CR 088: Mason Currey on the Financial Lives of Artists

The author behind the “Daily Rituals” series discusses his latest book, “Making Art and Making a Living.”

Mason Currey, photo by Rebecca Veit

Mason Currey has spent much of his career investigating the working habits of artists, sharing all that he’s learned in two books, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work and Daily Rituals: Women at Work, as well as his popular Substack, Subtle Maneuvers. But in his latest book, Making Art and Making a Living, he takes a deeper look into how artists over the centuries have managed to afford their creative pursuits.

Currey hopes that the stories in the book offer solace to artists who struggle with the financial aspect of their work. “I want people to see that they’re not alone in confronting this,” Currey says. “That as miserable or thwarted or overwhelmed as they might feel trying to confront the whole dilemma of making art and also paying for your life, that they are actually in great company. They’re part of a lineage of people who have confronted this problem and often didn’t have a great solution and still kept making their way forward. And maybe also th…