"I asked Deresiewicz if he felt anything had changed in the 13 years since he wrote the piece. Back then, he says, “I was still in that mindset of ‘selling out is evil.’” When he began research on his next book, however, “I realized that was kind of an outdated, privileged, and intensely unrealistic attitude,” he says. “Now, you don’t have a choice, and that’s why that concept has disappeared.”
"That book tackles how artmaking became an inherently entrepreneurial pursuit, arguing that while social media hugely increased the number of people who pursued art, it didn’t increase the number of people who can support themselves financially by making it. A world in which artists think like entrepreneurs, he writes in the Atlantic, is one where “You’re a musician and a photographer and a poet; a storyteller and a dancer and a designer … which means that you haven’t got time for your 10,000 hours in any of your chosen media. But technique or expertise is not the point. The point is versatility. Like any good business, you try to diversify.” It’s also a world where that art is “more familiar, formulaic, user-friendly, eager to please — more like entertainment, less like art.”
Vox, Everyone’s a sellout now: So you want to be an artist. Do you have to start a TikTok?