The part-Messiah, part-hipster, all-round superstar self-portrait of 1500, by Albrecht Durer
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We’re making a series for radio and we’d like to pick your brains… We don’t have a budget for this project but the exposure will be fantastic… Please come and talk to our students, I’m sure we could cover the fare…
Five years in the freelance galleys have made me familiar with every imaginable formula wielded by salaried cheapskates in order to acquire work, knowledge and ideas for nothing. The digitally-driven age of “free”, in which a vast expansion of corporate and institutional power rests on the exploitation of barely-paid or even unpaid casual labour, has compounded the ancient toxins of Grub Street with a fresh poison of wheedling, entitled hypocrisy.
“Precarity” — a clumsy word for an ungainly state — has always shadowed working life outside the walls of guild, cloister, palace, office, studio or college. And technological upheavals have regularly tilted the balance of the seesaw that links producer and client.
The media evolve, and the money that backs them moves around. What remains constant is a tetchy stand-off between makers and the intermediaries, the patrons, publishers and distributors, who stand between them and their consumers. The mindset of the self-employed artisan or artist — proud, prickly, jealous, at once eager to please and quick to take offence — has endured to jump the centuries between Gutenberg and Google. Visit the National Gallery’s new exhibition devoted to Dürer’s Journeys, for instance, and you meet an artist-entrepreneur who pioneered both the role of the lone creator as hard-bargaining, self-sufficient pro — and found ways to fight back against mean or crooked clients and rivals.
Curated by the gallery’s Dr Susan Foister, Dürer’s Journeys takes as its focus the career-enhancing trips that the Nuremberg-born painter and printmaker took around Germany, over the Alps into northern Italy, and up the Rhine into the Low Countries, at various times between the mid-1490s and 1521. Paintings, drawing, prints and books both by Dürer and his peers present the artist as a shrewd, tough and even cantankerous travelling salesman, avid to collaborate but flintily convinced of his own worth. The National plays with a straight, scholarly bat. So you won’t encounter much of the airy extrapolation that this kind of article routinely indulges. I rather enjoyed the stern rejoinder in one of the catalogue essays that Dürer’s personality “should not perhaps concern art-historical research”. That’s telling me.
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But… with my 21st-century, gig-economy spectacles on, it becomes sorely tempting to see Albrecht Dürer, son of a Hungarian goldsmith who had settled in free-trading Nuremberg, as patron saint of the stroppy modern freelance. From Venice to Antwerp, he modelled the novel Renaissance costume of the artist as celebrity. He designed his own logo, cultivated his own brand, and harnessed the new technology of print to spread his fame through engravings and woodcuts to thousands of clients who never saw a painting of his. His sympathy for the humanistic learning of Erasmus (of whom he drew a wonderful portrait in chalk, later engraved) and the reformist theology of Luther partnered a pursuit of professional autonomy, as maker and merchant alike.
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SubscribeI’m always amazed at how much talent there is in the world, and how hard it is for talented people to make a living.
So many writers are now self-publishing on Amazon at 99 cents for a novel that probably took a year to write, or publishing current affairs articles on substack, Medium, etc, hoping to attract paying subscribers. Some of those folks have more optimism than talent, but many are truly talented. For example, the intelligence and erudition of the author of the current article shine through but he probably wasn’t paid a fortune by Unherd for his efforts.
Why do such talented people choose the creative, freelance life–a life of ‘precarity’ as the author concedes? They’re obviously smart enough to toil in the corporate world by day and engage their creative side in their spare time. I suppose Carlyle said it best: “Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.“
Freelancing is either really lucrative or, well… not. There’s an appeal to not having a boss, and if you play your cards right, you can earn so much more than in a day job. But that’s business owners, not your average artist or writer. If you are the latter two, learn an auxillary skill: software, teaching, marketing, etc. This is what I’m doing with my writing. This year, I took some courses on Udemy (on sale!) about branding and marketing, which I hope to use in my author ‘career.’ As I earned some publishing credits, I started to teach online at Skillshare, where things are going upwards. It’s tough, though!
