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What it Means to De-Risk Your Artistic Work
There’s a narrative that artists and industries took more creative risks in the past; one possible reason for that was the businesses and industry just was able to cross-subsidize different work. If they made a commercial success, that would fund the critical one. Author and critic William Deresiewicz writes:
In the past, one of the principal ways that the culture industry supported more subtle or thoughtful or artistically ambitious work was through cross-subsidization. The entertainment paid for the art: the thriller supported the poetry, the pop star supported the girl-with-guitar, the blockbuster floated the art-house division. Magazines and newspapers were themselves a form of cross-subsidization, with the fashion features or the sports reporting making possible the fiction or the deep investigative piece. So were albums: the “single” up front, for the radio play; the “deep cuts” for the art and soul. But now it’s every tub on its own bottom. Everything has been unbundled; every song, every story, every unit must pay for itself. No more deep cuts.
Even if it were true in the past (I don’t have a strong opinion on this — I think there’s a lot of great artists creating and releasing independently right now), that’s no longer the case. Many publishers, record labels, production houses, and handlers want to work with de-risked projects…
