What's the difference between an artist and a creator?

In 1973, experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton wrote a letter to MoMA that captures a paradox that still defines creative work today. 

The Museum of Modern Art had offered the filmmaker a retrospective of his work — a huge honor. However he was also told there would be "no money included at all" and it would be "all for love and honor” instead.

Frampton was furious. He responded with a lengthy letter listing all the people who would be paid for the show but not him: projectionists, security guards, administrators, film developers, on and on. He asked a simple question: why was everyone but the artist being compensated?

"I, in my singular person, by making this work, have already generated wealth for scores of people," Frampton wrote. "Ask yourself whether my lab would print my work for 'love and honor.' They would explain to me, ever so gently, that human beings expect compensation for their work. Yet while all these others are to be paid for their part in a show that could not have taken place without me, I, the artist, am not to be paid."

Frampton’s plea is both individual to his specific circumstances and universal to the situation of artists everywhere. (There’s no record of the curator’s response, but the show did happen.)

But this isn’t always how things work out, as we find when we fast forward three decades to a unique moment in the history of creative compensation.

It’s 2004. An artist named David Choe gets asked to paint a mural in an office building in Northern California. It’s a young startup looking to decorate their walls. Because it’s Silicon Valley, the artist gets offered a choice of compensation: $60,000 in cash or the equivalent in company stock.

Choe chose the stock. The startup was Facebook. 

When the company went public a few years later, his shares were worth more than $200 million. Making it almost certainly the best-paying mural gig in history.

Divergent paths

These two stories represent extreme poles of how we do and don't value creative work. Creative work done for artistic purposes is thought to exist for reasons above money. "Love and honor” is a convenient excuse to not compensate for it. “Exposure” too. Creative work for commercial purposes, on the other hand, can be handsomely rewarded. However you’re doing a job for somebody else.

The people who make the first kind of work are historically called “fine artists.” The people who make the second kind of work are called “commercial artists.” These two roles defined the creative landscape for centuries. There’s work you do for yourself (capital-A Art) and there’s work you do for others (sometimes Art, but also decoration, ego-fluffing, and market-driven motivations). Most creative people straddle a hybrid of both: commercial art for their livelihoods, fine art for their souls.

(This post implicitly uses visual artists as the representative category of what an “artist” is, but the logic and term equally apply to other types: writers, filmmakers, musicians, performing artists, and so on.)

In recent decades a similar but distinct creative path has emerged: the role of the creator. People who make a living from subscriptions, crowdfunding, selling merch, and other forms of direct exchange unlocked by the web.

Like artists, creators have a lot of freedom in what they do. In some ways they’re even more free than artists, as they aren’t confined to the conservative canon of what they’re “supposed to do.” All tools of the market are at their disposal: from products to livestreams to memecoins to ghost kitchens to limited edition drops.

Creators don’t answer to a boss, but they do answer to an audience. For most this is less an audience than they hope. For a few this means fame and attention beyond imagination. The pressure to perform and create for the audience can create a performative cycle that leads to burnout and disconnection from what inspired them in the first place. That and a related, debilitating narcissism are the primary side-effects of the creator profession.

Artists, commercial artists, and creators

If we think about the functions each of these roles perform at a high level, we get a sense of the differences between them.

An artist is a self-directed artistic expressor. They work for themselves and express what they want. There’s no one beyond their anxiety looking over their shoulder about what they should do.

A creator is a self-directed market expressor. Everything they do has a commercial aim at its core, however they answer to themselves and their audience rather than a traditional boss. But instead of a traditional boss, they often have an algorithmic one that implicitly and explicitly shapes their output. 

A commercial artist, or creative, is a contracted market expressor. Everyone who works at an ad agency or as an in-house designer fits into this bucket. You’re much better paid than anyone else here because you’re there solely to fulfill a market-oriented vision. (Worth noting that historically, among artists, “commercial” is maybe the worst burn you can throw at somebody.) Today this role is often called a “creative” — to my ears a dehumanizing phrase with deep roots in the advertising industry, but the kids seem to like it.

An institutional artist is a form of contracted artistic expression. Think of an artist being asked to produce a Biennale commission or a piece for a museum. They are being contracted for their voice in a defined way. This quadrant is the space for people who have “made it.” Only if you get to a certain level are you invited to this party.

These quadrants show us how and by whom each gets paid:

Role: Artist
Who pays: Patrons, foundations, collectors
How: Grants, residencies, commissions, sales of work

Role: Creator
Who pays: Audiences, platforms, sponsors
How: Memberships, merch sales, rev shares, sponsorships

Role: Institutional artist
Who pays: Museums, public arts, universities, nonprofits
How: Commissions, grants, honoraria, stipends, exhibition fees

Role: Commercial artist or Creative
Who pays: Employers, agencies, brand clients
How: Salaries, day rates, project fees, retainers

This shows why the artist is the least compensated: there’s no outside entity contracting them to produce their canvases, objects, and experiences. The data supports this. Art critic Ben Davis writes in his excellent book 9.5 Theses On Art and Class that “artists earn less than workers in their reference occupational category (professional, technical and kindred workers), whose members have comparable human capital characteristics (education, training and age).” 

