Great Artists' Wildest Side Hustles, From Genet to Cage
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- "Making Art and Making a Living" by Mason Currey (Swift Press, £18.99) surveys how artists across centuries paid the bills while making work, drawing on examples from Genet and Godard to Cage, Acker, Akerman, and Emily Carr.
- Jean Genet developed a custom "trick briefcase" to steal valuable books and resell them after reading; his shoplifting funded the early years that led directly to his vocation as a writer, discovered during a 1939 prison stint.
- Jean-Luc Godard stole first-edition books from his grandfather's Paris apartment and pilfered cash from at least two employers; one theft landed him in a Swiss jail and then a psychiatric institution.
- Kathy Acker performed in simulated live sex shows at New York's Fun City nightclub in the 1970s, working one day a week and writing the other six — a gig that, she said, let her "see people from the bottom up."
- John Cage won roughly 5m lire (about £70,000 in today's money) on the Italian TV quiz show "Lascia o Raddoppia" in 1959, quizzed on mushrooms, and used the windfall to buy a Steinway piano and a VW campervan for partner Merce Cunningham's dance company.
- Chantal Akerman pocketed half the cash intake from her job selling tickets at a Times Square porn theatre in the 1970s and stole boxes of 35mm film from a photo lab, later using the film to shoot her first feature.
- Emily Carr had to abandon her painting after WWI economic collapse forced her to run a boarding house, sell pottery to tourists, and breed Old English bobtail sheepdogs in her Victoria backyard.
Why it matters: The book marshals figures from Genet to Cage to argue that being an artist is less about talent or inspiration than about cobbling together enough material stability to make work — and that the hustles themselves often seeded the art. For today's underfunded artists, the historical examples recast side gigs not as distractions from creativity but as part of the creative process.
