You can't make a living as an artist... can you?

This video is actually a promo video for Shopify, an e-commerce service where you can build your own online store.  It's an alternative to Etsy and other ways to sell your creative work online.  I just like this video because it gives a great look at actual working artists.  They're not household names.  Their work doesn't sell for millions at auction.  They're real people who've blended their creative work with business and make a decent living and live the kind of life they want to live.  That's what most of us creative people want to do.

So... can anyone else do that?  When you tell people you want to make a living as an artist, there's this age old idea that a handful of fruity, crazy people in New York and L.A. make money doing art, but it's impossible for anyone else.  I'm 51 years old, I've been working for 2 1/2 years towards making a living from my art and writing, and the whole time more traditional people around me have been saying things like, "That drawing is nice, but why don't you go get a REAL job?"  The funny thing is, I decided to focus on my Sharpie drawings to earn money when I couldn't find a "real job."

Being an geek about macroeconomics and big picture thinking, I dug into books that research and project where work itself is headed in the United States.  Million of the high paying factory jobs have either gone to other countries or been replaced by industrial robots or other technology over the past 40 years.  About 35% of workers now belong to what researcher Richard Florida calls the "Creative Class," people who make their living primarily using their brains and creativity.  That's tens of millions of people.  But most of that group are tech workers and management and similar types of work. As we head into the future, millions more jobs will be taken over by new tech like Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and even better robots.  Creativity is seen as one of the key traits necessary to make a decent living in the next couple of decades by the tech leaders. 

But can you actually make it as an artist?  Can you actually make a living as a painter, designer, sculptor, writer, or musician?  The vast majority of everyday people will tell you it's not possible.  Fuck them.  Check out this page of stats about working artists by the National Endowment for the Arts.  As of 2015, over 2 MILLION people made their living as an artist of some kind.  A total of 4.7 million people made a living in the "Arts and Cultural" sector.  That's a lot of people.  Artists also tend to be much more entrepreneurial than the general public. 

So yes, IT IS POSSIBLE to make a living as an artist in the U.S..  That doesn't mean it's easy, but it is possible, and millions of people do it.  Take that haters.