Look Who it Was Random video

Can Money and Art Coexist? With Jane Friedman

437 views · Published 18 January 2018 · 3:46 · Indexed 12 November 2026

Channel: The Creative Penn · 2018 · Education

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This is an excerpt from the full video interview with Jane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLBo-r5-fEk

Joanna: I actually get quite a lot of personal criticism for my own focus on the business on being an author. Some people think if you talk about business then you must not care so much about the craft or the language. And people think art and business can’t go together.
So, why do you think there’s such an issue with money and art, and why did you start Scratch because of it?
Jane: Yes, I would say it’s interesting we’re starting with this question, because I guest spoke on it at a conference over the weekend, about the historical perspectives on money and art, and business and writing, and I did a really deep dive into some of our cultural attitudes towards art and business. And our thinking on this issue goes back a few hundred years, so it’s kind of like there’s this engrained idea in the culture that the two things are antithetical to each other. That idea was invented: it was invented by someone who was frustrated with his sales and felt like the only way to rescue his art was to say that it was superior because that it didn’t sell!
And we’ve had that idea ever since: this myth of the starving artist, that to keep our art pristine and to preserve this value to it, we can’t pay attention to the marketplace. I recently read a book by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens, she did this book called “Make Art Make Money,” which focuses on some of the lessons we can learn coming out of Jim Henson’s life, the great artist and puppeteer, and how he balanced these two sides and didn’t see them as opposed: that he saw how to make business serve art, and how he could use it as a way to fulfill his artistic vision. It’s not that he was pandering or selling out but he knew how to use the system to his own purposes.
And so I think it’s horrible that any writer or artist should be criticized for operating in the realities of the marketplace. I mean, certainly there are people who do totally pander, and everyone has to make certain sacrifices to go to the next level, but it’s totally ignoring the inter-relation of these two things and how art has often thrived because of the support of business and patrons, or sales. I mean, this has been a relationship that goes back for a very long time, and art can’t operate in a vacuum; I’m not sure why they ever thought it could, or that it should, or that it was somehow superior for it to do so.
I think the tension that results is actually quite healthy, you know: we need a little bit of that fence, a little bit of that challenge, to push us to do better, to go further, to think creatively. It strikes me that sometimes when I talk about these issues, I don’t’ want to sound strident. I don’t take it really, really seriously; I’m sincere about advocating that writers think about the art and the business as something that can successfully play together, but I’m not like saying, “You’re wrong” if you can’t be a businessperson. It’s more about being open to the possibility that these things can work together.

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