Book Review: “The Lives of the Artists”
Courtesy of Susan Finlay.
Last summer, I first came across British artist and writer Susan Finlay via her Spike article Don’t Give Up the Day Job—a musing on new literary works centered on the economic strife of artmaking. It was something I’m often thirsting for: candidness around how professional and financial insecurity in the arts manifests yet conceals itself at the expense of the very artists who give the industry its substance.
Afterward, I tracked down Finlay’s new book at one of the only bookshops open in Paris in August. The Lives of The Artists is a small “(anti-)memoir” recounting Finlay’s first decades within the arts, from secondary school to the present day in her 40s. As she told me, it’s about: “the many hats that artists (are sometimes forced to) wear.”
Zooming into her own hustle, she fills the book with poems, scripts, and other offbeat materials, like unused presentation notes. Email chains with pitches and drafts are inserted with a playfulness that softens the punch of their replies, like “I DO NOT WANT MY NAME ON THIS” and “Sorry, pass.” She changes typefaces for the subject matter and prefaces each chapter with an artwork—choices she explains as a visual mirror to the “multi-identity-tasking” that is “part of the job.”
“[They] are self-portraits of the artist ‘as something,’ in that they simultaneously portray the artist and the artist playing different roles,” Finlay explained in our conversation. “This is the crux of the book: the idea that we're constantly acting and adapting, but that this isn't necessarily ‘fake.’”
Susan Finlay, The Lives of the Artists. © Joan Publishing
Finlay collages these experiences with a mix of self-reflection, self-exposure, and critical takeaways, the result being a record of a creative life oscillating between breakthroughs and the dips in between. She describes odd jobs, debt, and relocating to London—a city “meant to be the centre of everything art-wise” but not anymore as it’s “too expensive for anything truly creative to happen”—and then Berlin and then her hometown to stretch her resources further.
“The thing about the minimum wage is that even if you work every hour that Goddess sends you, you will still only just scrape by,” she writes in one of the book’s many pithy sections. “I couldn’t afford a studio and I couldn’t make the kind of large-scale installations that I was used to making in my bedroom and so I stopped making visual art altogether.”
Tracing her own life as a case study gave “insight into the realities of rent, pensions, day jobs and so on for those without trust funds,” she said. “It's often funny to juxtapose the glamorous aspects of creative life (book launches, artist dinners, and so on) with things like factory work the following day: the literary equivalent of a rimshot.”
Though ironic, these disparities are not news but a well-known problem for those enduring them. Yet this broken system is often obscured by those better off neglecting to clock these circumstances and concerns. She side-eyes—with a touch of jadedness and exasperation—misconstruals of reality spread by “full-time” artists who’ve never faced financial barriers in their pursuit of a creative career, editors and reviewers who disregard discussions of class in her work and platforms like Vogue’s YouTube channel platforming the luxurious apartments of loaded creatives.
It’s tongue-in-cheek, but Finlay’s honesty nudges the status quo of art writing, which assumes these settings aren’t worth spelling out. Such frankness dismantles ideas, as Finlay shared, that “poverty is ennobling” for artists or, by extension, the starving artist as an aesthetic trope rather than actually damaging. Rather, she documents the existential precarity that infests the industry, knocks artists without inherited wealth around, yet still feels largely downplayed.
“I didn't exactly set out to ‘show people’—I was just doing what I was told and ‘writing what you know.’And precarity is what I know,” Finlay tells me. “[This is] the first thing I've written where I, Susan Finlay, have appeared as a character, banging on the glass and saying, ‘But this is how it is!’”
“[The book has] generated a lot of discussion,” Finlay added, “I regularly receive emails from people detailing similar experiences… we're all part of this same struggling but supportive community.”
Even with this transparency, she’s resigned. As much as things get better, they don’t.
The compounding costs and sacrifices taken to sustain a practice never stop. It’s grueling, yet artists are dogged. Near the book’s end, Finlay speaks about a hypothetical future of artistic success—what she would do with her day, what her home would look like, and the prizes she would win. It contrasts with a very early passage where she almost mocks her delusion of choosing art as a career. An artist’s curiosity and persistence will always clash with the uncertainty of their livelihood.
“Living this way leads to many wonderful and unexpected moments but to many anxious and exhausting ones, too,” Finlay said.
“I [once] firmly believed that this was the price one paid for a creative life. But as I get older, my view has changed slightly,” she added. “I want financial security, creative recognition, and guilt-free, worry-free fun, but ideally, I'd like that to come via a community of like-minded peers working together rather than convincing governments and companies that ‘I'm worth it.’”
I recently rolled my eyes at a clickbait headline: “Are creative careers paid enough?” Aren’t we beyond rhetorical questions like this? Instead, we need advocacy for stability and equity so that artmaking isn’t reserved for the well-off and a struggle for everyone else. We need stories on the dread and hope plaguing the artist’s bottom line; we need personal anecdotes like this memoir. We need to grow our collective awareness of the ramifications of inequality in this sector. We can talk in the way Finlay has: sharing our realities with disdain, honesty, wit, and desire, so that we can create something better together.
