Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens Read Free Book Online Page B

HIJACK THE AD
    Henson’s art relied on keeping a core group of people
together. But to keep your collaborators with you long enough, you need to keep paying them. Without financial incentive, collaborators tend to move away,
get families, get other jobs—ones that do pay. Art alone doesn’t usually
pay the bills, so what is an artist to do? Go where the money is. Jim Henson
learned early that for his generation and line of work, that meant commercials.
    Effectively, making TV commercials was Henson’s second
job to finance the rest of his artistic projects. In the 1950s and ’60s, he made
hundreds of commercials, and was quite successful. As Henson put it, “At that
point, I was making a lot of money.” [1] Money is a good thing, and Henson himself admitted, “I rather enjoyed having
money in my jeans.” [2] But like most artists’ “day jobs,” it was not his passion. In fact, Henson felt
ambivalent about commercials.
    He explained to an interviewer that he decided
to stop doing commercials in 1969, and didn’t do another until 1981:
    Judy Harris: You’re not in the commercial
business anymore, are you?
    Henson: Not really.… [I]t was a pleasure to get
out of that world. If you’ve ever worked in commercials, it’s a world of
compromise and a world of …
    Judy Harris: You’re right. I used to think it would
be fun to be behind the scenes and produce something like that, and I did work
in an ad agency for a year, and I hated every minute of it. You’re right about
compromise. I was constantly told to talk down to people and pick the lowest
common denominator, and it really made me grit my teeth. I was very unhappy.
    Henson: Yeah, it’s interesting when you’re working at
the lower levels through agencies and that sort of thing, it’s really quite
difficult.… [B]ut even [when you’re at the level where they respect you
and your opinion] it’s still a matter of every meeting is a meeting with a
dozen people, who all have opinions and the whole process is really not easy on
a creative person. So, anyhow. [3]
    Henson’s Vonnegutian so-it-goes signoff implies he was happy
to leave his past—the frustration of commercial work—in the past. But
commercials, as they say, paid the bills .
    In Lewis Hyde’s conclusion to The Gift ,
he explains that painter Edward Hopper’s career required a “day job” for many
years:
    For years before he established himself as a painter,
Edward Hopper used to hire himself out as a commercial artist to magazines with
names like Hotel Management . Hopper was an expert draftsman, and the
illustrations and covers he drew during those years are skillfully rendered.
But they are not art. They certainly have none of Hopper’s particular gift, none
of his insight, for example, into the way that incandescent light shapes an American
city at night.… Hopper’s magazine covers—happy couples in yellow sailboats
and businessmen strolling the golf links—all have the air of assignments, of
work for hire. Like the novelist who writes genre fiction according to a proven
formula, or the composer who scores the tunes for television commercials, or
the playwright flown in to polish up a Hollywood script, Hopper’s work for
magazines was a response to a market demand, and the results are commercial art.
…
    In a sense Hopper’s work for magazines should be
considered not a part of his art at all but a second job taken to support his
true labors. [4]
    Hopper’s career was split in two, and this allowed him to
reserve what Hyde calls a “protected gift sphere” for himself, a space for his
work to grow on its own terms, free from market demand. He spent half the week
in this gift sphere, painting for its own sake, and half the week paying for
that time with magazine covers. It wasn’t until he was forty-one that his
artwork began to earn him enough of a living to give up the second job.
    The commercials Henson made for coffee and
gasoline are like Hopper’s magazine covers.