Three advantages to working as an artist in a second-tier city.
Inexpensive, plentiful real estate opportunities will teach you how to use and manage space. The city you live in is full of abandoned factories and warehouses and old, crumbling robber baron mansions that have been divided up into small units. And it’s not just a few city blocks, but entire districts. Miles and miles. In the urban core, on the fringes of the urban core out by the interstate on-ramps, and out of urban core. Twenty miles outside town there’s even more real estate than in the city proper. Most of it’s cheap. You can work large, and there’s no physical barriers. You’ll learn to deal with space in a way artists accustomed to cramped quarters can’t begin to. You’ll also learn to deal with landlords — how to argue with them and cajole them and sweet-talk them. Buying, selling, renting and filling up huge swaths of real estate, with either your own work or the work of others, will be second nature to you.
Mastering skills outside your specific discipline are not only encouraged, but necessary for survival. You will learn to be flexible professionally: you understand that just knowing how to paint on canvas is not enough. There are not many patrons waiting around for you to finish your work and buy it. There’s not many galleries waiting to represent you. So you will learn to screenprint posters and t-shirts for rock bands to make ends meet. You will have to learn to build things, write well, use HTML, put up drywall, sew, cook, play keyboards, mix drinks, write grants, use Photoshop, and understand the basic tenants of customer service, so you have options professionally. You’ll continue to play guitar, like you did in college, because there’s still opportunities to play in bands every now and then, which you’ll do when you hit those cycles your own artistic practices slows down. You’ll learn how to write — not just about art, but about film, or music, or culture, or anything else that needs written about for small local magazines or websites for a few dollars. You’ll learn to make your own books, or figure out ways to publish on the cheap, because no one else is going to put out anything you’d done for you. You’ll learn how to deal not just with art world people, but also people in the straight world. It’s impossible to exist solely in an art world bubble, because that bubble’s just not big enough where you live. The language you’ll use to describe your work will become more utilitarian. You’ll be prepared to incorporate your knowledge of other areas into your own practice. It will make your own work more generous, more expansive, more all-encompassing.
Generally speaking, your sexual bridges will have all been burned by your mid-20s. By 25, half of everyone you know will be in a committed, long-term relationship. People pair up earlier and more seriously. By the time you’re 30, it will be 75%. Not at all these pairings will be stable, but most will. There will certainly be opportunities for sexual mischief with your peers, but not a lot of it. Much of it will be out of your system by the middle of your 20s. Chances are there will be two or three people you encounter regularly that make you nervous because of the ridiculous, hurtful things you said and did to one another when you were both younger and stupider, but rarely more than two or three. Never more than a handful, and the number continues to drop off with every passing year.