Tbh I’ve tried the ‘freelance a skill’ thing. The competition is intense, there is someone in India charging lower rates and reviews are crucial – so chances are, you won’t charge your first few clients for potentially, weeks of work. There is an exception: high-level content creators. A YouTuber in the book reviewing sphere started offering manuscript critiques at fairly high prices, and she’s been booked out for an entire year. Here’s the thing: people will pay high ticket prices if they feel a connection or like you. The schools / companies that pester the author probably don’t value him enough, or they expect things for free (which is, to be frank, alot of people).
As for myself, I don’t want to work full time at a company, for several reasons. One, is that I plan to have kids in the next 10 years. Two, I have a disability which really stuffs work up at times. There’s a thrill in knowing you are responsible for your successes and failures – not Jim who sits next to your desk.
Hope your journey includes those kids you plan. Having a creative skill is rare enough. To manage that skill in harmony with the surrounding demands of others is where the admirable genius bit seems to come in. The Dürer article omits his contribution to settling the Catholic/Protestant tensions in Augsburg; the setting of his time amongst extraordinary turmoil visited upon those living through the 1500’s (Luther and printing presses and all; even a plague!)- and his own family responsibilities. Being the third of 18 children,- he had a few to reckon with! He was in his 40’s before settling the household debts, I read. Perhaps not a lot has changed.
Best of luck to you. 🙂 While I might not always understand what motivates people to go the freelance route, I admire anyone with the guts to take their professional destiny in their own hands.
One particular annoyance to me as a lifelong freelancer and small business owner, is the blatant disregard that large corporations have for paying on time. Perhaps I should be grateful to be paid at all, given the points made above, but really, when large companies (and Government departments) routinely wait three months or more to pay the smallest of invoices, it makes one wonder just how much our leaders care about the backbone of our economy, i.e. SMEs.
We have a law (so-called) that invoices have to paid within thirty days but large businesses often make small ones sign a contract that allows them to pay within 90 days…and then they don’t even honour that! on Gov.uk it says that ‘unless you have agreed otherwise’ with your client they have to pay within 30 days. This leeway should not be offered by Government. It works entirely in the favour of big corporations and harms the small players
Waiting for pitiful payments is not something that small and micro businesses should have to do with their time. Cashflow is more of an issue for them than for the big boys. Time for Government honestly and strongly to step in and force big businesses, and their own departments, to abide by a humane 30 days and not keep trying to stretch it to their own advantage.
Why 30 days? I wouldn’t wear it. When we ran a business as a bed and breakfast, people paid the bill in full before they set foot inside our house.
If people want time to pay it very often means that they intend to attempt not to pay. Do not accept it. Do not do business with such people and do not accept such terms from anyone, ever. I never did throughout a long working life in various businesses.
I was told from time to time that I had lost business because of this. I didn’t give a damn. I am now retired and I always pay my bills on time.
The intro is an old trick to find suckers who think their work will be appreciated and new opportunities will open up for them! If you’re in business long enough, you just avoid taking the bait. Or you just say, “Oh, you don’t have any money, what do you living from, then”?
I know this may be difficult for some people to accept, but anything that can be accessed (paid for or not), becomes, in effect, ‘public goods’ – and I’m not striking a moral or legal or political pose, I’m just making a statement of fact. I’m saying IPR, copyright, personal ownership of data etc, are phantom human superpositions over information, concepts that have persisted to date because of a combination of human biology limits (speed, scale, memory etc) and societal conventions (law etc), all of which are in the process of being busted by the digital world.
As such, all those rental models of data use employed by the tech industry (the media or the training you buy etc) cannot possibly survive long – because someone somewhere will make copies and thereafter multiplying distribution cannot possibly be stopped. For example, try reversing an illegally acquired digital picture which has proliferated. You may as well try and reverse entropy.
