Starving artist

A starving artist is an

disposable income

goes toward art projects. Related terms include starving actor and starving musician.

Some starving artists desire mainstream success but have difficulty due to high

service industry jobs while they focus their attention on "breaking through" in their preferred field. The Starving Artists Project

describes these artists as those who have not yet broken into their careers.

Other artists may find enough satisfaction in living as artists to choose voluntary poverty regardless of their prospects for future financial reward or broad recognition. Virginia Nicholson writes in Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939:

Fifty years on we may judge that Dylan Thomas's poverty was noble, while Nina Hamnett's was senseless. But a minor artist with no money goes as hungry as a genius. What drove them to do it? I believe that such people were not only choosing art, they were choosing the life of the artist. Art offered them a different way of living, one that they believed more than compensated for the loss of comfort and respectability.^[2]

Cultural depictions

The starving artist is a typical late 18th and early 19th-century

Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, the basis for operas entitled La bohème by both Puccini and Leoncavallo. Knut Hamsun's 1890 novel Hunger featured a starving artist as the protagonist. In 1922, Franz Kafka wrote a short story called "A Hunger Artist" about a man who seeks fame for his public performances of fasting

.

References

^ Chohan, Usman W. Should artists pay their taxes in art? The Conversation July 16, 2016
^ Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939, (p. 2); Penguin, 2003.

[1] Chohan, Usman W. Should artists pay their taxes in art? The Conversation July 16, 2016

[2] Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939, (p. 2); Penguin, 2003.

[2]

Cultural depictions

See also

References