You Have to Contend
Notes on COVID-19 and the Ghetto that Arts Capitalism Can’t Let Everyone Out of
Is it even possible to assess? Your gigs have been canceled. Your readings, canceled. Your book has fewer opportunities to appear in the world. That class you picked up to teach over the summer to help cover school costs might be canceled. You are attempting to almost completely restructure your pedagogy according to lesser explored platforms. At least some of your work in that arena is working with students to think variously in the presence of one another lest that moment should come when you are all isolated from people who think variously—or are proximal to people who have no idea what to think, and are desperate for absolutes. You have nothing resembling a home to leave school for. Your service industry or retail job is either suffering the slack in foot traffic or is putting you at risk of exposure and never trying to hear a thing about health insurance. You can’t afford to take off the day that brings in the most customers/carriers, or you’re already losing hours and shift meals you rely on. You’re waiting to hear back about that and this. The university administration that owes you a speaking engagement honorarium you were counting on is currently MIA. The rent. The food, the doctor bills. The debt. Whatever expedition of dopamine you need to look it in the face again.
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What’s new about the whatthefuck of it? Maybe the immediate disappearance of the floor, or the way everything is backlit. But let me check my privilege real quick.
When I received a $20K grant from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis in 2017 and began completing my second book in earnest, I had just been fired from my arts programming job. My health insurance had disappeared within two weeks. The IRA I had only just begun ceased meaning. I had no secondary income. I organized community-based poetry workshops and charged participation fees for labor that I can now, in 2020, provide for free because a university subsidizes my living expenses. I didn’t immediately put in my two weeks notice upon receiving a National Book Award in late 2018 because not a month earlier I had been attempting to schedule low-paying, exposure gigs around my best tip nights, and the regulars kept asking where I’d been, and the IRS asks about me, and my student loans still tally $60K, and anyway that money ain’t long like you think it’s long. Grateful as hell to not be chain-smoking in a dusty apron while carrying out the soggy cardboard behind Layla’s Burgers and Shawarma with my Treadsafes covered in tzatziki and my fingers stinking of raw red meat, and 38 hours a week of my vertebrae curving forward while standing on concrete with hardly any energy to conceive another way to be, but / and / yes.
I could do it again if I had to (I don’t like your English departments and students who’ve only known desperation in the shadow of a grade, so I’ll probably have to), and it’s imperative that someone has to, Jayson reminds me: institutions require such precarity and scarcity in order to maintain and leverage prestige. Years of treating colds with back-of-house ibuprofen stashes and tapering upper respiratory infections into wet coughs while asking again if I should ration antibiotics for the next inevitable one to avoid an urgent care bill and sometimes buying no more than coffee, peanut butter, and cigarettes til my tips and check and under-the-table hustle added up to rent, and now I have a savings account and an HMO and you can Google me. I’ve entered the list of niggas who should get robbed if it comes down to it, and still people who “it” didn’t and still doesn’t “happen” for have the grace to be people who care deeply how I’m doing. This should not have been able to happen to them. Not to you.
I think maybe whatthefuck we been talking about, we need to be talking about in a big way. Out of the DMs, the group chats, the mutable Twitter threads, the long panicked texts. What would a Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship have been had I received it in one of the several previous years I’d applied, when I felt unsure I’d be able to eat enough and live safely until the next application? Everything. And it damn sure wasn’t nothin. What, then, would it ever be if we weren’t always either in or climbing out of a need we have to know intimately and articulate well should it prove impressive to somebody with an endowment?
I mean, what if I were able to be healthy enough, fed enough, safe enough, learning enough consistently so that I could immediately recognize an endowed award as not the brightest lights in the city but as a curious lack of power everywhere else? and ask how this coagulation of wealth came to be in the first place?
Whose need does this relief reinvent in order to substantiate itself?
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The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t just all-CAPSing the frailty of the gig-to-grant economy.
It’s reminding me that that economy is a particular conference room in late-capitalism’s drag-ass convention center where we all seem to agree that selective patronage of artists under the guise of mysterious and subjective merit is more possible, credible, and sustainable than equitable support of the basic needs of all artists who struggle in the conditions plutocracy creates. What is a check’s potential to be life-changing if nobody can die wishing for it? Would I still have talked about it? Dreamed about it? Rehearsed for it? Deprecated my art? Other people’s art? Where else could I have applied that energy—which was erotic energy—if I had not been operating from an assumption of default absence?
“If you can only be tall because someone’s on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”
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Decolonize has offered this Coronavirus Resource Kit, which includes this list of freelance artist resources. I’d like to add to this list Shade Literary Arts’ Queer Writers of Color Relief Fund. (Please give what you can where you can.) I’d like to know for sure how you get people what they need without making them perform that need. I’d love to know where these resource lists could be / are hosted, maintained, and updated altogether, in one place, indefinitely.
My imagination’s weak and my friends help me work it out. I’ll follow the lead of this faithful millennial anaphora:
What does it look like when relief/support funds are the standard? When every institution that can argue for its own existence offers to community artists as much in material resources (food, rent assistance, tech support, etc) as it would in merit grants?
What does it look like when relief/support funds are impossible to miss? When every arts site has a tab for them, a link to a database? When every arts administrative team is trained in securing these resources for artists in need, and even then, the route is a secondary resort because the people who need them already know where to find them?
What does it look like when no artist who receives these funds is then paraded through a ceremony for the correction of unevenly distributed wealth misrepresented as “indebtedness?”
What does it look like when Jonah’s quick common-sense vision sees execution and every foundation / center / academy that otherwise taps donors at black-tie affairs drums up, say, $2,000 a head from 50 heads and then helps feed or shelter 100 artists? Today? And any orgs who can afford it, these orgs, the ones that have my name and require that I be proud of my affiliation?
What does it look like when experiences of traumatic circumstances during disaster capitalism are validated and remediated in real time, and not just for marketable work reproduced in the commemorative anthology or the retrospective event that only teary-eyed well-to-dos can drive to?
What does it look like when a society’s artists are empowered to make art for themselves, for other people, and art for art’s sake without instantly demanding that art to register in the eyes of prestigious, philanthropic purveyors? abusive networkers? hoarders of education?
What does it look like when it looks better than this?
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But fuck me and what I got. Who am I to pipe up with discontent? A rich black, according to some, and some other stuff. I don’t come here to lead anyone’s crusade; I’m too indecisive. I just thought it might be time we all had a talk.