Nor is there more than a nominal distinction between something tangibly old world and physical, say a car or Tower Bridge, and a digitally stored blueprint for the same, which will take the form of some engineering diagrams or bunch of equations or formulae or instructions or algorithms. One look at the copies of German cars, or of entire historical monuments, replicated in China will illustrate this. The likes of Napster have been suppressed for now, but this is not a winnable fight. The only reason illegal proliferation has stalled is that the cost of legitimate media has dropped so low, to a point where it’s not worth bothering to get round paying for it – Netflix, Spotify, Prime, etc give you the world for around £6 per month – the cost of a couple of sandwiches. The model completely is predatory of course, because the ecosystem can only support a very small number of such entities.
It is the innate nature of information that it will proliferate over time and space. To illustrate in practical terms, there is pretty much no digital asset, piece of music or book, or newspaper content or algorithm, etc, I cannot get a hold of without paying for it if I so choose. Whether I can interpret it or use it, is a different matter – for example I can get a book on thermodynamics from the library, but will I make head or tail of it? As such, valuable content eg Dürer’s work, or Dirac’s, is only of value to those who can use it and meaningless to the vast majority.
Most people I discuss the nature of data with have a problem with these ideas because they cannot see past assumptions they are making that they are not even aware of, and the veneer of human self-stops they are immersed in (“… but, but, laws and regulations and treaties and inspectors and policing and human societal norms …).
But the truth is, technology will brook none of these, and nothing now prevents the mass replication and proliferation of literally all data about anything. Computing power and algorithms provide (for all practical purposes) scaling without limits, and that simply doesn’t map on to human sensibilities of ownership of content.
Kotak, I talk of the coming Block Chain being used for all Titles, Deeds, and Ownership proof.
Once real estate uses blockchain, instead of paper at the courthouse as in USA, then the property becomes Globalized. I am buying a bit of waterfront land near me to build an Air B&B on – it has been For Sale By Owner for 8 years and no takers as it has some issues, (but I can fix them) and he is down to just about half its value. Once the deeds go digital the world’s investors will search the world for property to invest in, and buy the NFTs, which will be the deed to the land – so a Salesman in China with some spare cash could buy it as an investment – all the money in the world will begin gobbling up the real-estate all over the world. The developing world will be eaten up – or the prices inflated so high the locals cannot buy…. Farm land in Kenya, Canada, Brazil – – bought by by investors buying the NFT deed – from all over the world. Land with water rights, just everything will be golbal investors – home ownership decline as investors buy and rent out the houses near you…..
This thing alone will F*** up the world – turn it into Feudal as the wealthy will buy – borrow against. and buy more, Like Bill Gates is not the largest owner of farm land in USA – this will become global…
“…The mindset of the self-employed artisan or artist — proud, prickly, jealous, at once eager to please and quick to take offence — has endured to jump the centuries between Gutenberg and Google…”
Thank you for this article. As a freelancer, I can identify with the Dürer mentally. I can also completely understand the köstlich outlook – you are appreciative of high quality well crafted work, but wonga often provides the background.
But the abiding characteristics of freelancers are (a) independence of thought and (b) about as easy to manage as herding cats. The first characteristic is a survival trait, because as an outsider you have to ipso facto think differently to the guild groupthink, while simultaneously maintaining good relations with the people you are working with who will have their own way of doing things which you can often see are not the best. Telling people they are doing it wrong is never popular, so instead you end up sharing knowledge and time, suggesting solutions and alternatives for free, because this is a variety of ‘soft socialisation’ which works well for an outsider, and you hope that someone notices and you are in their good books so they will think of you in the future when they need someone for more work. The second characteristic is, well, just because as a group we freelancers are more often than not opinionated, grouchy old gits.
“are more often than not opinionated, grouchy old gits.”
The largest majority of my life I have been self employed because I do not take well to people telling me what to do. I have gone so far as to also only being my own customer as I do not want people hiring me to be telling me what to do. Decades ago I hit on my system which worked for me – I build a property with my labour and money and land, then rent it or sell it. No clients. Anyone telling me what to do and they can just F*** Off.
