SmArts
February 1-7, 2016
Work and worth
By Molly Rector
The MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas is starting a literary magazine. I’ve gotten the chance to be a part of figuring out how it’s going to be run, which has been something of a complicated process. One of the most complicated pieces (one we’re still working on) has been determining how to go about funding the thing. In addition to printing and production costs, we also care a lot about raising money to pay contributors. As writers (and beginners in the field), most of us feel frustrated by the double-edged sword of publishing in magazines that don’t pay. On the one hand, publishing is essential in the process of building name-recognition, which is (perhaps more than talent and skill, truthfully) how writers move forward in the field. But often magazines have very limited funding (even really good ones), which means rather than paying writers, they essentially end up trading on name recognition: for the right to publish work, the writer is compensated by the right to say s/he was published.
While I’m all for the bartering of goods and services, the fact remains that only in a very long-run sense does this kind of trade help artists eat. This is not, obviously, an ideal system, and our magazine would like to avoid perpetuating it if possible. But that’s the question we keep coming up against: the question of whether it’s possible.
I’ve written before about the subjectivity of value, about how there is very limited consistency in the ways we assign financial value to artistic endeavors. And although it’s ability to expose our sense of worth as a construct is one of the things I admire most about art, this lack of consistency becomes frustrating when dealing with systems that do maintain a (somewhat) consistent system for assigning financial value (for example, printers and distributors).
To pay contributors what we think would be an uninsulting amount, we’d need to triple the amount of money we plan to raise. And that’s what’s been difficult to figure out. It’s still not an enormous amount, all things considered (we’ve written up a tentative annual budget of ten thousand dollars), but thinking about funding for arts (and other nonprofit) endeavors is a challenge within a system that is built to serve the opposite kind of work: the kind with tangible, money-making products, with profits and returns.
I don’t know what to do about this – the challenges of crowd-sourcing funding, of applying for grants and asking for donations, are things I celebrate, and also, to some extent, take issue with. To me, they beg the question: how do we invite art and artists into a system that consistently values that type of work without diminishing art’s ability to expose and challenge how we think of and assign worth to work in general?
Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.
