The artist's business — self-employment and creative work

To support yourself by your creative work is to occupy a position the market did not design for you and must constantly be renegotiated with. The business of being an artist — pricing, promotion, the management of time and energy across the making and the selling — is not a separate concern from the art but an environment that the art must survive. Those who make this work tend to be clear-eyed about what the market can and cannot offer them, and they do not ask it to provide what only the work itself can give.