a lot of people, but it is hard because people, they're subscribed to a lot of things.

16:54Mason Currey:And so they have to make hard decisions of what are the things that are most valuable. So for us, I'm always thinking, is this worth your time, your money, your life's energy, which money represents. So as someone who's writing and producing things a lot, I guess it sort of maybe pushes us to think more about how we could create value for people.

17:16Eli Wolf:Yeah, I like that way of thinking about it. I've been thinking about that a lot. Like what do people actually want or need in their creative lives? It's not more emails. And I've been doing a Zoom accountability group where we meet in the mornings and everyone tries to carve out a two-hour block where we can work together with our cameras off and then have a little check-in at the end. That's been, for me, not hugely monetarily successful, but it has a really nice energy. That's one theme that really comes to the book is the artists in this book and the great artists through history are people who know how to listen to their instincts and trust them and people who know how to follow their energy even when it is not at all clear where it might lead or how it might lead to funding or not.

17:59Eli Wolf:And I'm not saying it always works out financially, But I think it does work out in a creative satisfaction way and in an energy-creates-more-energy kind of sense. I think there's a real lesson to be learned from these people about figuring out what that voice is and trusting it, even if it doesn't seem like it's going to work out. You see the ways that it works out in sneaky, unexpected fashion throughout these stories.

18:25Mason Currey:Thinking about technology, and we have these semi-established technologies, like we're just talking about with Substack and Patreon. And there's these kind of emerging things. You can think of like NFTs and Beeple, which, is that a scheme or is that a real thing? I don't know where it falls, honestly, the scheme. Definitely a scheme. Technologies like OpenClaw, formerly ClawedBot, where there's examples of somebody, and this person's not an artist, but I can imagine an artist doing this, setting up an instance of ClawedBot or OpenClaw to go out and make money for itself, essentially. I'm going to give you these parameters, these constraints, go out, and it's made, I think, over$100 ,000 at this point.