Starving Artists: Part Three by Dave Jaffe

    Starving Artists - Part Three


    Emily Carr was just plain unlucky. She is one of British Columbia's most famous visual artists. Yet she lived most of her adult life in poverty. When she was born in Victoria, B.C, in 1871 into a middle class family, there were very few traditional visual artists in British Columbia.
    First Nations people had carved some magnificent totem poles. Artists in the British navy drew landscapes that could be used for military purposes and naval journeys. Yet elsewhere in B.C. there weren't too many visual artists around. Of course there weren't too many white people around either. And money for the visual arts was scarce too.
    By the time Carr died in 1945, the art world of North America was on the cusp of a great change. A new affluent world emerged after 1945 in the United States and then spread across the western world. It was based on the car, the suburban tract home, television, the jet plane and the credit card. And tax laws concerned with the visual arts changed too.
     "The American government passed a law," writes John Berger, "which allowed income tax relief to any citizen giving a work of art to an American museum. The relief was immediate." Yet the art didn't go to the museum until after the owner died.
     In Britain the government passed laws that tried to stop art works from leaving Britain as exports. A rich person's heirs could now pay the deceased's death duties with art not money. "Both pieces of legislation," adds Berger, "increased prices in sales rooms throughout the art loving world."
    Then, too, the massive spending by the governments of the United States and other western countries during the Cold War poured billions of dollars, pounds and other currencies into people's pockets. Some of this ended up in the art world, and also helped  push up prices in the art galleries.
    Visual art became a commodity like everything else.
   Yet Emily Carr and many others saw none of this new affluence. After the age of 40 she was poor and remained poor for the rest of her life. She became a landlord, a breeder of animals, a writer of books, and a worker at many other tasks. She had to do this to survive for she never made much money from her paintings.
     Flash forward to 2015. Charles Ray is an American sculptor, now based in Santa Monica, California. Ray's huge life like sculptures sell for two or three million dollars apiece. Ray doesn't get all of this money. His dealer Matthew Marks takes some of the money off the top for himself. Yet every year a museum or rich people snap up one of more of Ray's works.
     Ray is not a very rich man. He pours most of a lot of his proceeds from sales into his studio. Still, he lives on a privileged plateau that Emily Carr and many other artists of the past could only dream about. "Everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes," said Andy Warhol who died a very rich man and who was famous for a lot longer than fifteen minutes.
     Warhol, Charles Ray Jeff Koons and other  fortunate visual artists made or make millions of dollars from their work. Emily Carr never had their luck. She was just born too early.