Artists get paid less than people like them. Now we see why.

How big are these groups?

How many people are in each quadrant?

In the same book, Ben Davis writes that of the 2.1 million self-declared artists in the US Census in 2010, “fewer than one in ten were ‘fine artists.’ About 10% of these so-called creative laborers worked in architecture and about 17% in the performing arts. By far the largest portion of creative laborers — close to 40% — were classified as ‘designers’ of various kinds.”

This suggests the number of artists is actually quite small, at least when it comes to professed careers. But more recent data suggests a more nuanced picture. In a 2023 survey, 48% of Americans reported having an active creative practice — art, music, or writing. This makes creative expression as popular with Americans as watching the NFL — long considered the most American thing there is. These numbers are likely to grow, too. Among Gen Alpha, 30% report that their goal in life is to be a creator. 

These numbers also mean that most people really do it for “love and honor” (sorry Hollis Frampton) rather than money. Some because they’re making for themselves. Others because they don’t have an audience that will reward them.

We can also dig deeper into just artists who already generate income from their work. In 2022, the Saatchi gallery conducted a survey of 500 artists who make money from their art. It found that 13% were able to earn a full-time living from their work, while 16% were employed full-time in non-art jobs. Here’s the full visualization of how people responded:

Fine artists who wish to make a career of their work most commonly have to piecemeal together a living to do it. The same survey invited artists to share their sources of funding, which mirrors the same creative funding complex that the four quadrants revealed.

The need for new models

Contrasting Frampton's MoMA letter with Choe's Facebook windfall to today's creator economy reveals persistent patterns in how creative work is valued and isn’t. 

Creative work by inspiration is default seen as unpaid and without value. Creative work for commercial purposes is worth compensation if it meets the brief. Institutions remain the primary mediators of payment, whether they're museums, corporations, or technology platforms. Virtually all who participate must move through them in one form or another.

What, if anything, about this structure can and should change? We feel drawn towards two ideas that feel deeply intertwined:

1) Increasing creative agency 
2) Increasing economic control

By increasing creative agency, we mean growing freedom for creative people to move between the quadrants of activity. Artist, Creator, Institutional Artist, and Commercial Artist are all potentially attractive and consequential roles for a creative person to embody, depending on the context. We should continue to work towards a creative universe where these roles are fluid and open to all.

Another side of increasing creative agency involves growing the respect for the artist in these contexts. Even as they move into market-based and contracted forms of expression, we wish to see a greater empowerment of the creative people making that work and for their voices to come through.

By increasing economic control, we mean more direct access to funding sources, more sophisticated ways of using those funds, and a greater ability for the artist to determine and participate in the economic value of their work. 

Right now artists find themselves dependent on larger entities that are proven to translate non-commercial expression into commercial value (galleries, publishers, platforms, labels). These systems keep artists dependent, financially precarious, and historically have imposed unjust terms on creative workers.

Moving forward, not backward

Instead, artists and creators should better control their economic destinies in ways that protect their vision, provide reliable income, and allow them to financially participate in the full outcomes of their work.

This is what the Artist Corporation is designed to do. The A-Corp aims to introduce a new kind of corporate entity that can: receive a wide variety of revenue sources (all areas of the quadrant); enable resource pooling (like group health insurance); and make the creation of collective ownership and shares for creative work possible for the first time. 

Whether it’s the A-Corp or some other form, the structural opportunity is there to help future creator-artists and artist-creators express their visions, own their work (individually and collectively), and receive compensation from those who most appreciate it.

We feel a moral and romantic pull towards the solitary artist and their role as the outsider truth-teller that keeps society honest, but we also wish for a future that allows creative people to have agency in how they operate. In many ways, the archetype of the creator provides the most helpful framework through which to think about this.

Rather than being confined to a model and history, the creator synthesises and reinterprets the world around them however they see fit. Instead of the solitary genius, they’re networked individuals drawing from and contributing to a constant flow of ideas and influences through which economic value and cultural status flow.

The challenge and opportunity is in making a something better organized, valued, and sustained in ways that reflect all the persistent nuances of how this world works. Some things are commercial. Other things are not. Sometimes people engage in explicitly self-oriented creative projects for which no compensation makes sense. Other times it absolutely depends on it. Regardless, the people behind the work itself need to eat and support themselves.

But what if? What if this marks the end of one era and the start of another? What if a world where it can be for love and honor and there is can still be money at the end — not in every case, but in more cases than before? Isn't that worth working for?