via Eric Rudd’s website.

I just finished The Art World Dream: Alternative Strategies for Working Artists by Eric Rudd. The idea behind the book is that artists can (and should?) work outside of institutional support to produce great art. You don’t need gallery shows to make major installations, and you don’t need your work to end up in a museum for your work to be preserved for future generations.

And what is the key to freedom? Real estate, and lots of it. The more studio space that you have, he argues, the greater art that you can make (because you have the space to think big). If you own that real estate, you don’t have to worry about gentrification-through-aestheticization raising your rent prices, and you can rent part of it out to fellow artists. A central concept here is that an artist doesn’t really want to be rich – an artist just wants to make enough money to be able to live in some sort of comfort and to keep funding their artwork. Although Rudd mentions the Internet (capital i) several times throughout the book, the one thing he doesn’t mention is perhaps the most important of all – the digital studio is limitless.