Thank you for the good article. The question “Why is it so difficult to be an artist?” is indeed worthy the digging. You very well compared the artist with the pilot and pictured the uncertainty of the profession of art.
I have looked at myself and…The more we will concretize the situation that an artist faces today, the gloomier it will become. So to say it is the real “To be or not to be”.
However, that ambiguity will vanish immediately in case we choose to rewrite our question. Why is it so difficult to remain a man today?
While the pilot drives just a car, the artist deals with the symbols, with the comprehension of the light. The artists act as priests in some sense. Therefore we encounter not the difference in the wages there, but the conflict between human flesh and spirit- the eternal striving to reach the harmony.

Point #2 agrees with my impression of what is happening at the Michigan State Dept. of Art.

During a Summer Arts Program in Interlochen, MI, Sarah, a young woman, painted self-portraits that struck me as highly original. Now, taking art courses at Michigan State, she has lost interest in painting. She complains that art teachers compliment students for throwing paint on a canvas.

Viewing the many paintings lent by our Art Profs for the decoration of our elegant new ‘Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building’, makes me think that she is right. The paintings are colorful and dull.

It may be good that they are so dull. No one is tempted to steal them.

Second, Art training today is no longer done the way it used to be where it was, “You will take this seriously and work hard to make it as a pro, or you’ll be gone from this studio.”

It’s easier to fill and keep classes when the hard line approach is dropped.

Result: Legions of dilettante know it alls (about 8,000 MFA’s a year) who can’t draw or paint worth snot.

Obnoxious enough for you Karl?

Your comment of 6 October is a welcome addition to this discussion, which generated a lot of comments within a day or so of the original post. I will look into the comment date question. It might be possible to display the dates.

Karl, I realize you posted this back in April, but since I just discovered your blog today I thought I’d put in my two cents.

There are different types of competition, and I think some are better than others. When people are competing on the basis of skill, talent or achievement, competition is a good thing. It motivates them to achieve more.

But the type of competition that exists now in the artworld is more like drivers competing for parking spaces. Now that it’s considered fashionable to be an artist (it wasn’t always), everybody’s an artist. There are millions of artists trying to park their work in a few galleries. I never feel like I’m competing w/ the quality of other individual artists’ work - I’m competing w/ their shear quantity.

PS Is there a way on blogs the have the date of a comment listed along w/ the time? It’s hard to tell whether all these comments came the day of your post, or over a period of time.