I think it would be bad for culture and the art if artists and people who develop the apparatus to support those artists don't get paid.
One of my aims was to be paid as well as a plumber. Plumber was better-paid than any performance artist who was always doing this for free. It is so important to make a good living from art. You know, John Cage, until he was 60, he couldn't pay electricity.
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
Art is only worth what people will pay for it. Artists do not get paid by the hour.
First of all, I only get 50 percent of it, because, I mean, the galleries get 50 and 60 percent. I mean, that's normal. I understand that. I don't quarrel with that.
The more ugly, old, nasty, ill, and poor I become the more I want to get my own back by producing vibrant, well-arranged, radiant colour.
The more ugly, older, more cantankerous, more ill and poorer I become, the more I try to make amends by making my colours more vibrant, more balanced and beaming.
I think any writer is a fool if he doesn't do it for money. There needs to be some kind of incentive in addition to the project. It all goes together. It's fun to sit there and think of characters and get them into action, then be paid for it.
A hundred years ago, of course, the question that the German Composers' Co-operative asked itself sounded a lot more fundamental: How do you create a fair share for those who ensure that works can actually be performed at all?
Since I cannot sing, I paint.
I didn't even know for years that people ever even got paid for this, because they don't teach you that in school. They don't say Shakespeare got a check.
I believe that artists should be paid for their creativity. There's no other industry where people can come in and take what you create for free and give it away for free and that's acceptable.
The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts.
Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
I like to make films, but the only reason I do is because I'm a very bad musician.
The economics of theater are painful. I still think that the theater community should be looking much more rigorously at how to let the playwright keep the money they make.
If the studios paid the artists, how would they ever be able to afford the executives?
There's not only emotion in the way you sing but also in what you sing. That way I can compensate it.
There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand - good heavens! - that's what I really call troublesome.
Who will want to write if writing doesn't pay?
Never measure literature by accounting statistics. A quarter of working authors earn less than $1,000.
How much money you get, depends on lots of extraneous things. It depends on how good you are at turning poetry into a marketable product, which is something it was never supposed to be. That's why many people suppose that the better the poet you are the lower your income should be, and that's probably true.
The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