The snag now is the building and planning dept head is a new guy and he is making me get licensed, technically I am not a licensed contractor, or a licensed electrician or plumber – and so I am studying for licensees in those. I can document the time in trade so qualified to take the exams – and soon do the contractor’s license exam (I have gotten the approval from the state that I qualify, I am a skilled tradesman in several trades), what a huge pain in the a** that is… I am using these guys https://rocketcert.com/ and my residential builders license + on-line course + books is about $1000 to prep you to pass the exam (Books $750!). The old building guys just would give me permits on a technicality that one may build their own house, the new guy says I have built too many that way…And there is nothing I can do but yield and do as I am told…..Books include Carpentry, Concrete, Masonry, underground pipe and earth moving, OSHA, International Residential Code, Trusses, business law and accounting, roofing, structural…..A stack of books – next comes the electrical and plumbing.
What do you do Kotak? Here BTL there is another Carpenter, and a Plumber I know of – There is an interesting bunch, I bet the range is really big – I know we have a couple Book authors, and Bankers, Lawyers…..
You’re right there’s posters from a big range of professions here and it’s interesting to read the different perspectives. I saw the picture you posted the other day and that looked amazing.
I freelance in IT these days, almost exclusively coalface programming and design, in various popular languages and databases. In fact I come from a mixed Comp Sci and Electronics background, but I haven’t done any serious Electronics for a decade and a half, it’s been all coding.
This is a very insightful comment. I’m a corporate drone and have employed various contractors (aka freelancers) over the years. The two key characteristics of a successful contractor are (a) be good at what you do (and don’t oversell your capabilities); and (b) don’t inject your personality into the business relationship. Of the two, (b) is more important (provided you’re at least competent at what you do).
Give the person who employs you what they want, whether you think it’s the best way of solving the problem or not. Make suggestions in a neutral way: leave them hanging there for the employer to select or not; don’t become so personally invested in your advice you feel you must force your ideas on your employer. The person employing you may well understand the whole project is a bunch of nonsense but they also have a boss and limited say in which projects they handle.
If you can do (a) and (b) you’ll quickly become the default person for similar freelance work and your invoices won’t be questioned too deeply if they’re not way out of line with prevailing standards.
Absolutely – as a hired gun you are paid to give the best advice you can, but it’s entirely up to the client if they want to take it. You’re right about not becoming emotionally invested, but that reminds me of the other extreme, when around the Y2K projects time I was once arguing with the project leaders about some abtruse technical decision, a contractor colleague told me not to bother. His cynical advice was: “just keep smiling and keep taking the money”!
As a copyright minimalist (I think the entire Anglosphere should reject the French innovations of life-plus copyright terms and droites d’auteur and return to copyright to the terms given under the Law of Queen Anne), I have always been fascinated by Dürer’s relative success in defending his brand simply on the basis of prevailing laws on fraud, in the absence of specific copyright or trademark laws. It almost makes on wonder whether copyright is necessary at all.
We’re still talking about this? With respect, we learned in art school that if you sell yourself cheap, you sell ALL of us cheap. I’m absolutely not for guilds or unions (the fastest way to make mediocrity). The way to address it is to be yourself, trust the market for your work, and ignore everything else. Think of Mervyn Peake. He may not have made a fortune until after his death, but he had a glorious marriage, a beautiful family, and an enviable life. I’d be very happy with that.
A good principal to follow. Something I’ve noticed in writing communities is the dangers of low self esteem. It can lead to: suss publishing deals, being too trustworthy / taking advantage of, little money, pricing courses / services low, etc. This hurts all writers. The expectation of artists to treat their work like a ‘hobby’ is quite damaging. Rather, we should be professionals who know our worth, whilst allowing room to improve.
Thank you for an article on an individual who is worthy of occupying one’s mental space after the spate of articles about non-entities and their irrelevant, talentless lives.