art as money laundering

One of the great sources of an instant argument with my wife, Kathleen, is to bring up Henry Rollins' infamous Gap ad. It's a good-natured argument these days, but the crux of it is this: she says there's nothing less punk rock than a Gap ad, whereas I never heard Henry take a vow of poverty. I think we're both right, but it does bring up a serious question about how art is financed--a serious question I hadn't really thought about for a few years until Matt, a musician I met through Kathleen, mentioned the dreaded Gap ad as the way Henry launched his poetry and spoken word career, and thus A Good Thing. A few short days later I got into a conversation with Sam, a voice-over artist I worked with in Portland, about radio theatre. I have since learned Sam is a fellow lover of radio theatre and our recent conversation dealt specifically with whether there's any money in radio theatre. The short story is there isn't, but it brings up the same question. It turns out there are a lot of people who really get into producing radio theatre, but "most [of them] these days use it as an outlet for creative work when doing the commercial/corporate thing gets to be a drag."

Bingo. That's when the image of art as money laundering landed, fully formed, in my brain. Commercial/corporate money is perceived by artists as dirty, hence my wife hating Henry for hawking sweatshop jeans. Unless you do take a vow of poverty, though, it's hard to avoid that money and still, you know, pay bills and eat and stuff. So when an artist makes enough "dirty" money that they have a little extra, they use it to cleanse their souls by financing their "pure" artistic endeavors.

That, of course, brings up all sorts of age-old questions about why our society doesn't value art enough to make it a financial viable career in-and-of-itself for more artists. And I'm just as guilty as anyone else--I never bought Henry's poetry book, but I have shopped at The Gap.