Real Artists Don't Starve: Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age

Keith Sawyer says, “You cannot be creative alone. Isolated individuals are not creative. That’s not how creativity happens.”

Most of us get our sense of what’s good from a special group of connoisseurs, those superfans whom researcher Elizabeth Currid calls “tastemakers.”

before you become an artist, you must become a thief; but even before you do that, you must first become a student.

We cannot create great art without continuing to create ourselves.

What often allows great work to get the attention it deserves is not a matter of only talent or luck but a matter of the will. Can you stick around long enough to see your work succeed? Do you have enough grit to take a few critical hits and keep going? Or will you get discouraged at the first sign of failure?

Recently I met with Bill Ivey, the former chairman for the National Endowment of the Arts. He told me that we sometimes think the alternative to the Starving Artist is what he calls the Subsidized Artist, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. Art needs money. We can deny it all we want and pretend starving makes for better art, but starving o

This is the Rule of the Scene, which says that places and people shape the success of our work far more than we realize. Location is not irrelevant. Place matters.

Thriving Artists go where the magic is. But this takes more than moving to a new city. You have to join a scene, wherever you find one, and that means making connections with the people who will help your work succeed. In other words, you have to build a network.

What got her there was not some lofty dream. It was gradual and persistent action in the right direction. She learned how to be an apprentice.