Join us for the launch of How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists by David Berry. This will feature a reading, a discussion with conversation partner Ali Bryan, and a Q&A.

Grab your copy here.

ABOUT THE BOOK

How artists make a living and how money changes art

It may not be the worst time in history to get paid to make art, but it certainly is the strangest. The institutions and markets that have been supporting the arts are undergoing massive changes, some even disappearing. Meanwhile the tools to make art and find audiences have never been more accessible, and there are more people than ever making art.

How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists is an attempt to reckon with the history of money in the arts — from Titian to Taylor Swift — and how that complicated relationship is changing. David Berry analyzes past and present financial dynamics in the arts to show the practicalities of how artists make a living and how that, in turn, affects the reception and perception of artists and their work: the impacts art has on wider society, how economic realities affect aesthetic judgements of art, what kind of people are able to work as artists, and how political and cultural ideas about the nature of art affect what kind of resources are made available to it.

David Berry explores how art has become central to our understanding of humanity by tying art to what makes the world go round: money. Along the way, he challenges popular ideas of what constitutes a successful artistic career and considers what our treatment of artists says about us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Berry profiled and critiqued the book, film, music and theatre scenes for a local alt-weekly, and then nationally for the National Post, and has contributed essays, criticism and features to the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, CBC, Hazlitt and many other places, a few of which also still exist. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta. His first book, On Nostalgia, was published in summer 2020 by Coach House Books. When not writing, he spends his time editing, community organizing, and attempting to parent.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Ali Bryan is an award-winning writer. Her debut YA novel, The Hill, was longlisted for the 2021 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. She is also a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Awards Emerging Artist recipient. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she currently lives on Treaty 7 Territory, in Calgary, Alberta, where she has a wrestling room in her garage and regularly gets choked out by her family.