Transitional Note for a Transitional Time

A few days ago I was lucky enough to stumble upon Adam Gopnik's review in the New Yorker of two new Samuel Johnson biographies. My point here isn't to elaborate on Gopnik's review, nor to relate anything specifically to Samuel Johnson - it's to examine something Gopnik mentions as he briefly recounts Johnson's move to London in 1737:

...Johnson had no luck in his dream, of becoming a London writer and wit, for a very long time. He had the misfortune to have arrived in London at a time not unlike this one, with the old-media dispensation in crisis and the new media barely paying. The practice of aristocratic patronage, in which big shots paid to be flattered by their favorite writers, was ebbing, and the new, middle-class arrangement, where plays and novels could command real money from publishers was not yet in place. The only way to make a living was to publish, for starvation wages, in the few magazines that had come into existence...(The new order had also produced a permanently bitter and underemployed class of writers, who had meant to be Popes but were left to be merely beggars in the square outside, and they made their living working for penny-a-line pamphlets and cheap gossip tabloids, creating a constant mouse scream of malice that runs in counterpoint to Johnson's grave sonorities) (90).

A time not unlike this one. As I've mentioned in the past, the plight of overeducated underpaid liberal arts scholars is neither unique nor new. But, after reading this, it was the first time that I entertained the notion that this might be a particularly difficult moment in history due to media transition. Johnson (along with every writer and artist whose career spanned the 17th and 18th centuries) was facing a time when the infrastructure of patronage was being dismantled (not to mention the infrastructure of "royalty") and the foundation of public, for-profit publishing was just being built. I (along with every writer and artist whose career spans the 20th and 21st centuries) am facing a time when the infrastructure of for-profit publishing is being dismantled and the foundation of internet publication is in its nascent stages.

Publishing houses, like patronage, lasted centuries and they are still alive and well. Patronage didn't die overnight, and it never became completely extinct. Neither will publishing houses. My argument isn't that publishing is dead, books will no longer exist, libraries will evaporate, blah blah blah. My argument is that as the traditional model of writing and disseminating work has changed, so has the mode whereby authors and artists get paid. We've gone from a patron's steady allowance or commission of work to a model where we write/make something, get agent, submit manuscript/work, get published/shown, collect royalties/payment to a model where we write/make something, bypass all middle men, find a computer and blog or post pictures of our work, then try to figure out how the hell to make money. With the new model, there seems (so far) to be very few viable options: place advertisements adjacent to your work and receive tangential revenue, charge for digital manifestations (pdf's, etc) of your work, or ask for donations. Of course there are still writers who get paid in the traditional way for work posted to the internet - there are salaried bloggers, journalists, etc. But that's just a residual financial holdover from the previous cultural production paradigm. When patronage was phased out, an entirely new fiscal model was introduced - one based on the free market, supply and demand, widespread literacy, and cheap production methods. As traditional publishing is phased out, we're scrambling, as they are in the music and film industry, to figure out what the tenets of the new fiscal system for art and literture will be. But none of this is news. I'm merely highlighting that we're still walking onto the apron of a very substantial new system, one which is hardly even framed up yet.

As Johnson discovered when he moved to London, given the tools and opportunity, there is no dearth of creative people willing to distribute their work. The glut of young writers was filtered by the sieve of editors and publishers, and eventually, by the public's demand for certain work. One can only hope that this new glut of artists and writers, fueled by the ease and accessibility of the internet, will find a similar filter and a feasible economic model.

Until then, I'll simply add this to the list of difficulties facing artists and writers in our time. As we piece together the shrapnel of a defunct system, the resulting pastiche can be predicted and advocated, but never truly discovered until it has fallen into place.